In the first of these series of posts I began by looking at the producer as documentarian and then, conveniently skipping over  the US R+B ‘factories’, moved onto Jamaica where the record stopped being the final piece in the production process and became recycling fodder.

My goal has been to demonstrate a continuum of production styles and techniques as recording technology and the popular music industry develop in step over the course of the 20^th Century.

One of the important shifts that we’ve seen is that the role of the producer has changed from someone who’s job was focused on pulling the session together and pressing play towards (in the case of Dub) someone who is entirely responsible for the sounds heard on a record – in some cases doing away with ‘live’ musicians. We can also observe a similar shift in the way the studio is used from a space designed to capture sound to a place to create new music. Writing in his book – Repeated Takes – Michael Channan argues that:

with increasing possibilities for moulding the sound, a producer… could begin to ‘direct’ the musicians; not so much like a conductor in front of an orchestra, but as if they were making a film, not a record.   Or as if the studio had become a huge musical instrument at the producers disposal (Channan, 1995; p. 143-44). 

Channan’s comments are revealing in that they demonstrate the manner in which the producers (perceived) role, particularly in popular music, has been elevated to to that of an architect of the aesthetic and sonic outcomes of a recording through his / her influence on the production process.

One prominent, and obvious example, is Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’ production style.

Spector’s interesting because he started producing at about the same time as Hammond was shifting from Jazz to pop and Jerry Wexler was making moves at Atlantic. He trained as a Brill building songwriter with Lieber and Stohler and was similar in scope John Hammond in that he wasn’t a knob twiddler (at least not initially). He achieved the famous ‘wall of sound’ with big arrangements and running the song over and over and over again until he got the blend he wanted.

Larry Levine recalls working on the session for the Righteous Brothers you’ve lost that loving feeling circa 1964:

““We did it the same way we did most of the recordings, … There were four acoustic guitars and Phil always started with them, getting them out in the studio and playing the figures. Then, after he had gotten them to the point where he wanted it to sound, we added the pianos. On this song, there were three of them. I could mike the acoustic guitars on three microphones all going into a single input; the pianos had to have separate inputs. Then we would add the basses — there were three of them: a Fender bass, an upright bass and a Dano bass. Then came the horns … The drums were always the last to go on. The drums got two tracks, though: I used an RCA 77 for the kick drum and a Neumann 67 on the overhead. …All the while, as Phil was building the sound, I kept having to get sounds for each new layer of instruments, but at the same time try to keep a balance with each of the previous layers. Every time you raised the fader on another microphone, it changed the balance of the other microphones because it was such a small room. It was always quite a job doing a Phil Spector session, trying to keep everything in balance and have it match what Phil had inside his head.”

Even though he didn’t have hands-on the faders (and in fact left Levine alone to mix in the studio) – Spector is one of the first examples of a producer who bent the recording process and studio to his own artistic vision (his dictatorial behaviour legendarily including not allowing musicians to take a bathroom break once they were seated, in case they changed the sound).

A similar approach can be seen emerging in the UK in the 60s with producers like Joe Meek (and to a lesser extent George Martin) who built his own recording equipment and signal processors to create new sounds for the artists he worked with (before shooting himself and his landlady in a fit of paranoid delusion).

Points of comparison with these producers and the dub guys we spoke about last week is that, unlike many pop record producers of the 30s, 40s and 50s, they make no effort to simply capture sounds – they use the studio tools to make something new that in some cases couldn’t exist but for their engagement. This isn’t simply a feature of pop music however, and can also be seen in the electronic experimentations of Stockhausen, Emiert, Berio and Varèse in the 1950’s. Recording technology ceased to be a transparent device for the recording of existing music and instead acts as a vehicle for the creation of new music (Holmes, 2002).           

