In this installment of Sweetwater’s Studio Innovators series, we’ll delve into the life and technical achievements of Universal Audio founder Bill Putnam. As the inventor of the modern recording console, Putnam is one of the industry’s most prominent architects, earning him the honorific nickname of “the father of modern recording.” Aside from his inventions, Putnam is renowned as a recording engineer, songwriter, producer, and studio designer as well as a businessman of unparalleled ability.
- Early Years
- Serving His Country
- Taking the Windy City by Storm
- Moving to Hollywood
- Conquering the West Coast
- Pushing Recording Technology Forward
- Taking Care of Business
- Notable Studio Innovations
Early Years
Milton Tasker “Bill” Putnam was born on February 20, 1920, in Danville, Illinois. Putnam’s father was a successful businessman who produced radio programs for Macon County’s WDZ. This, in addition to the younger Putnam’s innate curiosity, sparked an early interest in sound, broadcast, and electronics. In Putnam’s youth, his father helped him build his first radio, and by the time he was 15, Putnam had not only become a licensed ham radio operator but also built a working ham radio. Putnam attended Danville High School, during which time he worked part-time in his friend’s radio shop. While working at the radio shop, Putnam learned how to build and repair radios and PA systems. By his junior year of high school, he was running his own business — a ham radio shop — where he rented out PA systems and installed car radios. He also moonlighted as a musician, singing with dance bands on weekends, reputedly for five dollars a night.
After graduating high school, Putnam sold his radio shop for $700 and enrolled in the broadcast engineering program at Valparaiso Technical Institute in the great state of Indiana. During college, he developed a keen interest in jazz music. At this time, Putnam was allegedly bitten by the music bug, realizing that music and musicians were where his heart was. After graduating from college, Putnam became the chief engineer at WDWS, a radio station in the Champaign-Urbana broadcast area in Illinois.
Serving His Country
Bill Putnam received his draft notice in 1941 at the age of 21. He became a civil servant working on radio ranges for the United States Army Corps of Engineers under the Sixth Service Command in Chicago. During his service, he also worked for military intelligence, developing a concealable gun detector using a miniaturized version of a land mine detection device. Putnam’s gun detector was deployed by the United States Secret Service to protect President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Tehran Conference, which was held at the Soviet Union’s embassy in Tehran, Iran.
During his time in the military, Putnam also engineered recordings for the Armed Forces Network that were used to entertain military personnel stationed overseas.
Taking the Windy City by Storm
Putnam, along with Bernie Clapper and Bob Weber, established the Universal Recording Corporation in 1946 with the help of a $20,000 loan from Putnam’s family. Located north of downtown Chicago in Evanston, Illinois, Universal Recording allowed Putnam to develop new recording technology and experiment with new recording techniques.
Universal Recording was a modest recording facility that housed a Western Electric broadcast console and Westrex system, along with a recording lathe from Scully Recording Instruments. Universal Recording proved financially successful, with Putnam scoring a lucrative contract recording program and creating deferred live broadcasts for the ABC radio network.
As soon as Universal Recording became financially feasible, Putnam moved it into the studios on floor 42 of the Chicago Civic Opera Building at 20 North Wacker Drive in Chicago. It didn’t take long for Putnam and Universal Recording to become one of Chicago’s top recording destinations, attracting such artists as Vic Damone, Patti Page, and Dinah Washington. The in-house Universal Records label saw a million copies of Al Morgan’s “Jealous Heart” sold. Putnam also engineered Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats’ recording of “Peg o’ My Heart,” which not only topped the Billboard chart but was also the first pop recording to use artificial reverb.
Moving to Hollywood
Universal Recording’s continued success prompted Putnam to build a 15,000-square-foot facility at 46 East Walton Street in Chicago, making it the biggest independent recording studio in the city, earning the nickname of the “grand palace.” Putnam was bombarded with recording projects and became the first-call engineer for Chicago-based record labels like Chess Records, Vee-Jay Records, Mercury Records, and One-derful Records.
