- [Will] In the 20th century, Motown artists had 200 number one hits and thousands of songs
that hit the charts. With that caliber of talent, and song craft happening
around the clock at the studio, it's kinda easy to see why those songs are some of the most
remembered in history. ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough" playing) ♪ Listen baby ♪ ♪ Ain't no mountain high ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough, baby ♪ - So we wanted to find out what makes Motown sound like Motown, and how close can we get to making a recording sound like Motown today. ♪ Ain't no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you, babe ♪ - [Joe] Tamla Records
was founded in Detroit by Berry Gordy in 1959, and it was incorporated as
Motown Records a year later. Gordy's inspiration for the hit factory actually came from his work at the automotive plants in Detroit. - [Will] Motown became an
assembly line for hit records, from songwriting, arranging, recording, mastering, and publishing. The studio ran nearly 24/7, with Gordy hosting weekly
quality-controlled meetings to keep the operation moving
at an incredible pace. - Gordy's approach and work ethic is what made the label
commercially successful. But none of that would've mattered without a great product. It goes without saying that
Motown saw its fair share of legendary artists,
producers, and songwriters. But there was a reason why all these disparate artist's songs collectively had a sound that defined an era. - [Will] Between 1959 and 1972, the Motown house band now known as The Funk Brothers played
on more number one records than The Beatles, Elvis, The Stones, and the Beach Boys combined. - [Joe] These musicians were working around the clock for over a decade, contributing their own individual tastes, styles, ideas, and instruments
into a unique blend that collectively made
Motown's music identifiable. - [Will] We may not
have The Funk Brothers, but I've assembled a really
hot band of pro players to play the arrangements
live in the studio, just like they would have at Motown. - [Joe] Which leads us
to our next ingredient: the studio. (funk music) Motown was the opposite of
the acoustically-optimized facilities in Hollywood. The live room was a
small, rectangular room in a house with ceilings only
slightly taller than average and cables dangling from the ceiling that earned it the
nickname, the snake pit. - [Will] In the early days,
there really wasn't a lot of separation going on
in these recordings. And it's that mic bleed from
all the instruments playing live that also added to
the vibe of these records. - But while the room set
up sounds primitive by say, Abbey Road standards, Motown kept up with the cutting edge of recording technology. From their custom-built
direct box and Motown EQ, to the latest and greatest
from Pultec, Langevin, and Fairchild. - [Will] To get relatively
close to the 16 by 26 live room, we enlisted the help of Rax Trax Studios with Noam Wallenberg leading the session. - We are here at Rax
Trax Recording Studio A. We have a similarly sized room as Motown. We're a little bit bigger and we're a little bit taller. We're making some acoustic
adjustments in the room so that we can try to get it
as close as we possibly can to that room sound. We brought in a bunch of baffles, which we're putting
pegboard on the front of. That was a unique part of the Motown sound was that they had a pretty small room and they had walls that
were covered in pegboard, and it allowed the sound
to permeate through, and still reflect somewhat. And behind that, they had
a bunch of acoustic foam. So the songs we're working on today were from the mid to late-60s, and that was around the time that Motown had switched from three-track recorders to eight-track recorders, and it was before they
had gone to 16-track. So we're working off of
our Otari 24-track machine, and we're only using,
we're limiting ourselves to eight tracks of it. We're also using a bunch of two preamps. We have telefunk and two preamps here that we're using, that are kinda similar to the ones that they
were using at the time. And we're adding a bunch of neve preamps, which are just helping with
the track count that we're on. - And then there's one of
the most iconic elements of the Motown sound, the echo chamber. - [Narrator] At one end, a large speaker, at the other, a mic. This is how an echo is produced. - [Will] This was actually
a decidedly low-tech effect, a speaker and a microphone
wired up to the attic of Hitsville above Berry
Gordy's living quarters. - They had multiple chambers, that were really reflective rooms that they built in the
attics of the studios. They had an EMT play to 140 plate and then they also had
an Echoplex tape machine that they were using for slapback delays and things like that. So today we are using
digital representations of all those reverbs, the
UAD plate reverb emulation and we're using the altiverb
chamber reverb emulation and then for the Echoplex, we have a full tone tape