Eno an arts-school non-musician who started playing synth for top 40 pop band Roxy Music (1971-1973) – one of the important things he developed in the band was a process of mucking with the sound of the rest of the bands instruments using signal processing. Eno called this process ‘treatments’ and rather than a production credit on the Bowie album we listened to he’s credited as responsible for songwriting (with Bowie), performance and treatments. An important aspect to note here is that, as a non-musician, Eno’s work tends privilege on texture, rhythm and dynamics over melody and harmony. Take, for example, the following quotes from a Sound on Sound interview back in 1989 (archived at Eno-Web):

Eno: "The first thing to say about my work is that I've almost always preferred a mixture of electronic and acoustic instruments over pure electronics. When I have used just electronic sources, I've always undermined their simplicity and purity by sending them through all sorts of treatments - out through loudspeakers, recorded through curious archaic microphones, then on into echo device, and time-modulation treatments. It wasn't just perversity that led me to construct such labyrinthine signal paths for those poor sounds: it was an attempt to introduce some of the complexity of character that real instruments naturally have without necessarily copying real instruments."

"That complexity is exactly what makes it possible for me to sit at the instrument for half an hour just playing the same note - because it isn't making the same noise, and the evolution of sound in time is of great interest to me."

"If you're using electronics there are two ways to approach this type of complexity. One is to use extremely sophisticated synthesizers, which was never a course open to me because I can't stand reading handbooks and I don't like spending money on ugly great heaps of integrated circuits. The second is to use unreliable equipment, which is much cheaper and more enjoyable. In the category of 'unreliable equipment' I would include all the conventional musical instruments. In my case (with synthesizers and electronics) what this meant was making complex signal paths within which many of the components were in a condition of continuous variability, ie. were nearly broken or were programmed to vary around a certain value."

One example of the application of Eno’s ideas to his production practice is his use of ‘shimmer’ reverb, heard prominently on his productions for U2 with Daniel Lanois. Basically the verb is set up on an aux as a feedback loop with a +1 8ve pitch shifter feeding a reverb with a long decay time and sometimes a delay and chorus. By controlling the amount and type of signal sent into the system and controlling the gain and eq of the feedback loop and the length of delay times you get sounds from slowly evolving pads (ala U2) to odd pitched resonances. While Eno and Lanois used Lexicon 224’s, EMT 250’s Yamaha SPX90s and an AMS pitch shifter (later an eventide H3000) – you can easily set up a similar system in most DAW’s.

Eno is acknowledged as an obsessive tweaker, coaxing amazing sounds out of his DX7 and tools like the Ultra Harmonizer. Over his career as a producer Eno has become increasing interested in ‘scuplting’ or ‘painting’ with sounds – treating recorded audio as a completely malleable substance bound only by the producers imagination. There’s an interesting parallel here to the Dub producers – and in fact Eno has cited the work of Lee Perry as an influence on his own studio practice.

Post Roxy Music (Eno fell out with Byran Ferry) he worked with King Crimson’s Robert Gripp on a couple of albums of echoey ambient sounding material in which he ‘treated’ Fripp’s guitar parts. He followed this with a string of solo albums of vaguely pop material culminating in Discreet Music which he released on his own label – Obscure – which he started to put out music that was too weird to find an audience elsewhere. Again we see a repeating theme here of a ‘performer’ undertaking entrepreneurial activity (of a sort) as part of his production process – though by this stage the entrepreneurial streak is less significant than his creative practice.

With his solo albums Eno had developed a toolset that he later applied to working with other peoples music, including Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ (Low, Heroes, Lodger), Devo, Talking Heads, U2 and more recently Coldplay.

In particular Discreet Music would prove vitally important in understanding a developing aesthetic he would later call Ambient

Prior to releasing discreet music, Eno had discussed the prospect of utilising music as a perfume or tint within certain environments.  Writing in Street Life in 1975 Eno stated “I believe that we are moving towards a position of using music and recorded sound with the variety of options that we presently use colour – we might simply use it to ‘tint’ the environment . . . we might use it to modify our moods in almost subliminal ways” (cited in Toop 1995, 9).

Influenced, in part, by an extended period stuck in bed following an accident Eno wanted Discreet Music to become “part of the ambience”, “listened to and yet . . . ignored” (Eno 1975, 2), suggesting this aim could be achieved via the use of systems that once set in place would create music with little or no intervention on behalf of the composer (Eno 1975, 2).

