1960s

The records of the sixties were mono and they were played on small record players at parties by the people who bought the single records - the teenagers. They were listened to over the AM radio in the car and at home while doing homework. There were FM radio broadcasts, most notably Public Radio broadcasts, but the teenagers didn't have FM in their cars or home radios.

These playback and broadcasting mediums didn't do a good job of reproducing the lowest bass octave and the top two treble octaves of the record. At Motown the treble was over-boosted on the single recordings to get a more exciting sound on the radio and on cheap record players.

1970s

By the early 1970's the records were stereo. AM radio was going strong but FM radio was "coming on strong." Some people listened to music on the dull tape recordings of the time (8 track and Cassette) but the preferred listening medium was still radio and records. Players were improving, however, at reproducing more of the audio.

To keep something loud and clear in the early seventies, we couldn't use the technique of sharpening the sound to cut through dull reproduction equipment. Instead we had to turn to more level control, both manual and automatic (compression), in the mastering stage.

Stick Up

The Female hit group with HDH was "The Honeycone," on the production company's Hot Wax label. They had the first Hot Wax release, While You're Out Looking For Sugar, which was a mild hit. They achieved #1 success with a release, Going To Put It In The Want Ads. Their follow up to Want Ads, was a tune called Stick Up.

To me, the Stick Up production had all of the drive of a hit, but the punch line and story of the song wasn't any where near as strong as their original hits. I knew the master had to be hot - louder and clearer than normal, for it to achieve sales success.

Normally I would master the two tunes of a single record in less than an hour, but I took eight hours to master the Stick Up mix. I was super-satisfied with the result and the release got a gold award.

A New Technique, Still Used

The limiting factors in how loud the master can be in disc recording is centered around skipping and distortion. There's also the matter of fitting music into that size of a disc, but since the HDH single product was always well under 3:00. that wasn't really a factor.

I initially copied the master tape and cut my test cuts off of this copy. My first test was at a level a bit higher than normal. I then played the test on a good stereo and on a cheap record player. When there was a drum hit or a passage that skipped or distorted I made a compressed, equalized, or level-adjusted copy of the master and spliced in a spot of "modified" sound into the tape I was using to cut.

I went though several steps of raising the disc level and modifying the sound at short spots, until I had a test cut the was very noticeably louder. This is how the master was cut for the pressings. The practice of spot modification of the master is a very common tool in mastering these days, fist commercially used as a mastering technique in the early 1970s in Detroit. The result was very noticeable, especially over the air waves. If you were working in an office with a radio playing in the background, when Stick Up played, it was loud and clear.