Rockabilly Musicians Didn't Have Multi-Track Recording Techniques To Make Their Great Music

These days if bands and musicians don't use multi-track recording techniques to record their music, they'd be pegged as unusual. It's completely normal for today's musicians to use 8, 16, 24, 48, and even more tracks to build layer upon layer of music that makes up their recordings. This can make the recording process quite complicated and results in a distinct type of recording feel. The early rockabilly pioneers didn't record like that.

In simple terms, multi-track recording simply means that different audio sources can be recorded to distinct portions of recording tape or, in the case of digital recording, distinct locations on a computer hard drive. This technique opens up a world of creative possibilities. For instance, it enables one person to record a part--say a vocal part--and then listen back to that part while recording another part onto a different track. This process is known as overdubbing. When you hear a song with Bruce Springsteen singing harmony along with himself as he also sings the melody, you know you're hearing the result of overdubbing.

It also makes it possible to easily go back and fix mistakes. For instance, say the band is recording and the bass player flubs a section. Since everyone else in the band played their part without mistake, it isn't necessary for them to record their parts over just because of the bass player's mistake. Instead, the bass player can just go back and fix his part. In fact, he can simply start in the middle of the song and replay just the part he messed up. This is known as punching in. The ability to punch in like this is probably the single technique most responsible for the fact that you rarely hear mistakes on modern recordings.

But it wasn't always that way. Multi-track recording didn't become widely used until well into the 1960s. Early rockabilly musicians didn't have that kind of luxury. Instead, the entire band was recorded as they played live. Often the whole session was recorded into one microphone onto one track, unlike modern sessions where the recording engineer uses multiple tracks to record multiple microphones. In fact, there may be eight or more microphones recording just the drum kit alone!

The lack of multi-track recording meant that recording sessions where much different in those early days. To get the right mix in a multi-track recording session, the engineer records everything as loud as possible and then later turns the volume of individual tracks up and down until it all sounds good.

Without multiple tracks to work with, the engineer had to create the proper mix before the music reached the microphone. This was done by literally moving musicians closer to or further away from the microphone until it all sounded nicely mixed.

Also, with everyone recording into one microphone onto one track, if the bass player made a mistake in a song, the band had only two options. They could either all record the entire song over again, or they could live with the mistake.