The Smiley Smile Message Board

Alright, so I've seen the footage on American Band, and I found an old thread where AGD gives some info on the mixing board.
One of the things I've noticed about Brian is his peculiar notion of "sounds" or "feels" or "vibes" (the band's vocal mix is a good example of this) the guy has a very interesting sonic vocabulary. The home studio (in the Smiley Smile-Friends era) seemed to have a very particular mix of instruments, and Brian seemed to have an attachment to some of the equipment, notably the detuned Piano and the Baldwin Theater Organ (I've heard this was a gift from his father, any truth to that?). What other equipment was Brian using in that studio? Did Brian bring in outside musicians to do things like Horns on Darlin'? or the glockenspiel on Friends? By the '68 Friends sessions what was Brian's impact on production? It seems on Friends he's still "in charge" but on 20/20 he's already much less involved, did this transition just happen naturally or was it overt decision on the part of the band?
Also at some point the studio got an echo chamber, when was that? I've heard an interview with Brian from '67 where he says that the studio didn't have one during the Smiley Smile sessions. By the time of Friends what was Brian's impact on production?
Also, who was responsible for the mono mix on Wild Honey? Was this done under Brian's direction? The mix is just so heavy, I can't imagine it wasn't consciously done that way.

Of course Brian brought in outside musicians - one of them even has a credit on Diamond Head although i can't remember which one....

The band also used outside studios a lot, and they took the console with them on tours until Desper installed the 16track console in time for Sunflower. So Brian would pop out to Western if he wanted to record.

I can imagine Brian mixing that 'heavy' sound on Wild Honey - Pet Sounds sounds a little similar, that thickness of the mono. It sounds a little odder on WH cos there is less in the mix.

I think he did Diamond Head at ID Sound, I've never seen a credit list for Wild Honey or Friends. Some stuff like Ana Lee is really simple, but I was just curious who Brian was working with during these albums.

In another thread AGD posted, from Desper's book:
quote removed by request of the author

Did the band still use the earlier Friends mixing board when they toured? Or did that only start once Desper upgraded the studio?

Really I'd just love to hear anything about this studio, the equipment/instruments it contained and any comments on Brian's general attitude/involvement/interest in the Wild Honey and Friends albums.

I don't think Brian used Western inbetween SMiLE and 15 Big Ones.  Which is interesting, come to think of it...the other guys occasionally did, and Brian still sometimes worked at Gold Star, and Wally Heider (which in itself is interesing:  the reason it was called Wally Heider Studio 3 is because it was virtually an exact replica of the famed Western Studio 3).  Maybe it was a psychological thing, Brian consiously avoiding the scene of his former glories.

Fishmonk, you should go to esquarterly.com, and order a copy of Issue #79 (Spring of 2008, I believe).  I contributed a piece which provides the musician credits for each cut on Friends.

I don't think that Quad-8 board was around prior to SUNFLOWER.  not sure what they used on SMILEY and WILD HONEY.  i believe the equipment was rented.  i know that around the time of the 20/20 sessions, they had a 3M M-23 recorder, it is visible in the "time to get alone" footage.  i can't tell if its 4-track or 8-track.   i would guess they were using 8-track for SMILEY and WILD HONEY.  the setup was certainly makeshift.  I know they shipped out a 8-track 3M (rented from Wally Heider's) for the hawaii concerts in '67.  i believe the consoles were custom built in any case, likely from Bill Putman / UA stuff.

Also, Jim Lockert was the engineer during Smiley Smiley and Wild Honey.  he mixed those records under the group's direction.  they were "assembled" as well; mixed in sections and copied and dubbed (modular recording).  brilliant stuff.

The most knowledgeable guy to ask all of this stuff is Stephen Desper - he was there and has intimate knowledge of all that gear since he not only engineered but also kept it all running and assembled.

For Smiley Smile, Brian had apparently ordered a rush job on the work, and it was hastily assembled and thrown together before a more formal setup was designed and built in the house. He originally wanted Chuck Britz to be his engineer at the house, but Britz recommended Jim Lockert in his place, and Jim took the job. The sessions were done on a patched-together setup which included a rather odd choice of a radio broadcast board instead of a true mixing board. I have a photo of that same model board somewhere from a similar discussion years ago, and it's not what you'd go to for recording music but again it seemed to be a rush job.