Eno’s interest in process, or systems-based composition can be traced back to his time at Ipswich Art School where a strong emphasis was placed on the notion of “process over product” (Tamm 1989, 40).  Eno stating in an interview for Wired:

I wanted to construct "machines" (in a purely conceptual sense - not physical things) that would make music for me. The whole idea was summarized in the famous saying (which I must have shouted from the ramparts a thousand times): "Process not product!" The task of artists was to "imitate nature in its manner of operation" as John Cage put it - to think of ways of dealing with sound that were guided by an instinct for beautiful "processes" rather than by a taste for nice music (Cited in Kelly 1995 para. 42).

Contrary to many “systems” composers however Eno believed that process in and of itself is not an artistic endeavour.  Instead Eno saw systems-based composition as a means to an end, an aesthetic or artistic tool very much dependent on the artists choice of content rather than the architecture of a particular process (Tamm 1989, 42).  In the above-mentioned Wired interview, Eno also mentions that:

By the early '70s, I had made and experienced a great deal of systems music . . . I wanted to make music that was not only systemically interesting, but also that I felt like hearing again. So, increasingly, my attention went into the sonic material that I was feeding into my "repatterning machines." This became my area: I extended the composing act into the act of constructing sound itself.

In Eno’s ‘repeating machines’ we can see here the marriage of Eno’s interest in treatments with systems that, once set in place, would continue to generate music without intervention on behalf of the composer. To quote Steve Reich (whose was a direct influence here) Eno wanted: “a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing”.

Interesting to note that Eno didn’t just use technological processes either but utilised a deck of cards with a series of Oblique Strategies written on them that acted as lateral thinking prompts in the studio, such as:

“Mute and continue.”

“Mechanize something idiosyncratic.”

Another important theme that comes out in his writings and interviews from around this time about the use of incommensurate loops to create ‘unlocked’ sounds with a sequencer. Eno:

When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn't recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is 'unlocked'. … One of the things I love about soul music is that it's relatively unlocked, so there are things that are very tight, like the rhythm section, but it's not tied: tight, but not tied. People can shift around, and they create inflexions by not falling together when you expect them to and so on. So this unlocked thing has been a big issue for me for a long time. And then suddenly this kind of music appears that is not only locked, but absolutely fucking bolted down together...

Eno followed Discreet Music with Music for Airports (which we listened to  earlier), an  “original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods” (Eno 1978, 2). Music for Airports was created through the use of an incommensurate system of tape loops which, once set in place, would create music without the direct intervention of the composer (Eno, 1996).

The work is a fascinating evolutionary point between what we heard on Heroes and Eno’s work with U2 – not only is there a growing focus on systems but also the use of sound to infer and foreground sonic environments (something that would become more prominent in Eno’s subsequent work). Eno wrote in the liner notes to On Land (which followed Music for Airports): 

The idea of making music that in some way related to a sense of place - landscape, environment - had occurred to me many times over the years preceding On Land . . . the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of; instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background (Eno 1982,2-3).

As a sort of summary, Eno’s production aesthetic is dominated by a desire to mould sounds using processes that create or inspire new / unforeseen outcomes. He knows his gear, doesn’t utilise presets and brings a really interesting conceptual framework to his work as a producer. Eno also, for our purposes represents a kind of mid-way point in the production archetype’s we’re discussing this semester – a composer, intimately involved in all aspects of the production and heavily invested in technology.

wheretonow

"If the song is broken down into individual phrases it becomes evident that most and quite possibly all these phrases were unoriginal. They were floating formulas, some of which came from older ballads and spirituals while others were folk sayings or everyday figures of speech … [A]ny formulaic or partly formulaic line could be placed at the beginning or the end of a verse and joined to another line that was either a formula, a combination of a formula and an original turn of phrase, or entirely original" (Palmer, 1982, pp. 8–69).

