Multitrack recording, one of the most important advancements in audio and music technology, was pioneered by a Wisconsinite: Les Paul, the “Wizard of Waukesha.”
Paul would have turned 110 years old on Monday. He died in 2009.
“His contribution cannot be overstated,” Madison audio engineer Audrey Martinovich told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
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Martinovich serves as co-owner of Audio for the Arts Recording Studios. She is also a lecturer of music production at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the recently elected secretary of the Chicago chapter of The Recording Academy.
She appreciates Paul’s influence on the industry.
“It doesn’t happen every day — where an idea comes along and it completely changes the course of everything after that,” Martinovich said.
She joined “Wisconsin Today” to discuss Paul’s greatest contribution to the arts.
The following was edited for clarity and brevity.
Rob Ferrett: How big a deal is Les Paul in the music we hear today?
Audrey Martinovich: Huge. He completely revolutionized how music is made. Before him, we all just went straight to two-track. We’re getting married to the sound. You can’t even delete things. If it sucks, we throw the tape away, do it again. He’s totally, completely changed how we even think of it. It’s great.
RF: How did recording work before multitrack was invented?
AM: So way back when, we would position instrumentalists around a cone, and they would make their noises into this cone that takes all of these wiggly sound waves and puts them into a membrane where there’s a stylus attached. So, you can think of it as a stylus on your record player — same kind of mechanism. That stylus would carve the sound waves into some wax as it was moving that stylus. And then to hear it back, you do the reverse. You just have this cylinder of wax, and you play it backwards, and then the sound comes out of the cone instead of going into it. And that was how the very earliest of recordings were made.
So if someone messed up in the group, everybody messed up in the group. You can’t really redo things. And as technology changed, with the introduction of the microphone, we can start putting microphones in front of different instrumentalists or a singer. There’s still not really much editing or post-production that you can do at that point. It all just kind of gets added up together on the tape, and that’s the performance you get. So the groups had to be really, really excellent back then. Now we can fix a lot of stuff, and if someone’s not perfect, we can nudge them around without interfering with anyone else.
RF: Then here comes Les Paul and multitrack recording. And as I understand, he’s the first musician to end up with multitrack equipment to record with. What does this mean? What is different about this technology?
AM: Now all of these tracks are separate. When audio people talk about “tracks,” we mean a track per instrument. So you have a kick drum, a snare drum, a rack, bass guitars — all of these are separate tracks that can be edited and blended together. So where Les Paul was really revolutionary was in developing this. He invented a process called overdubbing.
Let’s say he’d record a rhythm guitar part, and then he’d add another layer on top of that — maybe it’s a melody. And now another layer can come in where it’s a harmony. And now another layer can come in where it’s a solo on top of all of this stuff. And he and Mary Ford, his wife, were really the first people to do this. And that is pretty much how music today is made. We didn’t have ways for one person to create all these layers and play them back at the same time. That’s what’s really revolutionary about it.
RF: How did computers help musicians go beyond what they were doing on tapes?
AM: That’s huge, too. You get people like Jacob Collier, who will post videos of his sessions on Instagram where he’s got 500-plus tracks. And I’m like, “OK, now you’re doing too much.” I’m just kidding, Jacob, in case you’re listening.
But he’s an incredible musician and revolutionary in his own right, too. Really, the only limit is what your computer’s processing is capable of. It can be easy to do too much to the music sometimes, when the options are literally limitless, but the capability is pretty powerful.
RF: Is there a piece of technology, maybe something Les Paul used, that you feel nostalgic for or think it would be fun to work in that medium?
AM: I think it would be really cool to record to wax cylinder. I have never done it. I’ve recorded tape and done a little bit of tape editing. It’s really cool. Definitely love that. And seeing students light up when they get introduced to these old/new-to-them technologies is really cool. But I’d love to experiment with the good old wax.
