Wall of Sound

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For other uses, see Wall of Sound (disambiguation)}}}.

Wall of Sound is a phrase used to describe the effect created by the music production techniques of record producer Phil Spector.

Description

During the Wall of Sound era, Spector gathered large orchestras of musicians (even for instruments not generally used for ensemble playing such as the electric guitar) playing orchestrated parts for a fuller sound. Not so well known is that at the heart of the Wall of Sound was the famed echo chamber at the Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, where Spector habitually recorded.

This basement room was fitted with speakers and microphones; the signal from the studio was fed to the speakers at one end of the echo chamber; it reverberated around the room and was picked up by the microphone at the other end and 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 solo vocal 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).

Controversy

The Beatles' album Let It Be was produced by Phil Spector and is cited as a famous example of his "Wall of Sound". Paul McCartney claimed that the production had ruined the work, particularly McCartney's composition "The Long And Winding Road", and a 'de-Spectorised' version of the album was released as Let It Be... Naked in 2003. George Harrison and John Lennon not only favored the production style but they continued to use Spector on various solo projects. George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and John Lennon's Imagine and Rock 'n' Roll albums featured the production sound; each musician would later have similar misgivings over the style.

Sources

Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0335152759.
Williams, Richard (1974/2003). Phil Spector: Out Of His Head. Abacus. ISBN 0711998647. Cited in Middleton (1990).

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