Recordings mixed for AM (Was Re: Radio Disney in Boston)

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Joe Ross wrote:
>I suppose anything's possible, but I never thought that music was ever
>produced with AM or FM sound contours in mind.  In fact, I thought most
>older music was produced with live performance in mind.

        I disagree here. This was a practice that was used with a lot of
top-40 recordings and I'm sure it's used now in other ways to achieve a
certain sound on the typical FM receiver /portable CD-tape player of today.
There's a famous case in the olden days in which they went so far as to
have had a tiny, tinny-sounding transistor radio speaker hooked up in the
recording studio control room to listen to what the recordings sounded like
on that. They used it in the mixing. It's not quite famous enough that I
can remember who it was for certain <g>, but it may even have been Phil
Specter.
        I'd say the early-mid '60s was the heyday of this. Motown, IMO, is
a good example of a company that used to record and mix songs with this
issue in mind. Motown had great bass players, for example, but by year 2000
standards, the bass is buried; the snare drum (a higher sound) provides
most of the "lows" and the beat (especially if you listen on the type of
receiver used then), because that comes through better on a cheap speaker.
        If you listen to the Motown CD box sets now, you can hear that this
was not just what it sounded like because of the receiving equipment. You
can hear how much the higher ranges were emphasized in the recording--it
sounds extremely "bright," with the saxophones and pianos, etc. They were
recording to pour a lot of the sound into the range that was going to get
emphasized on the other end--the highs, the "tinny" sound of those old
cheap radios. So the song jumped out of the radio at you, like it was
louder (and better!) than the other songs. The same is true of the Specter
"wall-of-sound" recordings. Even some of Motown's most successful singers
had high voices--Ross and Robinson come to mind. Check "Baby Love," for
example. They filled the "tinny" range with great stuff, and, as they say,
the rest is history.
        It's really only logical and would tend to become part of the
routine. Radio was everything for whether these songs hit or missed, and
radio for pop/rock 'n' roll/r & b was AM radio, period. If you were going
to live or die by what it sounded like coming out of a certain type of
sound setup, you'd be interested in what it was in fact going to sound
like. Also, a lot of the time the professionals would not necessarily need
actually to play it back on a transistor radio because they would know from
previous experience that if they did certain things at their end it would
sound a certain way on the other end.
        It's not a question of the old argument about what fidelity the AM
station puts out vs. FM, it's what the signal sounds like on the receiver.
And the teen-age audience of the 50s and most of the 60s almost always was
listening on either car radios, transistor radios, or cheap portable record
players, and they all had speakers that at least seem now as if they were
the size of your thumb nail.