This article I'm going to highlight several technologies which form what I think of as ‘watershed moments’ in the sound of records. Unlike many similar collections of significant products in audio technology, I'm going to put one important criterion in place - the product‘s contribution to the sound of records has to be something that the listening public would notice. There are lots of historically significant pro audio products which in spite of their significance would go unnoticed by a typical listener. A vintage Neve console is a beautiful thing. A Fairchild compressor or U47 microphone deserve the places they so regularly receive in lists of the most significant music production gear of all time. However, I know that a typical listener would not notice the sonic fingerprint of any of this equipment. This isn't a criticism of the gear. After all, most pro audio equipment is supposed to be transparent.
To qualify the gear also has to have been very widely adopted and to have persisted over time. As such these technologies constitute a watershed in the sound of recorded music, by which I mean you can identify music is definitely having been recorded after a specific point in time, because of the sound of these technologies on those recordings.
Yamaha DX7
The first item on this list was inspired by a recommendation I had to check out a recent podcast from Sound On Sound in which key people involved in the development of this all-conquering synthesiser came together and discussed those early days. The DX7 was ridiculously successful. From its launch in 1983 it outsold the previous year’s most popular synthesiser 10 to 1.
On a walk this morning I chose a playlist featuring music exclusively from 1982. It is very clear from listening to this music and comparing it to something from only a couple of years later how completely the bright sounds of FM changed the sonic landscape. This wasn’t a flash in the pan trend and while I've chosen to focus on the DX7 the influence of these sounds, continued with other digital synths, for example, the Roland D50 wasn't far behind and was also wildly popular, but it was the DX7 with its FM synthesis which brought digital synthesis to the masses and introduced a sound to records which still persisted a decade later. The record buying public loved those punchy basses and that sickly electric piano sound. This was no subtle use of a studio tool and you can hear the difference between 1982 and 1984 easily. A true musical watershed.
“Autotune”
So are there any other examples where you can just hear the difference between the ‘before times’ and the bright future now that we have access to a new technology? The most obvious one has to be hearing the difference between pop records pre-1997 and post 1997. I'm sure that how we hear pitchy vocals varies with the age of the listener. I grew up in a pre-autotune world and listening to records I knew in my teens I'm very aware that pitchy vocals which passed for acceptable back then kind of stick out these days. I grew up hearing these vocals in a world where, beyond a certain point you had to go with what you had on tape or re-record. This of course is no longer the case and I'd really like to see some research to see how people who have grown up listening to tuned vocals perceive and react to looser tuning. In this article we’re using the word autotune in the same way as someone outise the industry would, as a generic term to refer to the process of tuning audio using softwre but it should be borne in mind that ‘Auto-Tune’ is the original tuning product as invented by Antares and that it is a trademarked product’s name.
There isn't much to say about autotune that hasn't already been said, it's so famous that it's achieved ‘verb status’ with people outside of the industry in the same way as Photoshop or Hoover. For good or for bad, tuning software is a fact of life. But listening to music from the mid-90s is interesting because in terms of production they can sound pretty contemporary, but an untuned vocal gives them away as being from the pre-tuning era.
Double Tracking
Jumping back decades compared to the first two examples, the ability to overdub on a multi track tape recorder is a thrill I still remember from my earliest experiments with dubbing between cassette tapes, using a dual cassette deck. Recording your voice twice is of course impossible in nature and Les Paul and Mary Ford's records exploiting this new technology in the 50s must have been extraordinary to the listening public at the time. Of course a singer harmonising with themselves would have been a spectacular trick in those days, but the example I'm going to pick out here is rather simpler but closely related. Double tracking, by which I mean a singer or instrumentalist doubling a part, playing it again in unison to thicken the sound, has become so much a characteristic part of records that we take it for granted. Precisely how the effect is achieved has changed over time in that ADT techniques to create false doubles have been around for decades, but that just underlines the point that it's a fantastic effect and hugely popular. So much so that the sound of vocals on contemporary recordings relies on it. However, this was impossible prior to the invention of the multitrack tape recorder. There may be stylistic clues in a record you are hearing which places it chronologically, but these aren't necessarily reliable indicators of the date of recording. But if it's got double tracking on the vocals then that place is it after this particular audio watershed event.
Chorus
It's well known that chorus is supposed to simulate the effect of multiple players playing together, but you're really not going to fool anyone with a standard chorus effect. Natural chorusing occurs when multiple players play together, for example string sections, but also when instruments have multiple strings tuned in unison like in a piano or a 12 string guitar, or even multiple reeds as found on accordions. But if you plug in a chorus pedal you're going to get something different from that. And the character of that, ultimately failed, simulation of a natural phenomenon is its own thing. And for a significant period chorus was extremely pervasive, particularly through the 1980s.
Developed by Roland in the 70s, and made famous by Boss, chorus on clean, electric guitars was pretty much de facto for a period and the expensive shimmer it gave was kind of addictive. It became ubiquitous on acoustic guitars at a time when piezo equipped acoustic guitars like the, at the time very futuristic, instruments from Ovation were so common that I'm pretty sure I didn't hear an acoustic guitar at a folk club without chorus on it until at least the mid 90s!
Chorus ended up on plenty of sources. I’m not a fan and I still wince slightly to hear chorus on saxophones or bass guitars, but in terms of being technology which produced a sound which imposed its fingerprint onto records in a prominent way which would be noticed by even casual listeners for a significant period, it definitely qualifies as a watershed technology in a way that something like for example digital reverb I don't think does. Hugely prominent during the same period and definitely an era, defining technology, I don't think reverb qualifies for this list because while listeners would have heard the reverb, they had heard reverb before and the fact that it was produced in a different way probably didn't mean that much to them. Chorus didn't really exist before people started plugging Fenders into Roland JC-120s in the mid 70s. It was new!
Sampling
I wondered whether or not to put something like Pro Tools into this list, but while it has changed the way music is made I'm less convinced that it's changed the way it sounds to quite the same extent. The fact that you can edit and quantise and correct to infinitely detailed levels can transform the production process, but the end listener doesn't really experience those changes in the same way. Something which did sound unmistakably new was of course sampling. These days sampling and digital recording are basically the same thing and a digital recording of a sound, if done correctly, just sounds like the sound. It doesn't have an inherent character. The same can't be said of the early samplers, which were pushing the technological envelope to the limit and whilst intended not to have a sound, clearly did.
Low sampling frequency and limited, bit depth, idiosyncratic conversion processes. All of these things conspired to give sampled sounds an uncanny quality where they resembled the things they represented, but were clearly samples of reality. Famous examples, like the infamous ‘Orchestra Hit’ and of course, stuttering, re-triggering effects and grainy loops didn't sound like conventional audio recordings. While the technology progressed to a point where a sampler had genuine fidelity and became transparent, the artefacts introduced by this limited early sampling technology lives on in all sorts of genres which adopted it either at the time or retrospectively. People definitely noticed sampling when it was first introduced into record production.
What Else?
If you accept the premise of this list of what it is which makes a 'watershed technology in recording history, you might have suggestions for other entries which would also merit inclusion. Examples of things I wondered about including were the TR series of drum machines, or wavetable synthesis. I considered MIDI but I omitted it not because it wasn't important, but because I’m not sure it had an identifiable sonic signature. It enabled all sorts of amazing records to be made, but what is the ‘sound’ of MIDI? For example records with sequencer-driven elements existed before MIDI did, MIDI just made things much, much more convenient.
What would be on your list of watershed audio production technologies?