Can we start with how you got to Motown and what you knew before you got there?
I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a radio or recording engineer because I was on a little radio drama we did in our grade school. They had a radio drama program they did in junior high and high school, so I took that. In high school, as soon as I could drive, I started hanging out Saturdays at United Sound, which was the biggest independent studio in Detroit. It was open on Saturday, and it was the only one that was open on Saturday. Then I decided I wanted to try and get a summer job in a studio — I'd been hanging out at United for a couple years, going out and helping one of the engineers there do his own personal remotes. This was a guy named Danny Dallas, who had actually been the engineer for the Lone Ranger! I'd been going around helping on remotes with him and had gotten my first taste of gospel music, which completely blew me away. So I decided I'd like a summer job and literally, as a joke, Danny said, "Well why don't you go down to Motown." I'd practically not even heard of Motown. I was a big classical music fan and I liked big band stuff and orchestral-acoustic kinds of things.
This is '64?
Yeah. So, I walked in the door and was taken to Smokey Robinson's office and they sat me down at his desk handed me an employment application and an IQ test! I filled in these things and then they sent me down in the basement to go talk to the chief engineer, Mike McLean. Mike gave me a tour of the place, which included seeing the first actually working sel-sync 8-track, which of course completely put my jaw on the floor. And I saw their Neumann half-speed cutting system which was just incredible. Mike was also a big classical music fan and a hi-fi nut and I wound up not getting a job at that time but becoming friends with him and wound up going over to his Friday night parties. I got to know a bunch of people and continued interning around town with other people until eventually they hired me in '65 as a mastering trainee.
They didn't want mastering as we tend to think of it now, changing the whole mix with the EQ slope, compression, etc.
Berry Gordy had the experience of getting burned by trying to do that. He had learned early on the hard way that if you didn't get it right you really couldn't do anything about it. And of course, with vinyl that was a lot more the case than with compact discs. They were very, very concerned that things not be particularly modified in the transfer. They'd rather do a new mix than try and fix anything in mastering. So I started out pretty much doing really hot flat transfers, although if we heard something that seemed obvious to change, we could throw on some EQ and send an alternative version labeled with what we did.
Eight track mixing room known as "the Mastering Room". Mono and stereo Studer C-37s flank the console. An interesting feature was that you could turn the panel of eight faders upside down and a relay would switch the channels so they still corresponded left to right. I think you could turn the meters off too. Monitors are an Altec 604E for mono and Acoustic Research AR-3s for stereo. That's the third Moog modular synthesizer ever made in the background. The timer on the left was used to make sure you had faded by 3 minutes because the level of a 45 dropped like a rock at that point.
You mastered a lot of stuff, including many hits.
I did, along with others, yup.
When you hear "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" on the radio, do you think "I should have done something different?" or "That's perfect?" Do you get those sorts of impressions listening to the things you did there?
Well, the way it worked, I actually mastered probably 10 or 15 different mixes, and they picked the one that came out the best. They were very into internal quality control. The basic idea was that it was better for something to be a flop inside the company than to get out in the world and have it be a flop there.
So by '65 they had a sel-sync 8 track?
Yeah, from what I understand, the first tune ever done on it was .
When you were working in the studio what kind of gear were you using? You described it once as a "project studio".
Essentially the whole place was Berry Gordy's home studio. I mean, obviously after they became successful they were able to buy some very fancy gear and they had a lot of home-made gear, but it must be borne in mind that this really was the guy's home! On the other hand I think Abbey Road was built in somebody's mansion, so it's not an unprecedented thing. I think too big a deal is made of this home studio versus the non-home studio. A studio's just a studio and there's good ones and bad ones and some of them are in homes and some of them are built from the ground up.
I think everybody would be interested what the typical set-up there was. Was everybody in the same room, or was there a vocal booth?
Well, we were seriously into overdubbing, so live vocals were very rarely done. The setup — you mean for rhythm session?
Yeah, what kind of situation was it with mics, etc?
Well, there are two distinct flavors: The first original set-up they used pretty ordinary mic'ing. That's where I first saw the Shure 545, which went on to become the SM57. They had a bunch of those. They had two or three U67s, a U47, an RCA 77 that I was told was used on the bass drum, which kind of surprised me.
"So, I walked in the door and was taken to Smokey Robinson's office and they sat me down at his desk handed me an employment application and an IQ test!"
You'd think you'd blow it up a lot.
