Question

Phil Spector was an important producer who created an original sound and recording style. Your task is to first, list and describe some of the techniques that Spector developed, and how they affected the sound of his recordings. Then, from the list below choose two songs produced by Phil Spector, and describe how they reflect his stylistic traits.

• The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"

• The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"

• The Ronettes, "Baby I Love You"

• Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep - Mountain High"

Answer 1

The Techniques Developed by Phil Spector

Phil Spector was one of the most influential, praised, and credible producer of modern music. Phil Spector was uniquely experimental and had strong feelings about how musical instruments and composure should play out in a piece of music. Spector’s use of “wall of sound” techniques to create an atmosphere of sound is distinctive. Spector often likened himself to German composer Wagner and referred to his works as “teenage symphonies”. Any work that his name was or would be attached to, he would put his mark on in some form or another. His role as a creator became so inflated that is would impress itself on generations of creators to come. Spector’s hands on approach touched on every aspect of creation, from picking musicians and specialists to backing up artists and his vision in each session. His inspired vision can be felt throughout his lifetime of work.

Techniques Developed by Phils Spector:

1. Doubling
2. Layering
3. Reverb
4. Wall of Sound
5. Echoing

• Doubling

Doubling and generous amounts of reverb were two of Spector’s major tricks was to use a vast number of instruments to increase the emotional volume of a song. Instead of singular instruments, he would have multiples of each type, pianos, drums, guitars and so on. In doing this it created his “wall of sound” and combine the different instruments and music in such a way that they would create a solitary impression on the piece. When he used this technique he would aim to avoid the use of stereo and instead he would use traces of the different instruments in a singular monaural track as opposed to isolating the tracks to different channels.

• Layering

The layering of similar instruments and the mono mix, along with the generous reverb and recording room cross talk created an opaqueness bordering on mystical. The way Gold Star was built, a dry instrument had more presence than a reverbed one. The echo of a harpsichord may in fact have been the reverb tail of a piano. He used instruments like an impressionistic color palette. Building timbres and chords by combining instruments that were never combined before.

• Reverb

His use of reverb was unique because it sounded like the orchestra was spread across two blocks of Spanish Harlem, but playing as tight as the best rock’n’roll band one could bring together. Multiple instruments playing the same notes in tandem resulting in an inseparable blend of sonority was often emphasized via the utilization of post-processing effects such as reverb, tape delay, or dynamic range compression.

• Wall of Sound:

The “Wall of Sound”, a production technique that Spector created at the beginning of the 1960s at Gold Star Studio in Los Angeles. He applied this technique to all of the music he worked with, turning it into an indispensable production standard. The “Wall of Sound” can be characterized by the mix of classical acoustic and electric instruments, superimposed layers of sound recorded in an echo chamber. The result, calibrated for FM radio and mass diffusion was intended as a “Wagnerian approach to rock ‘n’ roll” according to Spector himself.

The “wall of sound” might make a song feel as though it had four or five bands playing a single piece to its listener. Phil Spector also was a fan of laying foundations in his works. Spector would record the musical instruments first and then layer the vocals over the instrumental recording at a later time. This helped Spector to build up the layers of music and vocals to create a full version of the track. He would record each variable in a song on its own and perfect it before moving on to another instrument. He would also record his musicians and singers for extended periods of time because he felt that it helped produce a smoother sound.

• Echoing:

He also used echoing techniques by using microphones for recording the musicians and then that recording would be transmitted into an echo chamber. The recording would be played from the studio and reverberated throughout the echo chamber before it would then be picked up by microphones. The usage of echoes and natural reverberations on the rigid walls of the chamber provided a unique rich texture. This was achieved by getting players to perform in unison, adding musical arrangements for large groups of musicians up to the size of orchestras, then recording the sound using an echo chamber. Songwriter Jeff Barry, who worked extensively with Spector, described the Wall of Sound “by and large…a formula arrangement” with “four or five guitars…two basses in fifths, with the same type of line…strings…six or seven horns adding the little punches…[and] percussion instruments—the little bells, the shakers, the tambourines”

Despite the trend towards multi-channel recording, Spector was vehemently opposed to stereo releases, claiming that it took control of the record’s sound away from the producer in favor of the listener, resulting in an infringement of the Wall of Sound’s carefully balanced combination of sonic textures as they were meant to be heard. Brian Wilson agreed, stating: “I look at sound like a painting, you have a balance and the balance is conceived in your mind. You finish the sound, dub it down, and you’ve stamped out a picture of your balance with the mono dubdown.

Recording techniques are best when they make the playback sound like the live act. Rock and Roll acts could overload the acoustics in concert and dance halls because they were louder and more compressed than Big Bands. They had multiple speakers and pickups on stage that fed into each other - drum bleed into guitars, guitar bleed into vocal mics, etc. This created electro-acoustic reverb, along with the reverb springs in the amplifiers overlaying and compounding the room reverb.

Spector crammed the live room full of musicians, used room mics as well as instrument mics and drove a speaker in a concrete echo chamber to mimic the live sound. This also covered the reality that the studio cats were too expensive to take on the road, so the touring bands of that era were generally inferior musicians. PA systems and sound design have gotten a lot cleaner so producers can afford to offer a lot more clarity and articulation.

The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me”

Each generation has its own version of an iconic “girl group”, and The Crystals were influential in promoting and popularity of girl groups in the 1960s. Spector showed off his “wall of sound” technique once again in this work. Spector limited breaks when recording in an effort to limit adjustments to microphones or changes in positioning of people in the studio. Spector also worked directly with La La Brooks to channel the right mood by “thinking of somebody kissing you,” particularly her first kiss.

Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep - Mountain High"

The pairing of Spector with Ike and Tina might seem odd, then: after all, Ike was a band leader who knew and usually got what he wanted from his players. And Spector’s musical vision for all its strengths always threatened to drown out the individual personality of the artist; only a handful (then-wife Ronnie, the Righteous Brothers) could transcend his undeniably heavy-handed production. In Spector’s world, the artists were merely one of the (often incidental) instruments in his creations.

River Deep, Mountain High represented Spector’s production aesthetic taken to its most extreme limits. It’s likely that he (and Ike and Tina) believed that Tina’s voice was the perfect foil for the Wall of Sound, the vocal instrument most likely to stand up to it. It would be a sonic battle of epic proportions. And with the finished album as evidence, the verdict is: mostly it worked, and occasionally it didn’t.

The single “River Deep, Mountain High” opens the album. Spector’s cavernous production technique would come across especially well on monaural, lo-fi AM radio. Individual instruments are largely indistinct; instead the soaring onslaught of a seemingly infinite number of instruments and backing vocals chugs along while Tina shrieks atop the proceedings. It’s an epic recording, emblematic and representative of the Spector/Turners pairing. That said, Tina’s voice occasionally sounds ever-so-slightly off key. Her wailing makes it sound as if she’s struggling mightily to be heard amidst the Wall. The U.S. charts weren’t all that impressed, and the song is now seen as the culmination of Spector’s hubris; he quickly fell out of favor, not to return with any prominence for another three years.

Produced by Ike, “I Idolize You” is in a different bag altogether. While the title track had been brought in by Spector (he had a hand in writing the song), “I Idolize You” was a popular number from Ike and Tina’s catalog, having already been a hit. Compared to Spector’s approach, Ike’s production is certainly truer to the feel of the song. Tina and the Iketts have their vocals placed much more prominently in the mix, and Spector’s slabs of reverb are conspicuously absent.