"Originality in the blues, then, is not a question of sitting down and making up songs out of thin air. Yet a blues singer whose songs consist entirely or almost entirely of borrowed phrases, lines, and verses will claim these songs as his own, and he will be right" (Palmer, 1982, p. 69)

"Suddenly he sprang out onto the stage from the wings. He was a huge hulk of a man, but he advanced across the stage in sudden bursts of speed, his head pivoting from side to side, eyes huge and white, eyeballs rotating wildly. He seemed to be having an epileptic seizure, but no, he suddenly lunged for the microphone, blew a chorus of raw, heavily rhythmic harmonica, and began moaning. … Finally, an impatient signal from the wings let him know that his portion of the show was over. Defiantly, Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the thick curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight. Then he loosened his grip, and in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening. He was then fifty-five years old" (Palmer, 1982, p. 233).

A little more material pulled from the lecture series I prepared for this semester – although the content is really an extended lit review (we also do some analysis / discussion of recordings in class) reworking the lectures as prose is proving a useful exercise so I might try and blog out a bit more of the content as time allows. Posterous is playing havoc with embedded content atm so I've lost all the illustrative pictures... I'm also being a little lazy with my referencing here and only citing direct quotes. If you want to know what other sources I've pulled from drop me a line.

To understand the story of Dub it’s important to have an understanding of the immediate cultural, historical and musical context. Not only because this provides us with a basis for discussing the musical idiom but also because many of the producers who shaped the sound of Dub and Roots Reggae in the 60s and 70s were first recording artists and sound-system operators who turned their hand to recording.

Until 1962 Jamaica was a UK colony; home to a larger ‘slave’ population than indigenous people groups due to importation of workers for the plantations. With this mix of British, African and Jamaican people came a similar mix of musical styles.

The first ‘indigenous’ Jamaican recorded music was something called ‘Mento’ – kind of a Jamaican variant on calypso, that drew on ‘folk’ music (elements of African, British, Scottish and Irish musical forms – including fife and drum bands). Perhaps the most important element (or at least the one most readily identified with later Jamaican musical forms) was the syncopated banjo parts – later mimicked by guitar players in Ska and Reggae.  At the same time, American Jazz and R+B were also popular – Jamaica had a thriving live swing orchestra scene in the 30s, gradually displaced by ‘sound-systems’ by the 50s playing imported R+B records.

The Sound-System were basically a mobile set of speakers and a record player that could be set up at a venue to provide music for large communal dances held in enclosed flattened areas known as dance halls.

The biggest and best systems were operated by Duke Reid, Sir Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster –these three (along with King Edwars who dropped out to become a politician) ‘owned’ the sound-system scene in Kingston throughout the 1950s through a mixture of increasingly complex home-built sound systems, obscure records imported from the states and enforcers who would actively sabotage (and in some cases shoot-up) rival systems. Competition for exclusive sounds was fierce and the need to ‘flop’ the rival systems and DJ’s gave rise to “the common practice of scratching out titles, names and even matrix numbers from the disc” (Barrow & Dalton, 2001; p. 17).

The quest for exclusive content saw each of the three promoters expand into producing original recordings – initially on acetate plates exclusively for their sound-systems, then on 7” Vinyl circa 1959. Recording conditions were quite primitive – paralleling the 30s recordings made in the states for the Columbia and Okeh labels (among others).

 Take for example Singer Alton Ellis’ recollections on reording with Coxsone Dodd:

“It was a one-track studio, an’ when they count ‘1-2-3-4’, everybody have to be there. Who is not there, the train is gone! One mike standin’ in the middle of us, everything goin’ through the same mice. The vocalist would go closest to the mike, an’ everybody a lickle bit closer an’ closer accordin’ to the volume of what he’s playin’ The engineer, he was mixin’ at the time – we keep runnin’ it down an’ ‘im get a good balance. So when he say ‘Go’, we took then – that’s it. One take, no comin’ back. That’s it.” (cited in Barrow & Dalton, 2001; p, 21).