echo that we're using to approximate that sound. ♪ Ain't no mountain low enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you baby ♪ - [Will] The house kit at
Hitsville has a lot to do with the signature back
beat heard on so many songs. By 1963 the kit was actually
a secondhand piecemeal set made of Rogers, Ludwick
and other classic brands. There was also another kit at
the studio for the sessions that required two drummers
playing at the same time. - [Joe] Drummers like Benny
Benjamin, Richard "Pistol" Allen and Uriel Jones would experiment by taking the front bass drum head off and stuffing blankets in it. Many times Kleenix was
taped to the top head or the snares were
taped to the bottom head with electrical tape
and mikes from the side. - [Noam] So for the Motown drum sound, they kept it really simple. We have three microphones on our drum kit, a 67 single overhead mono and on the overhead,
because we don't have a 67, we're using a C12. A snare mike, which would switch out, but today we're using a KM84 and was an RCA 77 kick mic that was placed far away from the drum kit. So is really capturing the entire kit but it was getting all the low-end that the other mics were not capturing. So as we were sound checking the drums we were using pretty much the techniques that they were using and we stuck pultec plugins on it to carve out a little bit of the mud and add a little bit of high end. We still weren't quite nailing it, so I ended up going into the tape machine with a screwdriver and changing the biasing
so that it would crunch up a little bit more on the drum set like it does in those recordings. And that's a big part of
the drum sound we got. So we're using two kits today. The miking is pretty similar, although we're using a
U87 on the second kit and we're using a 57 on the snare mic. The tuning is really
specific on these sounds that we're going after so
we've spent a lot of time referencing the original tracks to try to get the tuning exactly right. And we also spent a lot
of time playing around with taping different
things to the snare drums to try to get the length
of the snare drums correct and sticking different
things in the kick drum to get the kick drum length correct. - Many Motown songs emphasize
beats two and four heavily and that was helped
greatly by percussionist like Jack Ashford playing tambourine or other auxiliary percussion
to spice up the back beat and keep that groove moving. (piano plays) Oftentimes the piano dictated the harmonic structure of Motown songs and band leaders like Joe
Hunter and Earl Van Dyke play countless hits on 1877 Steinway that took up a good chunk of the room. Many times, multiple
keyboards will be playing the same part to get that orchestral feel. (piano plays Ain't No
Mountain High Enough) - So the piano sound in
Motown was an 1800's Steinway, which we do not have in our studio today but we have our fantastic 1970's Baldwin, which sounds great. We are sticking a Neumann KM86 and it's just over where the high strings and the low strings meet and we are using a KM86 because that was one of the most used mikes
in later Motown years. Right around the late 60's
they started trading in all of their mics for KM86's. So they're great flat mics
and they sound great on piano. ♪ I've got sunshine ♪ ♪ On a cloudy day ♪ - [Joe] Now you can't talk about Motown without talking about James Jamerson and that bass sound. Jamerson's grooves were
some of the most solid and complementary bass lines
in the history of pop music. ♪ Ain't no mountain high ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low ♪ - [Noam] So the Motown bass sound was a P-bass strung with flatwounds played with a foam piece at the base that kind of muffled the strings and made it a little bit more plucky and that sound was captured with a D.I, which was made by the engineers. And today we're using
a company called Acme which makes a very
similar circuit D.I box, that is just a single
D.I box that you can buy. (guitar plays I've Got Sunshine) ♪ When it's cold outside ♪ ♪ I've got the month of may ♪ - Multiple electric guitars can be heard on most Motown tracks from
Eddie Willis's Firebird, holding down the two and four, to Robert White's 335 and
Joe Messina's Telecaster following the piano or
adding lead embellishments. - You may not know this
but the Motown guitar sound actually had zero amplifiers. It was guitars plugged
into that same D.I box that the base was plugged into, they all went into a mixer and that mixer came out of a speaker that was just a studio monitor basically in the live room that would play all the instruments together and they would all sit
pretty close to that speaker and monitor with no headphones on off of that when they were playing. (violins and horns play) ♪ I've got a sweeter song baby ♪ ♪ Then the birds in the trees ♪ - [Will] Strings, horns,
winds and percussion can all be heard on the Motown
tracks throughout the years and the arrangements of
