When I watched the trailer for documentary "Hitsville: The Making Of Motown", I was hooked when the loud cinema sound system belted out the first few bars of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine". Wow! I just had not realised what was a fantastic instrumental introduction there was to this song.
On repeat listenings, I still find the combination of drums, electric piano and brass to be overwhelmingly complex. The producer Norman Whitfield created something truly special. There was lots to read on Steve Hoffman's Music Forums, especially about the distortion on the instruments. Bob Ohlsson (Motown Legend?) gives this contribution:
The Wurlitzer piano is pretty distorted to begin with. The drum distortion was mostly our homebrew 12AX7xUTC A-10 mike preamps used without patching in the mike pads. They had a pretty bad resonance above 10 k that was less of a problem on drums than the other instruments we had to record at the same time. The bass distortion was caused by recording the direct bass real hot on track 8 of the homebrew 8-track because there was a lot of hum on the edge tracks. That "sound" went away when we went 16 track in 1968. The Marvin Gaye Grapevine had actually been recorded before the Gladys Knight version but the company was paranoid of putting it out because it was so different and the musically best mix had such poor apparent volume. This is another Motown single where you really want the mono version.
No comments:
Post a Comment