The Wall-of-Sound Explained: Part 7

When you're a producer, you hear a lot of demands from your various musicians. They sound something like this:

Drummer: "I want every piece of my drumset to be distinguishable in the mix, so people don't miss the cool patterns I'm doing."
Electric guitarist: "I didn't buy my $2200 Les Paul Standard for nothing. The world needs to hear my awesome tone."
Acoustic guitarist: "Can I get the vintage Martin sound on this record? I did spend $2400 on this guitar."
Bass guitarist: "Don't make me sound muddy, especially on the part where I'm soloing"
Vocalist: "I hate my voice. Let's put double-tracking, delay and reverb on it."
Arta: "Where's my pick?"

A good wall-of-sound producer will ignore all of these comments. You cannot make everyone sound the way they want, if you expect to create the kind of depth required by the wall-of-sound.

Think of yourself as the conductor of an orchestra. You are in control of your musicians. If your musicians want to go and create their own records so that they would individually sound the way they want, they can do so. But right now they are working for the collective good, the wall-of-sound, and you are the organizer of this project.

I make these points because musicians who do not appreciate the wall-of-sound will certainly not appreciate having his or her instrument buried under layers of echo and reverb, and also because the most common kind of the wall-of-sound has multiple instruments playing the same melody to create a new, bigger sound. This is a trick employed by both Phil Spector and Brian Wilson to create the most monumental hits.

The more instruments you hear playing a melody, the more powerful the melody sounds. Having more instruments also creates more depth to the song, because following the rule in Part 5, you would have to move the instruments farther away from the listener in order to hear the lead singer.

Here are some examples of this technique:

Bass with piano: The Ronettes - "Sleigh Ride"
Lead vocals with oboe: The Beach Boys - "I'm Waiting For The Day"
Electric guitar with piano: The Beach Boys - "California Girls"
Glockenspiel with flute: The Beach Boys - "Sloop John B"
Piano and piano an octave up: The Ronettes - "Baby, I Love You"
Electric guitar and electric guitar an octave up: The Crystals - "Then He Kissed Me"

Remember, even if you have a room full of instruments, it is not wall-of-sound unless you apply the appropriate amount of echo and reverb to all the instruments, as described in Part 5. And remember, too, you don't always need to have a room full of instruments for the song to be wall-of-sound. Think about the sparse instrumentation on "Instant Karma." Or the opening bars of "Imagine," where the piano echoes are sufficient to create a deep sound.