Wall of Sound From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wall of Sound is a music production technique for pop and rock music recordings developed by record producer Phil Spector in the 1960s.
Spector created a dense, layered, and reverberant sound that reproduced well on AM radio and jukeboxes popular in the era. He created this sound by having a number of electric and acoustic guitarists perform the same parts in unison, adding musical arrangements for large groups of and orchestral musicians, and then recording the sound in an echo chamber.
Recording techniques
Spector was already known as a temperamental and quirky personality with strong, often unconventional ideas about musical and recording techniques. Despite the trend towards multi-channel recording, Spector was vehemently opposed to stereo releases, claiming that it took control of the record's sound away from the producer in favor of the listener. Spector also greatly preferred singles to albums, describing LPs as, "two hits and ten pieces of junk".
In the 1960s, Spector usually worked at the Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles because of its exceptional echo chambers, essential to the Wall of Sound technique. Microphones in the recording studio captured the sound, which was then transmitted to an echo chamber—a basement room outfitted with speakers and microphones. The signal from the studio would be played through the speakers and would reverberate around the room, being picked up by the microphones. The echo-laden sound was then channeled back to the control room, where it was transferred to tape.
The natural reverberation and echo from the hard walls of the room gave his productions their distinctive quality and resulted in a rich and complex sound when played on AM radio, with an impressive depth rarely heard in mono recordings.
Songwriter Jeff Barry, who worked extensively with Spector, described the Wall of Sound as:
"basically a formula. You're going to have four or five guitars line up, gut-string guitars, and they're going to follow the chords...two basses in fifths, with the same type of line, and strings...six or seven horns, adding the little punches…formula percussion instruments — the little bells, the shakers, the tambourines. Phil used his own formula for echo, and some overtone arrangements with the strings. But by and large there was a formula arrangement."
The Wall of Sound may be compared with “the standard pop mix of foregrounded solovocal and balanced, blended backing”. In contrast, “Phil Spector's 'wall of sound' (‘one mike over everything’) invites the listener to immerse himself in the quasi-Wagnerian mass of sound:
"…he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that…if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, 'It is not the song...just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me” (again Jeff Barry, quoted in Williams 1974, p.91).
This can be contrasted with the open spaces and more equal lines of typical funk and reggae textures [for example], which seem to invite the listener to insert himself in those spaces and actively participate.
(Middleton 1990, p.89).