Putnam enjoyed a unique creative rapport with many high-profile clients, including Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Vic Damone. Putnam was also reputedly Duke Ellington’s favorite recording engineer. Putnam also worked on Elvis Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train” singles at the behest of legendary Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who reportedly requested “hot” levels with “as much presence peak and bass as possible.”
By 1957, Universal Recording had become so successful that many of Putnam’s top clients, including Quincy Jones, Mitch Miller, and Nelson Riddle, began pressing him to open a facility on the West Coast. Thus, with financial backing from friends like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Putnam sold his interest in Universal Recording and set his sights on Hollywood.
Conquering the West Coast
When he reached California, Bill Putnam purchased a defunct film studio at 6050 Sunset Boulevard, which he transformed into a state-of-the-art recording facility dubbed the United Recording Corporation. This new studio reflected Putnam’s innovative, cutting-edge approach to recording. The facility enabled multitrack recording using a hardware console and outboard equipment of Putnam’s own design. Studio B was completed in 1958 and eventually expanded to three acoustically isolated recording studios, three mastering rooms, a stereo remixing room, and a small-scale record manufacturing plant.
United Recording was a busy place. In addition to Putnam’s sizable recording artist clientele, the facility was also a hotbed of activity for television and movie voice-overs and soundtrack recordings. Ricky Nelson recorded his hit “Poor Little Fool” at United Recording, the first-ever Billboard Hot 100 #1 song.
The studio complex grew even larger in 1961 when Putnam bought the nearby Western Recorders at 6000 Sunset Boulevard. After this acquisition, United Recording was rechristened United Western Recorders. Frank Sinatra, who kept Putnam on retainer as his preferred recording engineer, had an office in the Western Recorders building after Sinatra founded Reprise Records.
In 1985, Putnam sold Allen Sides the Western Recorders building, and Sides changed the studio’s name to Ocean Way Recording.
Pushing Recording Technology Forward
Even though Putnam was an in-demand recording engineer, he was also a prolific inventor. Indeed, the largest share of the recording equipment housed in his various studios was his own designs. In 1958, he formed the company Universal Audio (initially located in a second-story loft in the United Recording building) as a means to manufacture his creations, which included custom-built recording consoles outfitted with his 610 channel strips, along with a wide array of tube-based studio hardware processors, many of which became — and remain to this day — industry standards.
In 1967, the company was renamed United Recording Electronics Industries (UREI). During this time, Putnam also acquired the Teletronix company, which gave him manufacturing rights to the LA-2A leveling amplifier and its predecessors, the LA-1 and the LA-2. Invented by James F. Lawrence, Jr., in the early 1960s, the LA-2A was — and still is — a staple in every high-end studio. Putnam also acquired National Intertel and, with it, the technology behind the venerable 1176 peak limiter as well as the 1108 FET preamp. UREI produced a number of notable units, including the LA-3A leveling amplifier, the LA-4 electro-optical compressor/limiter, Time Align studio monitors, and the industry’s first multiband equalizers.
After UREI outgrew its modest loft, Putnam relocated it to a wing of the Western Recorders building. Later, he moved the company to a larger space in North Hollywood.
Taking Care of Business
Bill Putnam was as brilliant a businessman as he was a recording engineer and inventor. After all, he owned and ran a ham radio shop while in high school and sold it for a profit by the time he graduated!
As a studio owner, Putnam was always one step ahead of everyone else and knew how to tilt a business deal in his favor. For example, he financed Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats’ Billboard chart-topping recording of “Peg o’ My Heart” in exchange for a piece of the profits. When he encountered unsigned clients with potential, he would sign them to his own in-house Universal Records label.
Putnam also had the foresight to understand the potential of stereo, even though the major record labels considered it a flash-in-the-pan novelty. Thus, beginning in the late 1950s, Putnam started creating and stockpiling simultaneous stereo mixes of the sessions he worked on. Then, when consumer demand for stereo recordings painted the record labels into a corner in the early 1960s, Putnam was more than happy to come to the rescue. He wasn’t content to simply sell them the stereo mixes. Instead, he inked a lucrative deal in which he was compensated — at his regular hourly rate — for the studio time he used in mixing the stereo versions. It’s been estimated that Putnam was earning around $200,000 a month (roughly $1.93 million in today’s dollars) from his stereo mixes alone.