the sweetening instruments blending with the funky rhythm section are a huge part of the Motown sound. - So you may have seen
videos of groups like The Temptations recording
in the Motown studios with everyone crowded around, you know, a couple microphones and
all the strings in there and horns in there. Those videos are full-on fake. I'm calling them out. So they would oftentimes
record the rhythm section and then record the string section, sometimes even in a different
studio as an overdub and they were kind of pioneers
of overdubbing at the time. Most people were tracking
everything together. They would isolate people
in isolation booths and record a bunch of overdubs
on top of their tracks. With the strings crowded
around a Neumann KM86, we have the horns all playing
into a single Coles 4038 and we're using that
same Coles on the bells in that isolation booth. ♪ My love is alive ♪ ♪ Deep down in my heart ♪ ♪ Although we are miles apart ♪ ♪ Listen, if you ever need ♪ ♪ A helping hand ♪ ♪ I'll be there in a hurry ♪ ♪ As quick as I can ♪ ♪ Ain't no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ - In the early days of Motown,
the vocalist would many times sing live in the room
or an isolation booth. As their technology
advanced through the 60's they generally found that isolating and overdubbing the the vocalists made for a cleaner recording. - The Motown vocal sound was
usually an Neumann 67 or 47 and it was recorded with
very little compression, very little EQ on it. They would record that straight to tape and once it was recorded, then they would do quite
a bit of vocal riding. That was how they would deal
with the changes in dynamics, was rather than compressing
and changing the sound a lot, they would just sit with the fader and ride the fader so that
the vocals can come up with when they're singing quieter and come back down when
they're singing louder. There was also a trick that
they would do back then and it was partially for dynamics and was partially for character. They would take the vocal sound and they would duplicate
it to two channels. And one channel they would
keep flat with minimal EQ and with no compression and the other channel they
would add a lot of high-end to and they would compress pretty heavily, compressing with a Fairchild
or an LA-2A sometimes and they were usually adding the high-end with something like a Pultec and they would push that
up next to the lead vocal and ride them together and that
would add a lot of presence and brightness to the
vocal without feeling over compressed like
we often get sometimes. ♪ I don't need no money, fortune or fame ♪ Another element of the vocal sound for Motown was distortion. There's oftentimes some
distortion on the vocals and that would come from hitting
the tape machine too hard. If you turn something up into
the tape machine too hard it's going to distort. Oftentimes in Motown, they would
end up using the soundtrack as the final vocal, they would take a one-take of Marvin Gaye and they would be like,
all right, great, done. And if they, he happen to
sing a little bit too loud and went into distortion, they would go with that, right? That sound is something that
we are very used to hearing and kind of fell in love with so we emulated that today
by pushing the vocals into the tape machine hard enough where they would start to break up when the singers got too loud. - [Singer] And here we go. (upbeat music) So the last things to mention are how we are routing
everything to the tape machine and what's happening after
that, how we're mixing it. We are keeping it true
to what they were doing at the time that they
made these recordings, which was we kept
everything to eight tracks. Now obviously, we're using a
few more microphones than that. So we had to do a terrifying thing, which is commit a bunch of microphones down to a single track. So our three drum mics all
went to the first track, the second track got our three drum mics from our second drum kit and also got the tambourine microphone. Our third track got the bass alone, our fourth track got the
guitars, both of them together. Our fifth track got the piano
and it also got the bells and on the other track that we had horns, we put the horns on an extra track. So we put the vocals
each on their own channel and we put the strings
on their own channel. Because of that, some of the
mixing is kind of happening while you're tracking it. So as you track the tambourine onto the same track as the drums, that is the volume of
the tambourine track. You cannot change it after the fact. Same with the balance
between different singers when you have them on the same mic, on the balance between
the strings and the horns and things like that. When we finally start mixing it we are doing pretty
minimal extra processing, we're not really adding extra compression. We're adding a little bit of EQ stuff, usually we're going to
put on some Pultec's that are going to help us carve out some of the tubby frequencies and make a little bit