Interesting fact - according to some participants in the scene like Hal Blaine, it was actually against the zoning laws of Brian's Bel-Air community to have a studio set up in your house, yet Papa John Phillips around this time had acquired that amazing, now-historic equipment from Western Studio 3 (where he recorded his best, just like Brian and others...), and had a secret home studio in his Bel-Air house, after United/Western had upgraded their equipment and sold off the old stuff in favor of "new" technology. Papa John also had a secret entrance to the studio so no one would know he was cutting tracks there.

So Papa John had Western's equipment, Brian was tracking in his house on a radio board and hastily assembled equipment, and Wally Heider had been busy taking measurements down to the smallest detail of Western's Studio Three, which he was soon to replicate in his own studio, and had built consoles using Bill Putnam's modular UA components he had worked with when he was working at UA. Then Brian eventually took not only the tapes of the Hawaii debacle but also his stacks of Smiley Smile reels to Heider's to put the finishing touches on and have Jim Lockert do what was then a miracle of splicing, editing, and mixing but which is now available in the form of digital recording and editing software which comes free with your new Mac. I don't recall seeing it confirmed but I think Brian was using that room where Heider cloned Western #3, or maybe not...

It's interesting how each of those legends who had built a reputation working at Western #3 all seemed to latch on to a piece of it after they were no longer booking sessions there, for whatever reasons they had in '67 and beyond.

The very interesting sounds to listen for, IMO, on recordings from that era are the electric guitars, especially on something like the 1967 track of Cool Cool Water. A very unique and bizarre tone, and on the Sea Of Tunes tracking sessions of that tune it jumps out at you. Very odd sound, and it doesn't sound like Carl or Al to my ears. The guitars overall in late '67-'68 Beach Boys tracks have a very unique quality, however they were being recorded.

Here is a great piece from 2005 that tells of the '67 Hawaii mobile recordings in great detail, as much detail as anything perhaps...and also includes a few questions I had posted to the author back then and had forgotten about. I also forgot Bill Halverson was the lead engineer in Hawaii...and notice the mention of "Diamondhead" which would soon be the title of a rather awesome instrumental on Friends.

http://wallyheider.com/wordpress/2005/03/recording-the-beach-boys-in-hawaii/ (http://wallyheider.com/wordpress/2005/03/recording-the-beach-boys-in-hawaii/)

Thank you so much!!!! Lots of great info.

Brian cut the "California Feeling" demo in Western, with Chuck, in fall 1974. Prior to that his last Western session was for the Smiley Smile version of "Vegetables", 6/7/67 (although Bruce held a solo-ish session there for "Bluebirds" 9/29/67 and Dennis cut "Tune #L" there 11/28/67. Wasn't "Loop De Loop" worked on at Western too ?)

Yeah, not sure why I picked Western out of all of them to mention.

You could do worse than read The Stephen Desper thread here - he talks a lot about technical things there, although not without the gentle nudge to buy his book.... which i can't find anywhere, dammit!

Yes, but without Brian.  :)

I distinctly recall someone saying the AFM sheets weren't 100% reliable. And their initials weren't CK...  ;D

Hey C-man, how's the Carl & The Passions sessions coming along? Been looking forward to that for a coupla years now - are you about done with it? 

I'd be very interested in seeing that photo and/or knowing what make and model radio board it was!

It was a Gates Dualux like this one, I do believe.

(http://www.videopark.com/Gatesstory/Gates%20Technology/Dualux_files/dualux1.png)

Thanks for the color photo, I had not seen that before! That's the one, and thanks for the name - couldn't remember what that board was called.

Smiley Smile was recorded with gear begged, borrowed, and definitely rented, and it's actually quite a story to have an album using swimming pools and showers for echo chambers and all sorts of mismatched equipment while also using something as expensive and high-tech at that time as the ELTRO tape-speed device and all kinds of hi-fi Neumann mics and whatnot. A real contradiction.

I think if that album were ever remixed - which is probably impossible due to the way Jim Lockert assembled the final mixes of the songs in sections - the sound quality would surprise a lot of people who think of it as "lo fi"...which it is, but anyway, some of the organ textures and vocals are very warm and detailed recordings.

:lol

Nope.   :p

A fascinating read.  Thanks C-man, it's great to see first hand accounts  ... and, on a personal note, congrats!

I'm not C-man, but we do share the same first name.  :)

I think remixes of Smiley Smile and Wild Honey would shock most people.  I have had the good fortune to hear some stereo mixes of some songs from Wild Honey and Smiley Smile, and of course there are the Hawthorne ones as well, but the multis are crisp and very hi-fi at times.  Sparkling stuff that screams for remixes.