In 1961, right after the formation of United Western Recorders, Putnam began working alongside the film industry, providing filmmakers with modern-sounding soundtracks crafted with his studios’ multitrack recording technology. Given that few engineers were doing this at the time, Putnam was able to dominate this market space with almost zero competition.
In 1962, Putnam purchased a majority interest in Coast Recorders and moved the studio to 960 Bush Street in San Francisco, enabling him to capitalize on the Bay Area’s bustling jingle industry. Coast Recorders later moved to a two-floor studio complex at 827 Folsom Street, which also housed Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope film studio. Putnam sold majority control of Coast Recorders to Columbia Records in 1970, after which the studio was renamed The Automatt.
In 1963, Putnam established the United Recording Corporation of Nevada (URCON) to penetrate the Las Vegas entertainment market. URCON was a state-of-the-art facility with its own fully equipped remote recording truck. Putnam sold URCON to Bill Porter in 1966.
Upon his retirement in the early 1980s, Putnam sold his businesses, including Universal Audio and UREI, to Harman International, the parent company of JBL. Universal Audio and its numerous acquisitions and offshoots were reacquired by Putnam’s sons in 1999. The re-established company quickly claimed a top spot in the industry, a position it maintains today.
Bill Putnam passed away in Riverside, California, in 1989, at the age of 69. Putnam’s memorial service was attended by numerous record executives and industry colleagues — a testament to his commitment to the recording arts.
Notable Studio Innovations
Recording Console
Bill Putnam designed and manufactured the first purpose-built recording consoles. Prior to Putnam’s influence, studios relied on broadcast consoles and other ill-suited pieces of equipment. Legendary engineer Bruce Swedien, who worked for Putnam at Universal Recording, said it best:
Bill Putnam was the father of recording as we know it today. The processes and designs we take for granted — the design of modern recording desks, the way components are laid out and the way they function, console design, cue sends, multitrack switching — they all originated in Bill’s imagination.
Studio Design
Putnam crafted the template for the modern recording studio. His studios, such as Chicago’s Universal Recording and Los Angeles’s United Western Recorders, pioneered the use of spacious control rooms, dedicated vocal booths, isolated live rooms, separate mastering and remixing rooms, and a whole host of other features unheard of at the time.
Multiband Equalizer
When he was operating under the UREI banner, Putnam designed what is considered the first multiband equalizer. This hardware unit boasted three distinct frequency bands with independent boost and cut controls for high-, mid-, and low-frequency ranges — something that the industry never previously considered, much less implemented.
Artificial Reverberation
Putnam is responsible for the first pop recording to use artificial reverb: “Peg o’ My Heart” by Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats. The reverb on this recording was created by sending signals through Universal Recording’s tiled bathroom. This makeshift echo chamber produced an eerie, almost surreal effect, changing the sound of records forever.
Vocal Overdubbing
Patti Page’s “Confess” was initially conceived as a duet; however, no second vocalists were available due to a music industry strike. Putnam, ever the problem-solver, devised a method to overdub Page’s voice, enabling her to perform a “duet” with herself. Putnam first recorded Page performing the harmony line onto a 17-1/4-inch disc. Then, the recorded part was played back, and Page sang the main vocal line, with the two vocal parts and accompaniment wedded and captured by a wire recorder.
Half-speed Mastering
Putnam pioneered the use of half-speed mastering. This technique involved running a cutting-machine platter at half speed while the signal was fed to the cutting head, which was also at half speed. Half-speed mastering makes sculpting high frequencies easier since the slower playback speed shifts the highest frequencies lower. The result is generally considered to produce superior high frequencies.
Bill Putnam: The Father of Modern Recording
As a result of his considerable contributions to the recording industry, Bill Putnam has earned the honorific title of “the father of modern recording.” If you want to be part of Bill Putnam’s storied legacy, then know that Sweetwater stocks a wide range of analog gear based on his tried-and-true designs. Call one of our knowledgeable Sweetwater Sales Engineers today at (800) 222-4700!