[ARSCLIST] Les Paul (was: New online publication: Manual of analogue audio restoration techniques, by Peter Copeland)

[Michael Biel <mbiel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yesterday I had a chance to look thru the bio of Les Paul by Mary Alice 
Shaughnessy.  Starting on page 138 she discusses how in the mid-40s he 
put a playback head on his disc cutter to achieve a 1/10 second delay 
echo.  This evolved into using the disc cutter and this playback head to 
do at first single-disc overdubs, and by 1947 (perhaps using bouncing 
tracks between two discs) "Lover" and "Brazil" were achieved on disc.  

After the auto accident, Bing Crosby had given Les a gift of a single 
Ampex (pg. 167), but the narrative seems to indicate he continued to do 
his overdubbed records on disc.  Page 180 and 181 describes how he knew 
he could use two Ampexes the way he did his disc overdubs by bouncing 
from one machine to another, but that he could not afford to buy a 
second Ampex.  "Although he had succeeded in producing remarkably clean 
overdubs with his custom made disc cutter, he knew he could overdub on 
tape with even greater fidelity,.  All he had to do was strum along with 
a guitar solo he cut on one Ampex and simultaneously record both parts 
on a second Ampex.  Unfortunately, there was no way he could afford 
another tape machine." 

The narrative continues with him discussing the problem with Jack Mullin 
after taping a Crosby show, and the two of them coming up with adding a 
preview play head, the PERP machine referred to by Peter Hammer.  
However, exactly as I had indicated a couple of days ago, this single 
machine system created a problem.  The book states "But the modified 
Ampex had one distinct drawback.  If Les made a mistake in, say, the 
twelfth overdub, he'd have to record the first eleven all over again.  
In other words, one small mistake could cost a day's work.  With the 
disk-to-disk recording method, he could simply go back to the last good 
disk and redo the part.    But he felt the advantages of overdubbing on 
his customized tape recorder outweighed the disadvantages, even if it 
put him and Mary under far greater pressure.  'It made us real pros,' he 
later boasted." 

The book doesn't say which records were recorded this way or how long he 
use it, but it is obvious that it did not take too long before he would 
be easily able to afford a second Ampex, and perhaps more!  He started 
dragging this machine around with him on tours, making it seem likely he 
had more machines installed safely at home.  This is summarized on page 
229.  "During the 1940s he had built his own disk cutting lathe to 
create miraculously crisp overdubbed instrumentals.  By 1950 he had 
figured out how to cut even cleaner multigenerational recordings on tape 
with a single modified Ampex.  Later he used two off-the-shelf Ampexes 
to achieve the same effect, bounding sound from machine to machine"  The 
narrative then states that he came up with the idea of a multi-track 
recorder in 1954 and that after Westrex rejected his request, Ampex 
built his 300-8 in the summer of 1957.  I had no idea that this came 
about this late since Ampex and other companies had been making two and 
three track machines for years.  Sel-Sync seems to be the hold-up, but I 
would need to take some time to pull out the catalogs to see how early 
this shows up. 

The Les Paulveriser is discussed on page 231 as coming in 1956 but no 
details are given other than saying it was "a remote control gadget for 
his guitar that would allow him to manipulate the taped accompaniment he 
used during performances."  I've seen him use it to close the act by 
creating overdubs on stage.  The film "The Wizard of Wakeshw" shows him 
doing it.  He plays one part, and then when it comes around again he 
plays a second part.  Then when the overdubbed pair comes around again 
he plays a third part and so forth.  This is only about four bars long, 
less than ten seconds.  After laying down maybe 5 or six parts he does 
not stop it after the next play and uses it as a backing track to play 
an entire song for a minute or two.  At this point I don't think he is 
recording anymore, just playing the loop.  It is said that this is a 
"black box" that nobody knows how it works, but a tape loop on the PERP 
would work as would the PER cart machine I used to use for talk show 
delays.  Now a simple device controlling some bucket-brigade recording 
chips would work. 

