In 1961 my family moved to Nashville because of my father’s business. My business at the time was to finish the sixth grade. Meanwhile, closer to downtown Nashville, a suburban neighborhood around Sixteenth Ave South was being transformed.
Owen Bradley had a Quonset Hut recording studio and the RCA Victor folks started their studio. Bradley recorded powerhouse singers and so did Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer in their Studio B. They assembled teams of the best musicians in Nashville.
Their music gradually moved away from its Appalachian roots. They lessened the fiddles and steel guitars, but added chorus singers, and ended with a “Nashville Sound.”
Bradley eventually moved out to a farm and barn outside of Nashville for the quiet. Studio B, which still exists today handled things differently. I believe I heard, back in the sixties, that the studio was surrounded by sand – under the floor, in the walls, it was isolated from the planet. It was about a 40 ft two-story room with all different angles and some sound panels that were tweaked over the years. The reverberation for the studio was its own room with a speaker and microphones on the roof. The total of all the elements equaled the home for the Nashville Sound. The tour of the studio is an amazingly interesting trip.
Even though the monetary temptation is often to tear down the old and put up newer – bigger, we appreciate holding on to some of our history. Especially on Music Row. Go take the tours!
When I was in college, in the late sixties, a group of guys from the campus radio station got a hold of an entire house down on Division St, gutted it and made a recording studio. The living room was a sound studio, the dining room became a control room, and the butler’s pass-through housed the tape machines and the kitchen the reception desk area.
This was the analog age. As time passed, the digital age eventually would let us approximate that building full of equipment in a laptop computer. We could even record music tracks separately and email them to someone else to add their instrument.
That being said, I must admit there is a huge difference in the sound itself. A trained ear or even an untrained one could tell the difference between the old Steinway at Studio B and another piano recorded anywhere else. It’s the magic.
The people who have recorded in Bradley’s Quonset Hut and his Barn and in Victor’s Studio B are an absolute who’s who of mega-stars. The length of these articles is too restrictive for that list.
Unfortunately, these studios began in the late fifties just before I moved to Nashville. Actually the Beatles were formed in 1960 (and weren’t on Ed Sullivan until Feb of 1964.) Therefore, I cannot claim credit for the Nashville Sound any more than I will for the British Invasion. In fact, the only thing that I can take credit for is actually making it through the sixties alive.
