Recording studio as an instrument
Despite the widespread changes that have led to more compact recording set-ups, individual components such as digital audio workstations (DAW) are still colloquially referred to as "the studio".
[9] Writing in 1937, the American composer John Cage called for the development of "centers of experimental music" places where "the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc."
[15] Pioneers from the 1940s include Bill Putnam, Les Paul, and Tom Dowd, who each contributed to the development of common recording practices like reverb, tape delay, and overdubbing.
He engineered the Harmonicats' 1947 novelty song "Peg o' My Heart", which was a significant chart hit and became the first popular recording to use artificial reverb for artistic effect.
[15] The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the first to use the recording studio as a creative tool, often overlooked as was producing music for TV (and the prominent people were women) Daphne Oram, and Delia Derbyshire, who were early innovators.
[30] According to author David Howard, Martin's work on the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows", from Revolver, and Spector's production of "River Deep – Mountain High" from the same year were the two recordings that ensured that the studio "was now its own instrument".
"[34] Composer and musicologist Michael Hannan attributes the album's impact to Martin and his engineers, in response to the Beatles' demands, making increasingly creative use of studio equipment and originating new processes.
[35] Like Revolver, "Good Vibrations", which Wilson produced for the Beach Boys in 1966, was a prime proponent in revolutionizing rock from live concert performances into studio productions that could only exist on record.
Through the method of tape splicing, each fragment could then be assembled into a linear sequence – as Wilson explored on subsequent recordings from this period – allowing any number of larger structures and divergent moods to be produced at a later time.
[42] David Toop commented that "at its heights, Perry's genius has transformed the recording studio" into "virtual space, an imaginary chamber over which presided the electronic wizard, evangelist, gossip columnist and Dr. Frankenstein that he became.
Jazz critic Francis Davis identified early hip-hop DJs, including Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, as "grassroots successors to Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin, the 1960s producers who pioneered the use of the recording studio as an instrument in its own right.
"[44] Beginning in the 1980s, musicians associated with the genres dream pop and shoegazing made innovative use of effects pedals and recording techniques to create ethereal, "dreamy" musical atmospheres.
Writing for The Sunday Times, Paul Lester said Shields is "widely accepted as shoegazing's genius", with "his astonishing wall of sound, use of the studio as instrument and dazzling reinvention of the guitar making him a sort of hydra-headed Spector-Hendrix-Eno figure".
[46] Chuck Eddy writes that, as the CD era emerged in the late 1980s, pop-metal was the first musical style to exploit contemporary recording studio techniques for "an aesthetic advantage", citing Def Leppard's Hysteria (1987) as a pioneering example and Lita Ford's Stiletto (1990) as a similar case, as both albums feature incidental high tech "whooshes and wobbles and giggles and boinks".
[47] Similarly, Eddy cites Kix's Blow My Fuse (1988) as an album whose sonics embody a futuristic "digital disco" sound, with "dub-doctored Who synths" and a 'studiofied' production.
[48] American psychedelic rock band The Flaming Lips earned comparisons by critics to Brian Wilson's work[failed verification] when discussing their albums Zaireeka (1997) and The Soft Bulletin (1999), which were the results of extensive studio experimentation.
