|
||||||
| When I was in junior high school, I heard a radio
broadcast about a revolutionary new method of recording - 8 track. The commentator gave a
picture of the different sections of an orchestra being recorded separately, and then
played back through a set of 8 speakers. Each of the eight speakers would be positioned
where the instruments would sit on the stage. The "violin" section speaker would
be positioned where the violins would be, etc. I found this whole idea interesting. After
all, this was before stereo systems were on the market, and you couldn't buy a stereo
record. Motown When I went to work for Motown (1963), they had a 3 track recording system. There were 3 sets of speakers in the control room (left, center, and right). The three speakers played the three tracks on the master recordings. Other studios that were 4 track, had 4 speakers, again one for each track. One of the first jobs I had was making drawings of the 8 track machine that was being built by the Engineering Department. Everyone had more or less assumed that when we got the 8 track up and running, there would be 8 speakers in the control room. This was the thinking of the day. Mike McLean, head of the Engineering Department let us know that when the 8 track was installed, there wouldn't be 8 sets of speakers in the control room. Instead, a monitor mixer would be installed so that one amplifier would drive the speakers into mono. Each of the 8 tracks would be "mixed." The engineers were doubtful how this revolutionary new idea would work in practice. By the time the 8 track was installed, a stereo monitor system was built with both a left and right side. The 8 monitor mixing controls also had pan pots, so each track could be sent left, right, or center. The Future Its amazing how most of us cling to the present ways that things are done, even in the face of new developments. We try and plug in the new inventions and methods into familiar surroundings. Ten years from now, it is likely that: 1. There won't be multitrack tapes. Tape as a storage medium will be considered "old school" and we will save our recordings to our studio memory bank. The word "gigabytes" will not be used very much because it only refers to the small quantity of 1,000,000,000 bytes of information. A "small" central storage system for a project studio will hold at least 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A central backup system will back up these files at night to some medium, not yet invented. The medium will be removable memory that will hold at least 1,000 gigabytes per cartridge, and the cartridges will be smaller that a current floppy disk. 2. You won't be buying CD's and DVD's (digital video discs) at all for your home. You'll be downloading from a central provider into your personal central memory system at home. You'll be charged for downloads on your bill, which will automatically appear and be paid by your VISA account (yes, VISA will still be here). When you go on a picnic, wanting to take along your "boom box" for music with the mosquitoes and hot dogs (yes, there still will be hot dogs), you'll be downloading from your home central memory storage system into your boom box. The whole idea of tape, CD's, and DVD's will be "interesting history" to your children, but have no relevance to then current times. Are you ready? |
||||||
|
||||||
Copyright 1998, Recording Institute Of Detroit - All Rights Reserved USE OF THIS ARTICLE SUBJECT TO USER AGREEMENT |
||||||
Part 6