Someone -- I'm thinking y'all insiders who post here plus the rank-and-file -- should agitate for a complete BBs catalogue remix. Would it be worthwhile to do it for material up to and including Pet Sounds? In any case, I think it would definitely benefit the post-1966 material...

(Yeah, I know. Not even pipe-dream-level wishing. Sigh.)

It needs to happen!
I love the Wild Honey/Smiley Smile mixes but the songs I've heard in stereo have been great too. I wish they would just release the lion's share of the unheard material. They could even release it Radiohead style and I'm sure everyone here would give enough to make it worth their while.

did they mix the record on the Gates or was a "real" studio booked?  those types of radio boards don't usually have echo sends, EQ, etc ...

Looking at the session details, my impression is that they cut the basic instrumental tracks at Brian's house, then used commercial studios for the vocals and, I'm presuming, mixing, at least until a pukka 8-track board was installed in late 1968..

What an odd method of recording music. I sometimes wonder how ANY work at all got done, working in this manner.

Were these Smiley vocal sessions booked/listed at Wally Heider's? Or Sunset, or somewhere else?

The engineers remember hanging microphones above shower stalls and there is the talk/legend of the emptied pool being used for vocals and as an echo chamber...I admit I don't hear that kind of thing on the released tracks but it sounds like they tried experimental vocals at the house (and shower, and pool, etc...).

There is a non-studio feel to a lot of the vocal tracks, and you can almost hear the room sound of the house at times...but I think they did do a lot of finishing up at Heider's as the album's numerous reels were being put together.

As far as I know Smiley Smile was given the final mix entirely at Wally Heider's studios, in a marathon session. I could be wrong...But deferring to Stephen Desper's knowledge of the board since he actually worked with it, I'd say a radio board like that Gates would probably have some kind of a send/return as well as some kind of EQ. A big part of top 40 radio at that time was an individual station's "sound", which would include some stations compressing more heavily and boosting bass more prominently than others, which made them stand out on the AM band. Some AM stations sounded terrific for what they had to work with, and others sounded thin as hell in comparison. So that was the station engineers' work on how they EQ'd their broadcasts.

And, another disc jockey schtick in the 60's was the use and over-use of gimmicks like reverb and echo on their voice, again sometimes stations could be identified by the echo or reverb they were slapping on the DJ's voice. So I'd think any broadcast board would have to include at least some kind of send/return circuitry to give the DJ's and engineers that option during a broadcast.

I'd seriously love to hear Desper's thoughts on the Gates board, if he hasn't posted something in the past on the topic.

Desper said that Jimmy performed some alterations on the dualux, at least it had a stereo buss situation, and Desper said they would bypass the board whenever possible, using outboard pre-amps.

aeijtzsche I don't know if you've already heard them, but someone on YT posted the backing tracks to "Slip on Through" and "This Whole World," which I'd never heard before. It made me mildly excited ;D

Those are, thank goodness (from my point of view), simply elaborately OOPS-ed, and not actual lead-down mixes.  Still, very revealing way to listen to those tracks.

There are several different models of the Dualux, including one where you could apparently switch between an AM broadcast on one half of the board and an FM broadcast on the other! This was in the 60's, I guess when FM was still experimental and when some AM stations were doing a simulcast on both AM and FM.

I'm wondering if there is any more specific information on which model of the Dualux they were using in summer of '67, since there were several different models with different features. I ask because there are still collectors and hobbyists who collect, repair/refurbish, and use the Dualux as an example of a classic radio board.

I'd also like to know why the decision was made to use one for recording Smiley Smile, other than it could have been a rush job and nothing else was available in LA.

Remember these same people crated up and shipped a Baldwin theater organ to Hawaii for two shows, recorded those same shows on what was at the time *very* high-tech mobile recording equipment, yet couldn't find a simple board other than a radio board to record an album 2 months earlier...I don't get that.

Good questions.  I feel like the Dualux is merely indicative of the nature of what they were trying to do; that is see if home recording would work.  Why spend money, or even put forward a coherent effort, when it's tentative?  You know, just find a cheap board, throw up some Neumanns, and see if Brian is into it?

it sounds like they were using it primarily for monitoring while recording if outside preamps were used and the record was mixed elsewhere.  keep in mind there were really no mass produced mixing boards in those days, so the idea of putting together a console at this stage wouldnt make sense.  a radio board would really be the only way to go. 

