Quonset Hut Studio
The first commercial recording studio facility in what would later become known as Music Row,[1][2] the studio produced hundreds of hits by artists including Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Patsy Cline, Red Foley, Brenda Lee, Marty Robbins, Sonny James, and others.
Between 1962 and 1982, hits by Johnny Cash, Bobby Vinton, Bob Dylan, Roger Miller, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Lynn Anderson, Ray Price, Merle Haggard, Charlie Rich and many others were produced at the studio.
[2][12] The Quonset hut location of Studio B also offered sufficient space for recording the musical elements essential to the developing Nashville sound, such as orchestras and string sections.
In 1961, during the recording of Marty Robbins' song, "Don't Worry" at the studios, a defect in the mixing console unexpectedly transformed session musician Grady Martin's guitar tone into an unusual distorted sound.
[16] "I'm pretty sure what happened was the primary transformer opened up, causing session player Grady Martin's guitar sound to go from clean to bludgeoning", Snoddy told The Tennessean in 2013.
Snoddy and fellow WSM radio engineer Revis Virgil Hobbs built a stand-alone device entirely based around three 1n270 germanium transistors that would intentionally recreate the novel fuzzy effect, and the two engineers sold their circuit to Gibson, who commercialized the device in 1962 under the name Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone.
Dylan's positive results attracted other folk artists, including Joan Baez and Ian & Sylvia, to record at Columbia's studios beginning in the late 1960s.
In 1981 Elvis Costello and the Attractions chose Columbia Studio A in Nashville to record Almost Blue, a covers album of country music songs.
[15] Other artists who recorded at Columbia's Nashville studios included George Jones, Dusty Springfield, The Byrds, Patti Page, Lacy J. Dalton, Dave Loggins, John Hiatt, and Johnny Paycheck.
[26] Toontrack produced an expansion library for their EZdrummer software drum instrument, Traditional Country EZX, at Columbia Studio B in the Quonset hut.
