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1970s films...audio + foley


Stephen Perera

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There's a particular 'sound' to 1970s films when characters speak and the style of foley.....I love it.....I could shut my eyes and can tell if a film is from the 70s........so I was wondering what equipment did they use back then to get this sound.....what mics on booms...what techniques.......the warmth of voices and the obvious use of foley.....I would love to be able to get this type of 'sound' in things I have in my mind to do......

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I think a lot of the sound is due to needing to work a bit harder to get over the "noise floor" of tape. Good recording practice in that situation is to record signals as hot a possible and use limiters/compressors a little more to control peaks. The result would sound a little "fatter" with some harmonic distortion and compression artifacts. Also with an analogue workflow your going to be bouncing audio down multiple generations - so you want a beefy recording to survive the process.

Same with foley mics maybe you'd be inclined to mic a little closer to overcome noise and result in a bit of proximity effect which boosts low frequencies...

At the tail end of the 70s and through into the 80s you had noise reduction coming in A type and SR which drops the noise floor and I imagine sounds didn't quite need to be recorded so "hot". 80s films can sound a little more open and natural compared to 60s, 70s (thanks to Dolby). SR in particular drops the noise floor by around 26db's allowing 15ips tape to match or ecceed CD's for noise floor

Then once digital happened you have both the low noise floor and the ability to dub and bounce without too much loss, you don't need to record signals as loud, so that sounds different. Clipping in digital sounds horrible so good practice is leave lots of headroom. On analogue gear your typically hitting the tape much harder and trading distortion for noise. (also subtle tape distortion can sound good) 

To replicate the sound either try bouncing the recordings onto 1/4" tape. As general tape artifacts and distortion - often change the sound in a positive way (its less accurate), e.g harmonic distortion can make something sound richer and add high frequency components that improve things (you have to be careful to not over do it). In music production, it's still very common to bounce to analogue tape to warm up the sound, even on projects that were tracked in digital.

Or look at getting a nice valve compressor to fatten up the audio. 

 

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thanks for a detailed response......not that I understand most of it but I will look up the things you say and learn......I like the sound of taking things to tape....Im playing with the idea of recording into the old tape recorders we used to have a mic with and record our voices....fond memories of those back in the 70s

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Basically the "tape sound" is mostly about recording signals as loud as you can and risking a bit of natural distortion/compression in the process. If you don't record loud enough your recording can get buried in the noise floor. Distortion and compression sound better then tape hiss.

Digital recordings don't have much background noise (e.g hiss) so you don't need to record as loud mainly because digitals response to signals that are too loud, is to clip - which sounds horrible.

Digital is more accurate, analogue tape colours the sound to a lesser or greater degree depending on the techniques used.  

Also how you watch the film will colour the sound.. when you listen to a film with a fully digital sound track your hearing what occured in the studio - with frequencies from 20hz to 20khz. 

But film prints with optical audio don't have any frequencies above about 10 to 12Khz, which colours the sound a lot. But also can sound nice and warm and less harsh then digital. NPR run all their radio shows through a 12khz low pass filter for the "NPR sound" which is smoother. 

Sometimes movies in analogue sound better. For instance take any recent Chris Nolan film played back at reference level - its going to be crazy loud, harsh sounding and give you a headache - at that point a nice gentle optical track sounds like a good option

 

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This is probably more for the optical sound than for analogue the magnetic sound recording - they generally used Nagra, which are pretty quiet on the noise front. Part of it is also how the soundtracks were mixed, the foley effects on some 1970s films are far from sounding natural.

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