La sala donde suena esta canción no existe

We ask ourselves

• What room is this song playing in?
• If only one person is singing, why can you sometimes hear three, and all three are her?
• Why can a guitar come out of your left ear only?
• Did they all play together, or did each of them record alone on a different day?
• How much of what you hear was decided while playing, and how much afterwards?
• Can a band play on stage exactly what is on the record?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

You need headphones, not a speaker. A speaker blends the two channels before they reach you and ruins the experiment.

Start With or Without You and take out your right earbud. What is left is a sustained guitar, dry and close, as if somebody were playing it next to you.

Now the other way round: take out the left one. Same guitar, but now it sounds far away, with a tail, as if it were inside a church.

There is one guitar. The church is invented, and it is only on one side.

Now do it with your bodies, no equipment. Half the class says one short word and cuts it dead. The other half repeats it straight after, quieter, then again quieter still, until it fades. That is a hand-made reverberation: sound still sounding after whoever made it has stopped.

Now play With or Without You, all of it, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

Until the mid-fifties, recording meant taking minutes of a meeting. Musicians stood in a room, played from beginning to end, and the microphone acted as a witness. If somebody fluffed the last bar, you did the whole thing again. The record was proof that it had happened.

In 1955 Ross Snyder designed the first Sel-Sync machine at Ampex: eight separate tracks on one inch of tape. It was sold to Les Paul for ten thousand dollars and he called it "the Octopus". You could record onto one track while listening to the other seven. In other words: you could answer yourself.

Foto: William P. Gottlieb, Library of Congress. Dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

In the ear that changes three things, and those are the three you will recognise from today on.

The first is overdubbing: the same person recorded more than once, sounding alongside herself. Ken Townsend automated it at Abbey Road in the spring of 1966, because Lennon was sick of singing every song twice.

The second is artificial reverberation: you choose the room after you play. Bill Putnam was already doing it in 1947, putting a speaker and a microphone in the studio bathroom. Ten years later the EMT 140 turned it into a machine: a steel plate one metre by two, with a decay you could set between one and five seconds. Abbey Road ended up with four of them.

Foto: EMT-Archiv-Lahr, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The third is stereo: two channels instead of one, and therefore a decision nobody had to make before. What is playing is no longer enough; somebody has to decide where each thing sits between your two ears.

Put the three together and recording stops documenting and starts building. The place where the musical decision gets made moves: out of the room and onto the mixing desk. That is why we say the studio becomes an instrument.

The proof is in what it cost. The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper between 24 November 1966 and 21 April 1967: around seven hundred studio hours, according to their engineer Geoff Emerick, and around twenty-five thousand pounds.

And they did it on four-track machines, not eight. Eight-track machines were not working in London commercial studios until late 1967. When they ran out of room, they mixed several tracks down into one and carried on recording on top.

"Chain of Fools" gives you the same thing in miniature, in 1967. The take they recorded runs four minutes and three seconds; the record that went on sale runs two minutes and forty-seven. Somebody cut a minute and a quarter at a desk. What you buy is not what they played.

Hard facts: Ampex Sel-Sync, 1955, eight tracks, ten thousand dollars. EMT 140, 1957, steel plate 1 × 2 m, one to five seconds of decay, twenty-five years in production. Automatic double tracking, Abbey Road, 1966. The whole toolkit was ready before 1960.

The same device elsewhere

The studio as an instrument is not a pop thing and not a sixties thing. Listen to these three back to back:

• Birds of a Feather, Billie Eilish (2024) — recorded by her brother Finneas in his home studio in Los Angeles. One microphone, one keyboard, one computer. The voice sounds so close you can hear her breathe, and that closeness is a recording decision, not a singing one.
• Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (Cologne, 1955-56) — thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds of a twelve-year-old boy's voice cut up and fused with electronic sound. There is no score anyone can play: the piece is the tape. Lose the tape and nothing is left.
• Jamaican dub — in Kingston, from the late sixties, King Tubby mixed live, moving the faders while the tape rolled, dropping instruments out and bringing them back. The desk is played. The modern idea of the remix comes from there.

