Bill Putnam

[Curtis Franklin]

Hello Bruce,

I have been a big fan of Bill Putnam for a very long time. I believe you mentioned that he was a mentor to you...

Can you speak for a bit about him, his personality, and funny/pertinant stories? Thank you very much for being here.

Curtis Franklin

[Bruce Swedien]

Originally Posted by pumadrum

Hello Bruce,

I have been a big fan of Bill Putnam for a very long time. I believe you mentioned that he was a mentor to you...

Can you speak for a bit about him, his personality, and funny/pertinant stories? Thank you very much for being here.

Curtis Franklin

My Friend Curtis........

My mentor, in music recording, Milton T. “Bill” Putnam, is the man whose many accomplishments eventually became standard, common practice in the music recording industry. For instance, the way we use “Reverb” or “Echo” in modern recording desks is, in essence, a Bill Putnam brainchild. The location and application of the echo “Send” and “Return” controls was first concieved in his fertile imagination. That system has remained almost unchanged from Bills’ first, rather small recording consoles, to the incredibly powerful mixing desks of today. Bill Putnam was truly an “innovator”. He was one-of-a-kind. A bona-fide “original”. I think Bill Putnam had a unique perspective on music recording. He is someone about whom you can rightfully say that he was the “first’. If you have ever listened to pop music or tried your hand at recording music, Milton T. “Bill” Putnam has touched your life!It was he who conceived the idea of artificial reverberation for “Artistic Effect”.

Echo chambers were for many years analogue only. Whether they were a room or a steel plate reverb generating device. There were even a few reverb generators in the 1960's that used steel springs as a reverb generating medium. The problem was that they sounded just like springs.

In 1980, digital signal processing was in it's relative infancy. At that time it cost $10,000 to buy a 16 bit reverb with a high-frequency response of 15,000 hertz. At that time there were only a couple of manufacturers in the business of reverb devices.

Digital delay lines, or DDL's, appeared about the same time as the digital reverb devices. Before the introduction of DDL's we used a tape machine and would route the echo send signal through it and then to the reverb device, whether it was a room or a plate. As the echo send signal was being recorded and played back by the echo delay tape machine, or 'slap', machine as it was sometimes called, the reverb signal would be delayed by an amount of time roughly equal to about 125 milli/seconds. This amount of reverb delay depended on the tape speed of the delay machine and the head spacing between the record and playback heads. At this time I used a variable speed control on the reverb delay machine to match the delay time with the tempo of the music. That analogue delay sound is very smooth has a character that DDL's have never been able to generate. I am going to be setting up that same analogue delay system of reverb delay again because I miss that quality in my reverb sound.

I used my Ampex 351 tape machine because the record to playback head spacing of 1 1/4 inches gave an almost ideal amount of reverb delay time. I have a feeling that some day soon, I am going to be doing precisely the same thing again.

At this same time devices such as pitch shifters and digital filters were beginning to show up on the market and soon found use in making music more interesting. They were very expensive by today's standards.In this age of ever increasing inflation isn't it wonderful that those devices that cost $10,000.00 can now be had for under $1,000.00? Technology marches on!

Reverberation is all around us. It is a part of our everyday lives. To obtain more mixing control we tend to use close mike techniques and remove a great deal of the room feel in much of what we record. I do feel that you all by now should have a good idea now of how much the sound of natural room acoustics can enhance any sound image. To be truly creative recording people we must also be able to use the new and incredible tools that are now available to make the music that we record more entertaining and at the same time leave the impression of our own individual "Sonic Personality" on the music.

Bruce Swedien