DON PIERCE
It’s a funny thing how I came across that song. Tex Tyler had made it into a transcription [disc, formatted for radio play]. I think he was in West Virginia at the time working with Little Jimmy Dickens. When he came out West and formed a Western swing band, he brought the transcriptions that he had, which were just for radio airplay at that time.
He took them down to [“border blaster”] XERB, the Mexican radio station right across from San Diego, in Tijuana. Matter of fact, it was out on Rosarito Beach. They had 150,000 watts that they aimed right up the coast of the U.S. They could sell products by mail order with that powerful signal. So he left those transcriptions down there, and they played them.
I’d go out and sell records on the road. I’d go up in the San Joachim Valley and go all through Bakersfield and Fresno and Stockton and Sacramento, go all the way up to Washington. People started asking for “Deck of Cards.”
I said, “There is no such record. I control T. Texas Tyler, so that’s it.” But when I got ahold of Tex, I said, “Tex, I’ve got people wanting to get this record ‘Deck of Cards.’ What is it?”
He said, “That’s no good for a phonograph record. That’s just a spoken recitation. I’ve got it on a transcription.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “We’ve got to make that record.” And so we did.
We recorded on acetates. We were very concerned that … On a 78-speed record, we could just barely get three minutes of sound on a side. The song was running long. We didn’t want to eliminate any of the story; it was all important. We had to speed up the recitation, to get it down to three minutes and ten seconds. We had Tex Tyler say it just a little faster.
But we were afraid that, when the pressings came out, needles wouldn’t track. They’d get kicked out of the groove. We had to be careful not to have too much bass sound in there because there were wide swings down at the bottom of the groove. You could see them with a magnifier. We had to limit the bass and concentrate on the higher sounds so that we could get that much music, that much recording, on the disc.
That was typical of what we did when we recorded on acetates. Then, we made the metal master [or “matrix,” created by electrocoating or plating the original lacquer or acetate] and, then, the metal mother and, then, from it the stampers to press records on shellac. We had a plant there in Pasadena where we made the [shellac and, later, vinyl] biscuits that records were made of. We went from the raw material to the finished product right there. Except for the plating. We got the plating done over in Culver City. But we would record there and make the pressings there and warehouse it there and ship from there. We did the whole ball of wax.
I think we shipped about seven-, eight-hundred-thousand copies of “Deck of Cards” on 78-speed. We just worried about production, production, production.
JOHN PALLADINO
The lady who became my wife was the engineer on “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” [a song written by Merle Travis for Tex Williams]. At that time there was a scarcity of guys. We were coming out of the war, and women had started to do a lot more stuff. She and my sister did what the Army called “deletion work.” They took radio checks [live broadcasts recorded on acetate], maybe recorded at Radio Recorders, and deleted the commercials. Then, those records were sent overseas to the Armed Forces.
The theory of the echo-chamber is not that new, but here’s how it worked. We were forced to get into small studios. As a commercial recording company, we had to have flexibility. You couldn’t have a studio that was big and had a very roomy sound to it. You wouldn’t have enough control. For example, we wouldn’t be able to do country music.
Country music depends on close miking and, usually, on a lot of individual mikes. Using as many mikes as you had, you would try to get an individual good sound for all the principal guys in a band with mikes of their own. As soon as you did that, the sound became very close. But it wasn’t a very exciting sound. It kind of fell flat in the studio.
We knew that the only way you could extend that sound was through the use of echo-chambers. They could be as dumb as a stairwell in a big building. Sometimes, especially when you had to go on remotes, you could put up an echo-chamber, or you would try to find a little room—maybe, a tiled restroom—with very live walls. You had to put a mike in there, and you had to put a speaker in there. Then, you fed a portion of what you were picking up on your microphones into that chamber [through the speaker], and you balanced the amount of reverberation against the quality of sound that you were attempting. The echo-chambers were on the roof at Radio Recorders and on the roof at [Capitol Records Studio on] Melrose. At the [Capitol Records] Tower, they were underground. You’ll notice there’s a great deal of difference between recordings by various companies because of the sounds of their chambers. Some of them got very distinctive sounds. They might try for more high-end, more delay, and other little tricks.
If a record producer hears a sound done by an independent recording studio, he pretty well knows what’s coming out of that place. He’s not going to go in there and start telling the engineer how to make a recording. He’s going to go in there and sit down. His job is to judge the recording musically. That’s the way the good producers did it. All of the Capitol guys used that system. In the early days, it was interesting to see guys like Lee Gillette and, later, Ken Nelson learn the business as we were learning too. Everybody was in the same boat. We knew we were dependent on each other to make the right kinds of recordings.
JOHN PALLADINO
Sometime in 1942, I came to Radio Recorders [in Los Angeles] and began working as an engineer. It was a very progressive studio. When tape came [in 1948, though it wasn’t fully adopted until the early 1950s], editing became part of the recording process. We did editing for two reasons. You either had errors that you are trying to dodge, or you were fighting time. Doing a session, you might not have the leisure of saying, “Another take; another take; another take.” Right away, during a take, the producer might say [to the engineer], “Let’s use the first half of the last take, and the second half of this one.” Usually, it was one edit, and not something that changed the feel of the record. Also, in those days we had a lot of time restrictions on records—singles, ten-inch LPs, twelve-inch LPs. We were restricted by the sheer physical properties of the formats.
BOB IRWIN
The earlier edits to analog tape that I’ve seen were not necessarily fix-oriented. I think the audience, the producers, the artists, and the music in general were much more forgiving back then and, ultimately, much more interesting. Rather than being fix-oriented, edits had to do with things like adding a solo from another take that was particularly fiery, or a vocal phrase or a chorus that was particularly touching, as opposed to so-and-so sang flat there. Let’s pick up “but love” from this take and put it in another. Which is what a lot of analog editing seemed to be based upon as time went on.
Although I’m sure that they exist, I can’t off the top of my head give you an example of a country recording that I’ve worked on from the early ’50s where something went wrong and they fixed it with an edit, as opposed to calling for another take. I can remember—not song by song—but specific instances where I go, “My God, look at this. They