Recording Studio: Capturing Sound

The first audio recordings were made in the 19th century. We don’t have a record of how anything at all sounded before this – nobody knows how Henry VIII spoke or exactly what Roman music was like. But since the invention of audio recording, technology has advanced rapidly, changing music with it.

Although devices for studying sound waves came before Thomas Edison’s phonograph, his was the first machine that could record and play back sound. Using needles to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders, phonographs evolved into gramophones and, later, record players. 

In the early 20th century, magnetic recording onto tape produced improvements in sound quality. Until digital recording became widespread in the 1980s, tape remained the dominant medium for recording sound.

Multitrack technology – recording sounds separately and playing them back together – was developed in the 1940s by US company Ampex and guitarist Les Paul. Before this, studios recorded musicians as they would play live. Afterwards, the possibilities were endless.

The gramophone or vinyl record remained the standard format for listening to music right up until the 1980s. Once thought a dead format, in recent years it has regained popularity, with sales rising dramatically.

New technology often helps the development of musical styles. Without the synthesiser, which can produce infinite artificial sounds, we wouldn’t have modern electronic music. Likewise, sampling – copying and reusing parts of recordings – was crucial to the development of hip-hop.

The CD (compact disc) was introduced in the 1980s. Boasting high-quality digital sound and supposedly near indestructible, it replaced records and cassettes as the standard music medium in the 1980s, before being itself overtaken by downloading in the 2000s. 

With developments in technology, music software emulating hardware that once cost thousands of pounds is now a reality. As a result, people can in theory make studio-quality recordings on home computers – though studios are still specialist environments with trained engineers.

The MP3 format, which reduced audio files to sizes small enough to be downloaded, became popular in the 1990s – the first mass-market non-physical music medium. Today, we can stream potentially millions of tracks via our mobile phones.

Overdubbing is a process that uses multitrack recording to record new parts along with material already recorded. Modern music would sound very different without overdubbing. It allows performers to play their parts independently of others until they are near perfect.

It also means that many more parts can be recorded than there are members of a band to play them. In fact, there are numerous examples of successful recordings in which no 2 parts were ever played simultaneously. 

Vocals are the most important part of most popular music. They are usually recorded in a booth separate from the main recording area to minimise the amount other instruments “bleed” into the mike. 

Comping – short for compiling – involves singing multiple takes on separate tracks and assembling an ideal vocal track from bits of each one. Producers isolate individual lines, words and even syllables to create the illusion of a perfect performance.

Microphones pick up blasts of air from “b” or “p” sounds (known as plosives), converting them into ugly popping sounds. To prevent this, singers use pop shields – mesh frames that block the blasts while allowing other sounds through.