Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- Hal Blaine, the behind-the-scenes heartbeat of over 40 #1 hits, has died at 90.
- Many records by 1960s and 1970s artists were secretly recorded by session musicians and singers.
- These unheralded performers were some of the most talented artists ever.
Drummer Hal Blaine died on March 11 at 90 years young.
Though you may not know his name, he was arguably the most important drummer in the history of recorded music. And the fact that so few were aware of his existence is no accident. If you’re a fan of popular music of the 1960s and 1970s — or if you’re simply a person who feels that the history of 20th century music is as worthy of study as, say, 18th century music — then you know his work.Blaine was one of a handful of behind-the-scenes musicians and singers responsible for much of that era’s most popular music. His was the anonymous beat driving a dazzling number of hit records.
Technology and the secret stars
Until Les Paul’s introduction of overdubbing in 1948, recording was a pretty straight-ahead process: Talented musicians and vocalists were captured performing live by a handful of mics in a great-sounding studio room, and a lot of magic was captured. Warts and all. (Singer Joan Baez once described the period as a time when the final performance, or “take,” was simply the one where no dog ran through the room barking.)
Les Paul changed all that. With overdubbing, a recording was made on one machine, and that recording was copied to a second machine while someone played or sang along. The resulting sound was the first performance with the second layered on top, both sounding as if they occurred at the same time. This process could be repeated lots of times, as in the hit recording made by Paul and his wife, “How High the Moon.” With each successive overdub, though, each copy of a copy of a copy would degrade in clarity way down there at the bottom of the stack of performances.
By the early 1960s, most professional recording was done on “multi-track” recorders. These machines allowed you to pile up performances as overdubbing did, though each performance was actually captured on its own separate “track,” a strip that ran the length of the recording tape alongside other tracks, much like a lane on a multi-lane highway. During playback, as with overdubbing, everything sounded as if it had been performed at the same time, but since each performance didn’t have to be copied, its original audio quality was preserved. Also, recording engineers could “mix” the tracks later on to achieve the desired volume balance between them, and also gained the ability to add different sonic treatments to each track’s performance.
This new technology provided a solution to a longstanding entertainment industry paradox: We like our stars attractive and talented, something that happens only rarely. There was another problem, too: Groups of musicians and singers who wrote their own material, such as the Beatles, became popular, an even rarer commodity: Multiple attractive people who are also talented and worked together. Oh, and wrote their own songs.
With buyers clamoring for new music, record companies didn’t want to wait around for such acts to fall from the sky, so — using multi-track technology — a new business model emerged: Incredibly talented players, singers, and songwriters secretly churned out hit after hit for “stars” the public fell in love with. Sometimes the performers sang on their records, sometimes they didn’t. But a surprising number of popular “bands” never actually played a note…
The post He had countless hit records. You never heard of him. appeared first on FeedBox.