And EV 666s and that kind of thing, but then they did something pretty wild around 1968. First off, they acquired another studio which had been Golden World Records, and they decided to do a complete rebuild of everything and so they went out and bought new Scully 8-tracks, because they were just a lot better than our homemade ones. We needed a bunch — we actually had the first Scully 8-track, which was our remote machine in most cases. The other thing is we always had two. Only for a very short period did they have only one 8-track machine. I mean, they had gone from mono to mono, to 2-track to 2-track, to 3-track to 3-track, to 8-track to 8-track. Nobody really thought in terms of doing it all on one machine — and you couldn't. On the old machines you couldn't ping-pong because the sync response had no high end at all! [laughs]
Some of your boards were homemade too?
Oh yeah. It was entirely — the old tube studio. The other thing that was interesting was there was a tube studio and a transistor studio.
At the same time?
So you were going back and forth between the two all the time.
A completely different sound, probably?
It was a very different experience and it did not do good things for the reputation of transistors with us! [laughs] Because in the tube studio you basically walked in, you plugged in the mics, if something was really raunchy sounding you might stick a Pultec [EQ] in, and you went to tape, and it sounded good! Transistor studio, you plugged in the mic, you turned it on, it sounded awful, you started fiddling with the equalizers, you know — the routine that we do now. [laughs]
Original Hitsville control room. The console consisted of two mixers, a six input switchable 3 buss and an eight. with pan-pots, if I remember correctly. It is the first console I'm aware of having multiple sends for each input channel, the first having mutes and the first having separate mutes for the sends. The mic preamps are in the rack on the back wall. The 6 input mixer had Langevins and the 8 input mixer had home-brew 12AX7 preamps that had a nasty rising high-end we liked to use for drums.
Mix room racks left to right.
First 3M 8-track, a play-only machine, calibrated phono preamp, more cheezy Fairchild dynamics controllers, Eico oscillator
Echoplex, Langevin high and low pass filters, Altec mixer, 7 band passive graphic eqs, Pultec EQP-1a, Pultec MEQQ- 5, EQP1a, Fairchild "Reverbatron".
Fairchild 660 mono limiter, patch bay, Fairchild Auto-Ten noise gates. I also remember a couple LA-2as that I don't see here.
Original Hitsville control room back wall rack. Left to right, top to bottom:
mike patchbay, mic pads, echo chamber controls, line patchbay, maybe Pultec EQP- 1as?, Eico oscillator.
Fairchild 670 limiter, Fairchild 666 compressor, little Fairchild "LumAtten" gates and limiters, 7 band passive graphic eq., some kind of filter, another 7 band passive graphic eq., 2 Pultec EGHs, Langevin high and low pass filters, ?
first 4 tracks of 8-track monitoring, 8 track deck, transport and tension controls, Altec mixer, Ampex MX-10 mixer, Mic preamps
second 4 tracks of 8-track monitoring, 3 track deck, transport controls, sel-sync panel for 8-track
Mic preamps, Mono Ampex 351, turntable, phono preamp
How bad was the transistor stuff? Altec panel mixers?
It was uh — well, it was a board that had been built by Cleveland Recording for Golden World, and it was a bunch of Neumann equalizer modules and Altec solid state stuff. It was class A mic pre amps. Actually, in retrospect they were pretty good. They weren't the absolutely horrible early Fairchild transistor modules.
Yeah, those are awful. But the Golden World board didn't sound as good as the tube studio...
Just was not as effortless to work with as the tube studio.
What was in the tube studio? What were you going into there?
The tube studio was a combination of a bunch of mixers. You had a monitor mixer and you had a... I believe it was a stereo mixer — stereo in that it was left, right and center. I think it was six inputs, it was from the 3-track days. And there was an 8 channel mono mixer. These were on the desk in front of you, and then in the rack there was an Ampex stereo mixer and a couple of the Altec tube mixers. That Ampex stereo mixer was the quietest thing in the place. It was beautiful.
So what were you using for vocal overdubs, a 77?
By the time I got into the recording studio, they'd gone to something radical. They rebuilt the studios, they bought those new Scullys I mentioned, and they bought around forty Neumann KM86 mics and donated all of the old mics to the University of Michigan! So we had nothing but KM86s, and they built up custom graphic equalizers, which now I'm hearing people talk about as collector's items although we never thought they were that great at the time.
"I think too big a deal is made of this home studio versus the non-home studio. A studio's just a studio and there's good ones and bad ones and some of them are in homes and some of them are built from the ground up."
That's the way it is with most collector's items, isn't it?