Noting that Capitol had done some fake Duophonics of his early stuff, I 
once asked him if he would consider doing real stereo remixes of his old 
mono overdubs going back to the disc days using the separated 
sub-masters.  "Why should I?" he said.  "I can record them all over 
again if I want to."  (I didn't bring up that Mary was no longer with 
us.)  I wonder if he has given anybody permission to go thru his master 
archive and document the techniques used for each specific master: 
Disc-to-Disc, PERP, tape-to-tape, or 8-track. 

As for stereo, part of the appeal of "The New Sound" was having all 
these guitars and voices coming from a single point.  I have likened it 
to whether you wanted a four-handed guitarist or two two-handed 
guitarists.  You do a stereo spread for the latter and keep the two 
tracks together if the former.  One of my techniques when setting up a 
mix of a lead and a harmony is to pan them out until they separate into 
two voices and then pan them slightly together till they rejoin but are 
not exactly on top of each other.  That maintains the ringing blend of 
the harmony but widens and fattens it just a bit so you can sense the 
dual sources which can clarify it as well.  Two guitars together in mono 
can sometimes have one note blurring with the note from the other 
guitar.  If they are just slightly separated you hear two notes rather 
than one in this case, but they are still very close together.  On the 
other hand, if you want to have dueling guitars, they have to be 
completely separated.  In the case of stereo mixing a Les Paul overdub, 
if you have some of his parts answering each other from a distance but 
have other parts close to each other to be ringing together in harmony, 
this could make a stereo version more interesting than hearing 
everything on top of each other.  The occasional duel will be a good 
contrast.  I haven't listened to his Columbia and London stereo work in 
decades to see if this is how those were mixed. 

Mike Biel  mbiel@xxxxxxxxx


Richard L. Hess wrote:
> At 05:49 AM 2008-09-15, Michael Biel wrote:
> > I agree that it is a good thing to have this published, but it is 
> > even more unfortunate that Peter is no longer with us because there 
> > are many, many factual and historical errors and omissions.
> ...
> > He has completely misunderstood how Les Paul created his overdubbing 
> > on page 287 when he talks about a mono tape recorder with the heads 
> > in the PER arrangement instead of the usual ERP.  That machine was 
> > used for a time delay that was of the length of the tape loop.
>
> Hello, Mike,
>
> There seems to be a real bit of confusion on this one, as I have heard 
> the same story that is in Copeland's Manual.
>
> I asked my friend Don Ososke (ex Ampex) to look into this as I did not 
> have time. Don agreed to and discussed it with our mutual friend Peter 
> Hammar, the founder/curator of the  Ampex Museum (portions of which 
> are now at Stanford). Pete was actually the one who introduced me to 
> Don. Anyway, Don reports:
>
> > Peter Hammar interviewed Les Paul at Les's house many long years ago. 
> > Paul showed Hammar the full-track Ampex 300 with an additional 
> > "preview head" mounted about 1.5 inches to the left of the head 
> > assembly that Paul used for "sound over sound" recordings. Paul said 
> > that he first recorded a "click track" so that he and Mary Ford could 
> > stay in precise synchronization. He then recorded the various parts, 
> > saving the most important parts for last due to the quality losses 
> > caused by re-recording the old parts each time he added a new part. 
> > Sometimes, for very complex and fast moving guitar parts, he would 
> > record at half speed while playing the guitar parts one octave lower. 
> > Paul said that by the time he recorded the last part, the click track 
> > had faded away due to the re-recording losses. THEREFORE, the head 
> > configuration was...PERP (although the "normal" play head was not 
> > needed while recording multiple parts).
> >
> > Hammar did not mention Paul discussing the time delay "echo effect" 
> > that was the length of the tape loop, although some of the Les Paul / 
> > Mary Ford recordings exhibit this effect. Could Paul have made a 
> > final re-recording to add the time delay?
> >
> > Hammar confirmed that the erase head was used.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
> Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
> Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.