As this new recording industry developed, early Jamaican R+B merged with mento under the hands of jazz trained session musicians to produce Ska – combining R+B walking basslines and a backbeat shuffle with an emphasis on beat 2 with syncopated guitar, piano and melodic phrasing influenced by Mento and borrowing from other ‘folk’ musics.

At the same time, more advanced recording technology became available in Jamaica (2/3/8 track recorders, larger desks etc.) and Dodd (who set up the famous Jamaican Recording Label aka Studio One), Reed and Buster set the template for what a record-producer looked like in Jamaica. Entrepeneurs with their own distinct sound, preferred studio, musicians and modes of promotion and distribution. Studio groups like the Skatalites and the Upsetters, as well as ‘name’ groups like the Maytals and the Wailers all formed in this period and, as studio players in various configurations (often the same band under a different name), would go on to shape the sound of Jamaican popular music as it developed from Ska to Rock Steady to Reggae.

As an aside – this is remarkably similar to what happened at Motown, Stax and, to a lesser extent, FAME studios. However, in Jamaica there was a huge economic imperitive to produce new material as quickly and cheaply as possible. It was really a production-line type process with groups churning out instrumental and vocal tracks (often improvised in the studio) to satisfy the demand for new content. Bassist George “Fully” Fullwood recalls:

“we might go inna the studio for about two hours, and come out with fourteen, fifteen songs! It’s a challenge because you have to realize the competition that you’re facing. If you don’t come up with something crucial enough, that producer don’t want to use you again. So you have what, three minutes, three-and-a-half minutes, four minutes to really come up with ideas, with arrangements” (cited in Veal. p. 47)

As all the studio groups were essentially recalibrations of the same pool of musicians and there’s only so many times you can significantly vary rhythm patterns and chord progressions this led to a certain amount of recycled musical ideas and the reuse of ‘riddims (generic rhythm feels) became a feature of Jamaican music. Towards the end of 1965, a number of Jamaican records were produced that included ‘riddim’ solos, a break in the music in which only the rhythm section or backing instruments play. These records became increasingly popular among dancehall patrons and records including a B-side instrumental version of Jamaican songs that would often be used as a background track for DJs or MCs to ‘toast’ (speak) over (Clarke, 1980).

In concert with the use of acetate ‘dub’ plates (soft wax over metal discs), to provide exclusive material for sound-system operators, the recycling of material led to the creation of versions – recycling the same recording master-tape to produced several instrumental / vocal variations of a track. Veal – who’s book on Dub is really worth a bit of your time – notes that versioning became “a method of serially recycling recorded material developed by producers desiring to ensure the longest commercial life for a given piece of recorded music despite economic constraints and a limited pool of musician” (p. 55).

By this stage guys like Dodd, Reid and Buster had moved up the food chain and a new generation of producers had taken their place. These guys had typically worked as session musicians or engineers on Ska and rock-steady records (such as Bunny Lee of the Wailers) or as sound system operators (such as King Tubby).

Lee Perry began working as a recording artist and then engineer and producer for Coxsonne Dodd.

Taken as a body of work the following 'tropes' can be identified in Perry's work - and Dub more generally [in class this discussion is accompanied with listening and discussion of several tracks, particularly how the recording process has affected the 'fidelity' of the sources].

-       fragmentation of lyrics, downplaying the role of the singer

-       reverb as part of the arrangement

-       delays used to modify rhythm + harmony (e.g. through drawing out / sustaining resolutions to the tonic)

-       emphasis on bass and drums within the mix

-       disassociation between sound and source (e.g. ‘bleed’ becomes texture thanks to verb and delay and becomes heard as a totally new sound divorced from what went to tape)

-       heavy use of eq

-       featuring extraneous / non-musical sounds

-       tape manipulation and splicing (speed, backwards, edits)

-       creative abuse of equipment (e.g. King Tubby dropping his spring reverb to create the characteristic echo explosion)

-       dub takes the form of a live mix adding and taking away elements over a static riddim

Perry didn’t come to producing as an engineer but as a musician, songwriter, talent scout and arranger. Some clear similarities here with Hammond who we looked at the other week – though Perry wasn’t born rich.

