The Infinite Realm: Recording techniques then and now

Cheryl Taylor

Rusty York, owner of Cincinnati's Jewel Recording Studios, sits at the 24 channel console during a 1981 Infinite Realm recording session. At the left of the photo is the large recording machine threaded with two-inch recording tape.

Fritzi jackson

Members of The Infinite Realm paused during a 1977 recording session at Queen City Album studio on Spring Grove Ave., in Cincinnati. From left are Dave Taylor, Tony Gossom and the late Mike Schmidt. Note the carpeted walls and short, portable baffle walls used to deaden sound.

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The first time I walked into a recording studio I was mesmerized by the big studio microphones, the sound booths, padded portable walls, the huge engineer’s console and the massive tape recording machine with the two-inch ribbon of Ampex recording tape threaded through it.

That Birmingham, Ala., studio was my introduction to the creation side of the recording business. I was attending college in Montgomery that fall of 1970 and traveling weekends with a gospel quartet of regional celebrity, called The Christian Five. The studio was owned by The Thrasher Brothers, one of the top groups in the gospel quartet field at the time. Shortly after the Oak Ridge Boys left gospel for the country field in the mid-1970s the Thrashers followed suit. The Thrashers were later heard singing the theme song for the popular television series “Simon and Simon.”

The Christian Five eventually produced an extended-play 45 rpm record with four songs on it at the Thrasher facility—the first recording to feature a song I had written, called “I’m On The Lord’s Side,” which The Infinite Realm continues to sing to this day.

The Infinite Realm was first organized under another name by five Trimble County High School students in 1969. About 18 months later we became The Infinite Realm. Within a couple more years the group had accumulated a following that demanded a recording. We chose to record at Jewel Recording Studios, on Kenney Ave. in Cincinnati, Ohio. We spent the day there on July 28, 1973 in a grueling six-hour recording session, followed by a two-hour mix-down and mastering session to produce our first album, “Sounds of Infinity,” released in Sept. 1973.

Jewel was owned by Rusty York, who had traveled with Dick Clark and the American Bandstand Caravan in the 1950s and early 1960s. One of York’s up and coming recording acts at Jewel in the early ‘70s was a group called Pure Prairie League featuring then-unknown front man Vince Gill.

Jewel had a 16-track console in 1973. There was a separate sound-proof cubicle for the drums to keep them from bleeding over into the vocals and keyboards and any acoustic instruments that would require microphones. Five tracks of the 16-track recording were allocated to the drum kit alone. There were four vocal tracks and one track each for the keyboard, guitar and bass guitar. On a few of the songs, we multi-tracked the vocals, adding a touch of reverb to give the group a choral sound. A similar effect was produced by the Beatles on a number of recordings. A good example is the song “Because” which appeared on their Abbey Road album.

In that 1973 session, we recorded all tracks at once—technically a “live” recording. Before recording each song we would first rehearse it for the engineer as he set the “pots,” or sliding volume controls, for each voice and each instrument. Once completed, we would begin recording. Sometimes there would be false starts as the engineer would have to make corrections in how far apart the vocalists stood in the large, sound-proof room to keep one vocalist from bleeding over into another’s track. If any part of a song needed improvement, we could go back as an entire ensemble and fix those few measures, or Rusty Wallace, the engineer, could “dub in” one vocal or one instrumental track at a time for however many measures needed attention.

We recorded about three takes of each song, selected the take we were most comfortable with, erased the others and continued on to record the next.

By the end of six hours we were physically exhausted, throats and fingers were sore and we were mentally drained. But there still remained the process of mixing-down and mastering the final product. This process involves balancing the volume on each of the tracks to the desired level, adding just the right amount of reverb to give the recording the desired atmosphere and preparing the final print from which the recording master could be cut.

Unlike today’s digital recordings, vinyl record albums were manufactured from a master mold into which the recorded signals would be inscribed with a needle. Just like photograph printing, where positive prints were made from a negative image, a negative image was etched into the mold containing the recording master. After the hot vinyl was injected into the mold and allowed to cool the positive image of the recording appeared in the grooves of the vinyl.

The Infinite Realm recorded three albums with this old analog technique between 1973 and 1981. Some of the songs from those sessions were digitally remastered and included on our 2005 album “The Infinite Realm Classics Yesterday and Today,” which also contained new digital recordings by the group.

We have sold out of all of our old recordings and are in the process of recording some new material with state-of-the-art digital equipment. Computer assisted recording opens a complete new world of possibilities for any artist producing CDs in today’s recording world.

Many artists and record labels make their products available not only in CD format in stores, but thousands of recordings are now available for download purchase on the Internet. Some are only available for Internet purchase saving the expense of mechanical duplication of the product altogether.

A few companies continue to offer recordings in vinyl, long-playing format. The mechanical process of duplicating and mass-producing compact discs is far more cost-effective, however, and since CDs are read by a laser and not replayed by a diamond needle tickling the grooves the recordings last infinitively longer.

Most recordings today begin with the instrument tracks stacked individually around a reference vocal. The final vocals are added later. Numerous effects can be added to the recording, to the point of taking a note that is slightly off pitch and tweaking it to the right harmonic value.

Unlike going to Cincinnati, Nashville, New York, Los Angeles or London, many recording artists today record in the comfort of their own facilities thanks to affordable, state-of-the-art, portable digital consoles and equipment allowing the proliferation of hundreds of home studios.

The Infinite Realm has followed this trend and with our new studio equipment, keyboardists/guitarists Neal Wright and Ricky Mahoney have been developing musical arrangements and soundtracks in preparation for the group to begin laying down vocal tracks later this winter. We no longer have to go into a studio and race through 12 songs in a single day. Sometimes an artist can spend days tweaking just one song at the convenience of all involved. Once all the tweaking is completed the final product will be sent to a company in Nashville for fine-tuning and professional mastering.

It is an exciting process! Stay tuned!