Oh, this is THE discussion I've been waiting for as long as I have been collecting Motown as a teen in 70's. I never could pin it down, but I could ALWAYS tell a Motown record from any other record company's output. Was it the bass? The Tambourines? The guitars? I don't know but I recall a station having a Motown weekend, back in '77 or '78. They were playing a huge amount of 60's Motown along with other classic 60's soul records. It was almost spooky, but even with never having heard about 99% of the records, I could tell within the first several seconds if I was hearing a Motown record or not. There was just SOMETHING in the sound. I had my tape recorder on standby all weekend and I recorded only the Motown tunes. As I got to know the artists and songs, it turns out I was right in every song I picked.
Robb, your posts nailed it for me. The Motown Sound has as much to do with the engineering and acoustics of The Snakepit [[in particular) as it did with the Funk Brothers' peerless music tracks. The first time that thought occurred to me was when I bought The Monitors' "Greetings" album. I was listening to the song "Time Is Passin' By" and I remember being just fixated on how good that song sounded. Not just the singing and music, but it was the WAY everything was mixed, so bell-clear, precise and exact. I kept playing that song over and over, noticing how the guitars sounded. I thought that was the sound of someone who is more of a tech, than a producer. It was only years later that I learned how Motown used engineers to mix those singles and albums and the use of EQ, compression and so on. BINGO.
You write about how the recordings of Golden World don't have as "full" of a sound as Motown's recordings. Another BINGO. I too would wonder what was it about Motown that their recordings had such a punch and rounded sound. Even when the recordings were sparsely populated with few instruments [["Where Did Our Love Go") the sound never came off as an unfinished recording. Also, I find in some of the Golden World recordings an almost "rushed" sound where all the instruments aren't completely in sync or in as tight a rhythmic pocket as at Motown.
There are some amazing Golden World recordings, like the first San Remo Strings album, Laura Lee's "To Win Your Love," Edwin Starr's recordings, but there is still just that something that to my ears, tells me it was not recorded at Hitsville. The only tune that totally fooled me was Edwin's "Stop Her On Sight [[SOS)" Granted, it may have used the Funk Brothers, but more than that, it has a completely Motown sound from the technical end. When I found out it was a Golden World recording, I was really shocked.
One song that has me scratching my head is by the Shangri-Las- "Right Now And Not Later." Hearing it, I thought it must have been recorded in Detroit, maybe at Golden World or another Detroit studio and then sent to New York/Red Bird for the group. It has a decidedly Detroit sound, even maybe a Motown Sound.
What a great thread!
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