Known for a very quirky personality – shrouded himself in mystery borrowing imagery from the Obeah sect (like Jamaican voodoo) to describe himself as a sonic magician. Helped to popularise the association between reggae and Rastafarianism, introducing rhythms associated with Groundnation ceremonies (binghi or nyabinghi drumming) as well as Rastafarian lyrics and themes into his productions.

Learned engineering from Coxsonne Dodd while working as an apprentice of sorts before splitting with Dodd and making a diss record – something he’d do every time a business relationship broke up. Worked as a freelancer with all the main studio groups of the time and probably became best known outside of Jamaica for his early work with Bob Marley and the Wailers (and also for the associated protracted legal dispute over the Soul Rebels material). Eventually set up his own label ‘Upsetter’ to release his productions (again we see entrepreneurialism as a trait).

Eventually built his own Black Ark Recording Studio after the studio where he’d been doing most of his work decided to renovate.

 The story goes that Perry thought the introduction of a new 24 channel console ruined the sound of the studio – so he set up his own with comparatively rudimentary equipment that he felt would allow him to capture sounds in his own way.

Interestingly the studio equipment list was really quite sparse (given it’s 1973 and gear was being brought in from the US).

Studio was built around a ¼ TEAC four track; an ‘Alice’ broadcast desk; an electric piano and cheap clav ripoff; a marantz amplifier and speaker for guitar; a drumkit and a Grantham spring reverb and tape echo. In 1976 a production deal with Island records allowed Perry to upgrade to a Soundcraft desk and (more importantly) a Mutron Bi-Phase and a Roland RE-201 Space Echo.

Unique aspect of Perry’s production style is that he would occasionally dub live to 2 track while the musicians were performing instead of tracking everything down and remixing it later. This also sets Perry apart from King Tubby (perhaps the most famous dub producer) as he stopped remixing others tracks and focussed on producing original ‘dubbed out’ recordings.

Stories of Perry’s antics in the studio are legendary but all suggest a very animated and excited producer at the board, dancing, shouting and constantly flicking the controls on his recording gear. His production practice could be politely described as deeply eccentric and included hanging a mic in a nearby palm-tree to record the “living African heartbeat”; blessing his recording equipment with mystical ceremonies; writing all over the studio walls and filling every blank space with pictures, icons and talismans; blowing pot-smoke into the tape heads to ‘dirty up’ the sound; burying his master tapes and ‘treating’ his tapes with whiskey, blood and urine to enhance their spiritual properties.

As this suggests things got a bit weird at the Black Ark and by the end of the 1970s the studio had fallen into disrepair – Perry had become increasingly odd (talking backwards, repainting the walls and covering them with crosses and mis-spellings of Pipecock Jackson, digging holes in the yard, talking to himself in extended monologues) – and the studio burnt down in 1983. There are divergent stories explaining the fire from an electrical fault to Perry believing the Ark had been possessed by Satan and setting it alight.  

 ____________________

I just finished reading Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. It was a real disappointment, over-long, repetitive and remarkably light on technical detail. Emerick is a much better engineer and producer than he is a storyteller and his time working with the Beatles had the potential to yield more than anecdotes relating what the Beatles ate in the studio and the significance ascribed to a partially raised eyebrow almost forty years after the fact.

I've given a series of lectures this past semester on archtypes in record production – by a roundabout series of events I'm not sure if I'll deliver this same content again any time soon so I'm going to blog some of the content for my own edification.

The producer as documentarian reflects early approaches to record production – in 1925 Victor company introduced home record players to consumers – vinyl was the format and this largely dictated the recording approach. - in the early 1920s (and later) in order to record an act onto vinyl you'd need to use a horn connected to a diaphragm that moved the cutting stylus on a blank record. Recording was all about trying to 'capture' sound (though some tricks were employed to ensure balance).

