In the early years, Les Paul greatly influenced my development as a guitarist, and spurred my interest in the art of multi-track recording. In 1954, I decided to venture into the realm of multiple recording with a 2-speed disc cutter and a monaural tape recorder. These machines were not of professional quality but they served well enough for my experiments. The biggest of several problems that I encountered was with the cutting stylus and the acetates. Sometimes, the acetates were imperfect and would not cut properly, and fine threads that came from the disc while the cutter was recording. These threads had to be brushed toward the center of the disk to prevent the cutter from running into them; otherwise, the cutting stylus would derail and jump from the disc creating a flawed and unusable recording. I enlisted help from my younger brother to remove the threads with a fine brush. Multi track recording took so much time using this method, the brushing became a tedious task my brother disliked. The recordings made on these machines were noisy and the wow created by the disc turntable was noticeable. The process I used for multi-recording was number one guitar would be recorded on tape and that track would be transferred to the disc machine while adding number two guitar. I transferred that track back to the tape machine while adding another guitar. By repeating this process, I could add more and more instruments. This technique however took its toll on the playback quality of the recording. The following year I received a second tape recorder with 2 speeds and I discarded the disc cutter (for which my brother was extremely thankful). With two tape recorders, the higher quality of the recordings became much improved but was still not master quality. I worked with this setup until late 1956. I temporarily discontinued recording because of the heavy work schedule with the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. In late 1956 I came across a Berlant 2 speed 2 channel tape deck and I experimented with this briefly until 1959, when the Army called my name and I served 2 ˝ years.
1947 The Fremont River Rangers
1947 KDYL in Salt Lake City
In 1962, after returning from the service, I started using the Berlant along with a Fender Stratocaster and a Fender reverb unit. This made great improvements to my multiple guitar overdubbing process. Essentially the process was the same as using two tape decks, except the Berlant had the matched components enclosed in one unit. This had the advantage of reduced bias hiss and hum, and the playback quality of the recording was largely unaffected by multipliable recording passes, (unlike the disc cutter). In late 1964, my recordings took a major leap forward in quality when I became the proud owner of a custom-built 3-channel mixer along with two Ampex 300 three channel 2 speed professional tape recorders. They used ˝” low noise tape and were equipped with Sel-Sync, which not only reduced the number of overdubs required, but also allowed stereo recording. The recordings produced on these machines were high master quality, and in the months that followed, I recorded around 20 stereo masters of which 14 were selected for my first album with Accent Records, entitled “The Guitar Sounds of Buddy Merrill” in 1965.