None is better than the others. All three start from the same premise: a recording is not the end of the work, it is raw material.

And here at home?

Madrid did have a studio that could keep up, and it was on calle Torrelaguna. It belonged to Hispavox. Rafael Trabucchelli arrived as artistic director in 1965 and built a team around the arranger Waldo de los Ríos and the sound engineer Mike Llewellyn-Jones, who was Chilean-born. People called the result "el sonido Torrelaguna". That the engineer had to be brought in from abroad tells you something.

Outside that, the honest answer is that you had to get on a plane. Los Bravos recorded "Black Is Black" in London in 1966, for Decca, produced by Ivor Raymonde.

And in the United Kingdom, by union agreement, only local musicians could record. The whole band travelled, but the tape has nothing on it but Mike Kennedy's voice: British session players do the rest. The first international hit in Spanish pop is not played by the Spaniards.

In Aragón the journey was shorter, but just as compulsory. Look at three Aragonese records in a row and look at where they were made.

Labordeta's Tiempo de espera was recorded in March 1975 at Estudios Kirios, in Madrid. La Bullonera 2 was recorded in August 1977 at Estudios Sonoland, also in Madrid. And the first Chicotén album, built entirely from the folk songbooks of Teruel, Zaragoza and the Alto Aragón, was recorded in February 1978 at Estudios Gema 1 in Barcelona, with sleeve notes signed by Labordeta.

Three Aragonese records, three studios, none of them in Aragón. You could write here, rehearse here and sing here. To fix it on tape you had to leave.

Classroom activities

• While With or Without You plays: half the class listens with the left earbud only and half with the right only, in silence. Afterwards each half describes what it heard and you compare. Two different songs should come out.

• While Chain of Fools plays: raise a hand every time an answering voice comes in. At the end, count how many different voices you heard and decide which of them are the same person.

• While Uptown Funk plays: write down each instrument in order of entry. Then I tell you that song was made in six studios in six cities over seven months, and you look at your list again.

• Play: we build Chain of Fools with the band. It is one single chord, so the whole class is in from day one. The full-band chart and the tab are attached to its own article.

• Create: use a phone to record one person singing the same line three times, and stack the three tracks. Then record the same line sung by three people at once. They do not sound the same, and the difference has a name.

One opinion of mine, so you can argue with it: of the three songs, the one that interests me most is Uptown Funk, and it is also the most dishonest. Seven months of work and more than a hundred takes so that it sounds like it fell out in an afternoon. That ease is the most expensive thing on the record.

Key vocabulary

• Multitrack — multipista: grabar cada cosa en su propia pista de la misma cinta
• Overdubbing — doblaje: grabar encima de lo ya grabado
• Artificial reverberation — reverberación artificial (la cola de una sala, fabricada con un aparato)
• Stereo — estéreo: dos canales, y por tanto una decisión sobre dónde suena cada cosa
• Mix — mezcla: cuánto suena cada pista, con qué efecto y en qué lado

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Chain of Fools, With or Without You, Uptown Funk.

The song the unit opens with — With or Without You, U2 (1987). Its article, with the chart and the tab, is in the library.

The song we play — Chain of Fools, Aretha Franklin (1967). Also in the library.

Inside the desk — George Martin, sitting at the tape machine, takes "A Day in the Life" apart track by track. You hear what is underneath.

A work that exists only as tape — Gesang der Jünglinge, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1955-56).

The desk as an instrument — how Jamaican dub turned mixing into composition.

The band that had to go to London — Black Is Black, Los Bravos (1966).

The band that had to go to Barcelona — "Jota del Chicotén", from the album Chicotén recorded in February 1978.

• Third song of the unit — "Uptown Funk", Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (2015), in the library.
• The other face of the home studio — "Birds of a Feather", Billie Eilish (2024), in the library.
• More from this era — "1960s – British Invasion and Psychedelia", in the library.