Take for example the following description of the Carter Family's first recording session in Bristol in 1927 with Ralph Peer (recounted in Zwonitzer and Hershberg's excellent Will you miss me when I'm gone? The Carter Family and their legacy in American music):

When they arrived upstairs in the warehouse loft, the walls were hung with blankets. The 'recording machine' was partitioned off by a second set o blankets and all they could see of it was one horn jutting through a small aperture. … Mr Peer calmly explained to the three nervous musicians that they would have to mount the jerry-built platform, get right up next to the horn, and direct their voices into it. (Zwonitzer and Hershberg, 2004).

Peer was one of the earliest 'popular music' producers in the US and built up the Okeh record label (small US independent) by recording US folk / novelty and 'race' records – anything that wasn't being recorded by the majors Columbia / Edison / Victor – in hopes of snaring a small part of what was, in 1921, a multi-million dollar industry. He hit it big with a fiddle tune and was hired by Victor to record 'hillbilly' music, necessitating a portable recording rig that could be taken out to country towns (this templated the way that many early folk and blues records were made by guys such as Alan Lomax and, also templates the modern record deal where the recordist or label retained copyright to the music in exchange for a cash payment.

In the 20s technological advances in recording technology allowing for the use of microphones and amplifiers (and later magnetic tape) - this allowed for changing of microphone placement relative to performers in order to capture sound. Typically recording / mixing down to 1 or 2 tracks necessitated a similar approach to 'recording' performances and it wasn't until the popularisation of 4 track tape in the 60s that multi-tracking as we know it became common practice.

In the intervening years recording setups varied between a 'classical' approach (stereo / room mic's) and a close-mic approach mixed down 'live'. The former became an art unto itself and led to many 'documentary' recordings typically captured using a single mic / source with little / no eq / compression. I'm using the term 'documentary' quite liberally here as there was often great artifice employed to balance the sound of the performances being captured.

This aesthetic became enshrined in classical music recording – the recordists role is to accurately and transparently 'capture' sound. In some instances (such as Decca's orchestral recordings making use of the Decca tree and supported spot mics) this lead to increasingly complex recording setups. In other cases such as Mercury Records Living Presence series an alternate (pre-audiophile) approach was developed that utilised a distinct 3 mic technique to capture recordings of extraordinary dynamics and depth. The husband and wife team of Wilma Cozart Fine and Robert Fine are worth mentioning worth mentioning for the importance they placed on microphone placement and the process they went through to get the mic's in the right spot of air:

"First the microphones were put in the right position: the distance above the orchestra and the angle were determined. The position also depended as a matter of fact on the acoustic energy generated by a 100 piece orchestra, by a string quartet or by a single performer as in the case with Byron Janis playing Mussorgsky in the Ballroom Studio in New York, or performing Chopin in the large concert hall in Moscow. Also the specific acoustic properties of the hall were the orchestra was playing were taken into account. And finally the nature of the work plays an important part in the game. The 'Organ Symphony' of Camille Saint-Saëns asks for a completely different microphone placement than the Minute-waltz of Frederic Chopin."

I'm getting a little sidetracked here though because what I really wanted to write about was the production style of John Hammond who 'discovered' and recorded (among others) Billie Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Hammond represents an early archetype of the 'producer' in the 20th century, somewhere between A&R talent scout, music critic and Alan Lomax style documentarian.  His career highlights the sometimes ephemeral role of the producer and the reality that responsibility for the 'production' of recorded works is often a composite role. 

Hammond was a college dropout who started producing as an extension of interest in african american music, touring the south in 1938 with Columbia president-to-be Goddard Lieberson in search of ‘authentic’ gospel, blues and jazz. Unlike the popular view of a 'record producer' Hammond not a musician, arranger or studio engineer. He was instead a music critic with an entrepreneurial streak (who wasn't above writing glowing reviews for albums he produced). Born into a wealthy NY family, Hammond financed many of his recording projects himself, his  entrée into the music industry exhibits an intriguing parallel with Rick Rubin's – the privileged white guy who hung out at clubs in downtown New York.