15 February 2022

Les Paul and Mary Ford 1940s Multitrack – Phantom Dancer 15 Feb 2022

Greg Poppleton's Phantom Dancer swing jazz radio show

Les Paul and Mary Ford are this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artists. Les was a jazz guitarist. Mary was a country guitarist. Together, they pioneered multitracking and had a string of hits in the 1950s.

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Here’s Les Paul and Mary Ford waiting for the sunrise in a short 1953 TV spot…

MULTITRACK

In 1946, Les Paul’s mother complimented him on a song she had heard on the radio, when in fact she had heard guitarist, George Barnes. This motivated Paul to spend two years in his Hollywood garage recording studio, creating his unique sound, his New Sound. Paul stunned the music industry with his New Sound in 1948, all recorded using acetate discs only.

With the assistance of Bing Crosby who was a major shareholder in Ampex Tapes and Tape Recorders, and who Paul backed on recordings in the 1940s, Paul started his studio in the garage of his home in Hollywood. He experimented with microphone placement, track speed, and recording overdubs. These methods resulted in a clarity previously unheard in this type of multitrack recording.

Capitol Records released “Lover (When You’re Near Me)”, on which Paul played eight different parts on electric guitar, some recorded at half-speed, hence “double-fast” when played back at normal speed for the master. This was the first time he used multitracking in a recording. His early multitrack recordings, including “Lover” and “Brazil” were made with acetate discs. He recorded a track onto a disk, then recorded himself playing another part with the first. He built the multitrack recording with overlaid tracks rather than parallel ones as he did later. By the time he had a result that satisfied him, he had discarded some five hundred recording disks.

As a teen he had built a disc-cutter assembly using the flywheel from a Cadillac, a dental belt and other parts from his father’s car repair shop. Years later in his Hollywood garage, he used the acetate disc setup to record parts at different speeds and with delay, resulting in his signature sound with echoes and birdsong-like guitar riffs.

In 1949, Crosby gave Paul one of the first Ampex Model 200A reel to reel tape recorders. Paul invented sound on sound recording using this machine by placing an additional playback head, located before the conventional erase/record/playback heads. This allowed Paul to play along with a previously recorded track, both of which were mixed together onto a new track. The Ampex was a monophonic tape recorder with only one track across the entire width of quarter-inch tape, and therefore, the recording was “destructive” in the sense that the original recording was permanently replaced with the new, mixed recording. He eventually enhanced this by using one tape machine to play back the original recording and a second to record the combined track. This preserved the original recording.

In 1952, Paul invented the flange effect, where a sound phases in and out in harmonic tone. The first example of this can be heard on his song “Mammy’s Boogie”.

Observing film recordings inspired Paul to design the stacking of eight tape recorders. He worked with Ross Snyder on the design of the first eight-track recording deck built for him by Ampex for his home studio. Rein Narma built a custom 8-channel mixing console for him. The mixing board included in-line equalization and vibrato effects. He named the recorder “The Octopus” and the mixing console “The Monster”. The name “octopus” was inspired by comedian W. C. Fields who was the first person to hear Paul play his multi-tracked guitar experiments. “He came to my garage to make a little record (in 1946),” Les recalled. “I played him the acetate of ‘Lover’ that I’d done. When he heard it, he said, ‘My boy, you sound like an octopus.'”

LES PAUL AND MARY FORD

In mid-1945, Paul met country-western singer Iris Colleen Summers. They began working together on Paul’s radio show, as Rhubarb Red and The Ozark Apple Knockers with Mary Lou. Later Paul suggested the stage name Mary Ford. They married in Milwaukee in 1949.

Their hits included “How High the Moon”, “Bye Bye Blues”, “Song in Blue”, “Don’cha Hear Them Bells”, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise”, and “Vaya con Dios”. The songs were recorded with multiple tracks where Ford harmonized with herself and Paul played multiple layers of guitars.

They used the recording technique known as close miking where the microphone is less than 6 inches (15 cm) from the singer’s mouth. This produces a more intimate, less reverberant sound than when a singer is 1 foot (30 cm) or more from the microphone. When using a pressure-gradient (uni- or bi-directional) microphone, it emphasizes low-frequency sounds in the voice due to the microphone’s proximity effect and gives a more relaxed feel because the performer is not working as hard.

They also performed music-hall style semi-comic routines with Mary mimicking whatever line Les decided to improvise.

Here, Les Paul and Mary Ford explain their multitrack recording technique to Alistair Cooke on his Omnibus TV show…

15 FEBRUARY PLAY LIST