Old Verve records mics and pre's ?

[kozsak]

I picked up a Lyle Ritz CD (What About Uke?) the other day. This is a Verve recording from the 50's. There is a pic on the album showing him playing a Gibson uke with the ribbon mic about 18-24 inches away from the instrument. The recording sounds wonderful. Warm and full. I cannot hear any noise on the recording. Does anyone know what signal chain they might have used for the ribbon mic's back then? I assume they recorded all the musicians live. The low output of the uke and the low output of the ribbon mic must have demanded a super high gain preamp.

[videoteque]

Don't judge everything by a picture!

Maybe the photographer choosed the ribbon because it fitted better in the picture!

[vernier]

Don't know where Verve artists recorded, but if its 50's, that'd be tube gear. Studios constructed their own consoles, usually a control surface with volume pots, and pre's made by Langevin, UA, RCA or similar. And they mic'd instruments with ribbons.

Go to this site and click on "Articles". ----> Home

[kozsak]

Sorry if this is off topic for "High End gear" but I did some research and found that he recorded at Capitol in LA. I found a great link on none other than Apple.com. It doesn't talk about specific gear , but it's a cool article nonetheless.

Apple - Pro - Profiles - Lyle Ritz

“In order to accommodate stereo recording, they had to use baffles,” Ritz remembers about the old days. “They moved around these big carpet-covered portable walls on rollers. And they didn’t have headsets for us then, so we musicians in the room had to really struggle to try to keep together because we couldn’t see each other and we had trouble hearing each other.
“The tape machines were huge, like dressers. They didn’t have room in the studio recording booth for both stereo and mono systems, so they had to put the stereo machine up in a utility room on the floor above the recording booth, and drill holes in the floor to put the wires through. They had a buzzer system, like a doorbell, that was the engineer’s signal for the operator upstairs to start the machine.
“There were two sessions involved in the editing,” he adds. “I did the mono, someone else did the stereo. An engineer helped operate the machine, and he’d say, ‘Well, let’s go through tape one,’ and then when we got there — boom, he’d say ’Let’s move over to tape three and use it there,’ and we’d edit that way. The engineer would just operate the machine and make the cuts with a razor blade.”

Keep in mind he played on hits from the 1960s through the 1980s, including such songs as “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” “Good Vibrations,” and “I’ve Got You Babe.”

This is the gear he uses now for his home studio:

Ritz decided to record a solo album featuring himself on ukulele and bass, taking a basic, no-frills approach after fans asked for a minimalist recording without a lot of other instruments. He found the pure, clean sound he wanted by plugging an acoustic-electric tenor ukulele into an M-Audio USB preamp, using GarageBand to record it as a real instrument track. “I recorded in one pass, and didn’t use any compression or EQ, other than a little bit of reverb,” he says.