I seem to remember there being a detailed account of the mix down sessions for Smiley Smile in the Byron Preiss book

This is true, there are bits from an interview with Jim Lockert and although it's only a few entries long, he describes how he mixed down Smiley from reels of tape and other details. That book is also where I got the info posted earlier about hanging a microphone over the shower stall to record vocals.

As much info as the book leaves out, there are small details like that hiding in there to make it worth owning. Great photos and artwork too!

The boards Brian was working with at Western just prior to recording Smiley, the Bill Putnam designed modular boards, were a series of preamps, meaning the "board" wasn't as much of a board as it was individual preamps in each of the modules which could be swapped out. The heart of the design was Putnam's 610:

(http://www.uaudio.com/webzine/2004/august/graphics/610-strip.gif)

...which would be built into a chassis where the 610's could be interchanged and replaced more easily than standard designs, a chassis such as this one which also had a history of recording a load of now-classic live albums and concerts (notice the row of 610 amps):

(http://www.uaudio.com/webzine/2004/august/graphics/ua_modular_console.jpg)

This is the kind of custom-built board Wally Heider's business had available to record on location, and this particular one after recording live and location gigs in the 60's was bought by Neil Young and later was used to record the Harvest album:

(http://www.uaudio.com/webzine/2008/november/_images/analog_console.jpg)

So these boards were the standard, go-to mobile recording rigs available to artists around LA in the 60's, they were available and intimately known by engineers like Jim Lockert who was a UA staff engineer and had worked every day with Putnam's 610's, Brian knew the 610 having mixed with it for the past few years, there were as shown above more than one 610-based mobile rig available, yet they rent a radio board to record what could have been Brian's most anticipated album? Remember, Beach Boys fans were still high on all the Smile hype as work on Smiley was beginning on the Dualux.

Unless the 610 was the preamps they were using, but if that were the case they might not need the Dualux since the 610 was the channel strip of the board...hmmm.

I guess a decision like that is indicative of the chaos around the band in the Spring and Summer of 67...a lot of their decisions simply made no sense at all.

Hmm.  I could see some situation like the following:  They decide to record at Brian's house.  They call Heider:  "Sorry, my boards are booked for the next month."  Oh.  "I've got a couple of spare 610 strips you could cobble together, but you'd still need something for foldback."

Total speculation.

Dug out the Preiss book yesterday, and Lockert's description is most confusing (OK, to me anyway) - he starts off by stating Smiley Smile was mixed in one marathon session at Wally Heiders (5pm-6am), then starts talking about wiping vocals from the 8-track and recording new ones. Now, is it just me or do I accurately get the impression that while the tracks were recorded at Brian's house, all the vocals were cut in that single session at Heiders as they were mixing down the album ?

This is an interesting point, and after going over the book again it is very confusing: In one quote Lockert is describing recording in the shower, and in another he mentions the process of recording over a vocal which had already been tracked, seemingly at that marathon session at Heider's. So which was it? It's impossible to tell with the quotes scattered around the book like that with no context.

He also describes tracking "You Are My Sunshine" with the cello players late night, and if we read it in the context of the Preiss book we might assume Lockert was describing a session at Brian's house, but we know exactly where and when that session happened, and I didn't even think Lockert was involved with Smile at that time Sunshine was cut...unless he was assisting.

Taking any available vocal session outtakes from Smiley Smile, from SOT or elsewhere, do those tapes tell the same story of mixing section-by-section as Lockert described in the Preiss book? I'm guessing Lockert may indeed have wiped vocals and recorded verse-by-verse as described, but perhaps only on a few of Smiley's tracks which had to be finished. To say he did this for the whole album as the Preiss book excerpts could be doing, I think it can be disproved by listening to the tapes and the sessions. A few songs? That would make sense.

A quick observation...if the vocals were cut at Heider's, or cut partially at Heider's and partially at Brian's house, or mostly at the house, it is a tribute to Lockert and Desper as engineers that the final vocal tracks sound so damned good on that album! Or a tribute to them that the vocal tracks have the same sound quality from track to track, except the obvious cut-ins from the original Smile tracks.

If I remember there are little items that show up on a few tracks from 64-66, things like a guitar solo or a vocal break, that were added in the final mixdown stage of the song, and are technically "missing" from the session tapes because it was done live during the mixdown itself. Isn't "Help Me Rhonda" a case of this, where a solo or something only appears on the final mix? There is a precedent for Brian mixing that way.

On Vega-tables, there is a keyboard part (sounds like a key setting on Brian's organ) in the last section of the song (I know that you'll feel better, after the aca break). It's missing from the Hawthorne mix, and I'd guess because it was punched in live as you said.