Read House of Hits: The Story of Houston's Gold Star/SugarHill Recording Studios (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music) for Free Online Page A
Authors: Roger Wood Andy Bradley
SugarHill incarnations), the now demolished original building, before becoming a studio, had housed a corner grocery store and gas station. Brewer’s earliest memories of the studio date back to 1947, when, as a teenager, he played fi ddle on a session with his uncle in the group Shelly Lee Alley’s Alley Cats.
Brewer recalls walking in off the street directly into “a fairly good-sized”
studio room with a small control room off to the right side, visible through a tiny window. In the main studio room stood a baby grand piano and a single microphone on a tall stand. Behind the studio room was another section, which contained the pressing plant and a bathroom. The walls of the studio were plain white-painted surfaces with no appreciable soundproofi ng elements. In the control room there were a large disc-cutting lathe made by Presto and a Rek-O-Kut turntable driven by a motor with a huge fan belt.
Another longtime country musician who played on many sessions, steel guitar master Frank Juricek, provides his own description:
Bill Quinn’s studio on Telephone Road was an old gas station with the pumps taken out—and might have had a grocery store also in the main building. It still had the canopy in the front, which made it easy to unload equipment even if it was raining. . . . You walked right into the studio when you walked in the front door. There really wasn’t any real entryway. In the back right corner of the room was his booth where the acetate cutter and turntable and such were. The piano would sit right in front of his booth. . . .
He had added on to the back of the building, and that’s where he had his pressing plant and all the equipment he needed to do the plating and all that other stuff .
t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n
1 3
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 13
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
Juricek’s references to “plating” and the “other stuff ” allude to basic production techniques employed by Quinn in the late 1940s. For starters, the disc recorder with which he had begun in 1941 had soon given way to more sophisticated equipment. However, he had no tape recorders, which had been invented in Germany and largely kept secret through the war years. Such technology was not yet readily available or aff ordable to pioneering independent sound technicians such as Quinn. (Ampex premiered its later widely adopted 300 series in late 1949 and 1950.) In Quinn’s early phase, recording was still done direct to disc on masters made of wax (or in later years, acetate) at the speed of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). The 45 rpm disc did not proliferate until the 1950s. Moreover, shellac was a key ingredient for making disc material, and it was generally in short supply for nonmilitary purposes during the war.
To make a record in the studio, one or more microphones would be plugged directly into a tube mixer and/or tube preamp. While the musicians performed into the microphone(s), the resulting sound signal was passed straight to the cutting lathe, and the needle of the lathe etched this sonic information directly onto the disc. Later that wax disc would be doused repeatedly in a liquefi ed nickel bath and thus plated. The disc then became a
“mother” that could spawn as many stamping plates as necessary.
The creation of the stamping plates, or stampers, was a time-consuming and delicate process. It started by placing shellac (or in subsequent years, vinyl), as well as the preprinted front and back paper labels, in proper align-ment between the plates. Then the presses compressed those materials together, creating duplicates of the original, one at a time. These records were typically referred to as “singles,” with an A-side and a B-side, totaling two songs per disc. During this era producing an album-length recording was very diffi
cult. Why? The artists would essentially have to perform all of the material for a whole long-play (LP) side straight through, in a single sitting, with only a brief pause
Brewer recalls walking in off the street directly into “a fairly good-sized”
studio room with a small control room off to the right side, visible through a tiny window. In the main studio room stood a baby grand piano and a single microphone on a tall stand. Behind the studio room was another section, which contained the pressing plant and a bathroom. The walls of the studio were plain white-painted surfaces with no appreciable soundproofi ng elements. In the control room there were a large disc-cutting lathe made by Presto and a Rek-O-Kut turntable driven by a motor with a huge fan belt.
Another longtime country musician who played on many sessions, steel guitar master Frank Juricek, provides his own description:
Bill Quinn’s studio on Telephone Road was an old gas station with the pumps taken out—and might have had a grocery store also in the main building. It still had the canopy in the front, which made it easy to unload equipment even if it was raining. . . . You walked right into the studio when you walked in the front door. There really wasn’t any real entryway. In the back right corner of the room was his booth where the acetate cutter and turntable and such were. The piano would sit right in front of his booth. . . .
He had added on to the back of the building, and that’s where he had his pressing plant and all the equipment he needed to do the plating and all that other stuff .
t h e i n d e p e n d e n t q u i n n
1 3
Bradley_4319_BK.indd 13
1/26/10 1:12:10 PM
Juricek’s references to “plating” and the “other stuff ” allude to basic production techniques employed by Quinn in the late 1940s. For starters, the disc recorder with which he had begun in 1941 had soon given way to more sophisticated equipment. However, he had no tape recorders, which had been invented in Germany and largely kept secret through the war years. Such technology was not yet readily available or aff ordable to pioneering independent sound technicians such as Quinn. (Ampex premiered its later widely adopted 300 series in late 1949 and 1950.) In Quinn’s early phase, recording was still done direct to disc on masters made of wax (or in later years, acetate) at the speed of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). The 45 rpm disc did not proliferate until the 1950s. Moreover, shellac was a key ingredient for making disc material, and it was generally in short supply for nonmilitary purposes during the war.
To make a record in the studio, one or more microphones would be plugged directly into a tube mixer and/or tube preamp. While the musicians performed into the microphone(s), the resulting sound signal was passed straight to the cutting lathe, and the needle of the lathe etched this sonic information directly onto the disc. Later that wax disc would be doused repeatedly in a liquefi ed nickel bath and thus plated. The disc then became a
“mother” that could spawn as many stamping plates as necessary.
The creation of the stamping plates, or stampers, was a time-consuming and delicate process. It started by placing shellac (or in subsequent years, vinyl), as well as the preprinted front and back paper labels, in proper align-ment between the plates. Then the presses compressed those materials together, creating duplicates of the original, one at a time. These records were typically referred to as “singles,” with an A-side and a B-side, totaling two songs per disc. During this era producing an album-length recording was very diffi
cult. Why? The artists would essentially have to perform all of the material for a whole long-play (LP) side straight through, in a single sitting, with only a brief pause
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