more room for the vocals which are gonna be the
focal point of these mixes. During the mixing process
we also use filters to pull off a good amount
of low-end from these mixes, which is accurate to what
they were doing at the time. They were filtering off around 70 Hertz. We're also going to add
in our full-tone Echoplex and our reverbs and things like that. And finally, we're going
to sum everything down to a J37 tape machine emulation. This is accurate to what
they were using at the time. That mix would be done
in two different ways. It would be done in mono and it would be done in stereo
on two separate G37 machines. A lot of people prefer the mono mixes, we're choosing to recreate
the stereo mixes today. The reason we're doing that is because when you have
mixes in stereo like this, you can pick out the
instruments a little bit better because you have the
separation between the speakers and it's going to help
us match these sounds a little bit clearer. Hearing just piano on one side and just drums on the other side. It's also going to help us isolate some of the reverb techniques that they were using at the time and some of the delay techniques that they were using at the time. - With all the pieces of
the puzzle on the table, it's time to put them all together and see if we can
recreate some of the magic that made the Motown sound. (guitar plays I've Got Sunshine) ♪ I've got sunshine ♪ ♪ On a cloudy day ♪ ♪ When it's cold outside ♪ ♪ I've got the month of may ♪ ♪ Well, I guess you'd say ♪ ♪ What can make me feel this way ♪ ♪ My girl, my girl, my girl ♪ ♪ I'm talking bout my girl ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ I've got so much honey ♪ ♪ The bees envy me ♪ ♪ I've got a sweeter song baby ♪ ♪ Then the birds in the trees ♪ ♪ Well, I guess you'd say ♪ ♪ What can make me feel this way ♪ ♪ My girl, my girl, my girl ♪ ♪ Talkin' bout my girl ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ ♪ I don't need no money ♪ ♪ Fortune or fame ♪ ♪ I've got all the riches baby ♪ ♪ What man can claim ♪ ♪ Well, I guess you'd say ♪ ♪ What can make me feel this way ♪ ♪ My girl, my girl, my girl ♪ ♪ Talkin' bout my girl ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ Talkin' bout my girl ♪ ♪ I've got sunshine on
a cloudy day, my girl ♪ ♪ I've even got the month of may ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ I'm talkin' bout, talkin'
bout, talkin' bout ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ My girl, you talkin' bout baby ♪ ♪ My girl ♪ ♪ Talkin' bout my girl, my girl ♪ (plays Ain't No Mountain High Enough) ♪ Listen baby ♪ ♪ Ain't no mountain high ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough baby ♪ ♪ Now if you need me, call me ♪ ♪ No matter where you are ♪ ♪ No matter how far ♪ ♪ Don't worry baby ♪ ♪ Just call my name ♪ ♪ I'll be there in a hurry ♪ ♪ You don't have to worry ♪ ♪ Cause baby there ain't
no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you baby ♪ ♪ I remember the day I set you free ♪ ♪ I told you, you could
always count on me darlin' ♪ ♪ From that day on, I made a vow ♪ ♪ I'll be there when you need me ♪ ♪ Someway, somehow ♪ ♪ You know that there ♪ ♪ Ain't no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you baby ♪ ♪ Oh no baby ♪ ♪ There's no wind, no rain ♪ ♪ Or winter's cold ♪ ♪ Can stop me baby ♪ ♪ Oh no baby ♪ ♪ Cause you are my goal ♪
♪ If you're ever in trouble ♪ ♪ I'll be there on the double ♪ ♪ Send for me, oh baby ♪ ♪ My love is alive ♪ ♪ Way down in my heart ♪ ♪ Although we are miles apart ♪ ♪ Listen, if you ever
need a helping hand ♪ ♪ I'll be there in a hurry ♪ ♪ As quick as I can ♪ ♪ Ain't no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you baby ♪ ♪ There ain't no mountain high enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no valley low enough ♪ ♪ Ain't no river wide enough ♪ ♪ To keep me from gettin' to you babe ♪ - At the end of the day, there will never be
another sound like Motown. But this was a really fun experiment that hopefully sheds
some light on how things were done back in the day. - Let us know how close you think we got and what other studio sounds
you may like to see re-created and we'll see you next time. - For sure. (Motown music plays)
This is great. I went into this expecting it to touch on a few obvious topics. Instead they got into the nitty gritty.
Standing in the shadows of Motown is one of my fave documentaries, talking about the musicians, but they never discussed the recording. This is a great companion piece to that I think.
If Motown were a house James Jamerson was the foundation
Talent.
They should record new songs in the same studio so we can get an idea of the type of change it would make to a modern song.
Simple--the producers and the musicians. That's why that Holland, Dozier and Holland produced in the late '60s, early '70s for Invictus ("Give Me Just a Little More time" by the Chairmen of the Board, for example) sounds like Motown--because HDH had previously been Motown producers and writers.