40 Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas
(2013), within the producer-consultant. Callejo empathizes with the band
to the point of living the experience of recording the album with the same
enthusiasm as those four young people who were facing the adventure of
entering a recording studio for the first time. In this sense, she remembers:
We all got in my Seat 600: the four Brincos, the ‘electric monkey’,
who was really called Miguel Ángel but everyone knew him by this
nickname and was the technician Los Brincos had, a boy who was 16
or 17 years old and who helped with the cables (that’s why they called
him “the electric monkey”). As we did not have much money, we went
rst to the fast food restaurant Rodilla in Callao Square and there we
collected the money we had to buy some sandwiches and a soda and
pay the gas needed to go to RCA.
The album is developed, therefore, within an atmosphere of cordiality
and fraternity between “the musicians” on the one hand and “the person
responsible for the production of the record” on the other, taking into
account that, unlike the case of The Beatles and George Martin, musicians
and producer belonged to the same generation, and both had the same
inexperience in the recording studio. The fact that a woman faced the lead-
ership of a project of these characteristics in the Spanish society of the first
half of the 1960s is highly significant and unique in the music industry of
the time. There are very few examples of women who have been at the
forefront of relevant positions in the Spanish music industry: Myriam Von
Schrebler (mother of the music producer Carlos Narea) in RCA, Carmen
Grau in Zafiro within the record companies, and Rosa Lagarrige in man-
agement or Daniela Bosé in the world of publishing.
As regards the recording of the first album by Los Brincos in RCA
studios, Callejo comments: “We recorded in stereo, but the stereo was
composed of a track with bass, drums and guitars, and then we mixed
everything into a track and, therefore, there was again a free track for
voices and choirs”. Callejo objectively adapts to the profile of producer-
musician and producer-arranger who delegates the technical work to a
trusted engineer: “Although I’m very interested in what the recording is
in itself, I’ve always had my engineers”. The first album by Los Brincos
would be recorded under the technical supervision of José María Batlle
and in accordance with an organizational chart made by engineer, assis-
tant, and music producer.
4
The album by Los Brincos represents a unique
case in which a Spanish band has the opportunity to tackle a recording
that emulates the English sound but with original musical ideas, against
the usual tendency in which, as musical critics like Jesús Ordovás point
out, record companies demanded bands to make versions of The Beatles,
The Animals, or The Rolling Stones – this was the situation of bands like
Los Mustang, Lone Star, or Los Salvajes: “Under the pressure of their
companies, Spanish groups will only be able to record a song of their own
between cover and cover version” (Ordovás, 2010: 11).
In the case of Los Brincos, promoted by Fernando Arbex as part of an
artistic evolution that begins with the pioneering rock-and-roll band in
41 The Role of Women in Music Production in Spain
Madrid Los Estudiantes, the idea was to create a group in the image of
The Beatles.
5
From the perspective of musical production, the evolution of
Los Brincos over the course of their albums is very significant and worthy
of analysis: a first LP recorded in Madrid, a second LP recorded in Milan,
and the third and fourth LPs recorded in London. Unlike The Beatles,
whose company maintained an infrastructure that made the Abbey Road
studios available to the band, Los Brincos belonged to a company that did
not have its own recording studios and that forced – or perhaps we should
say, allowed – them to record in different studios inside and outside our
borders.
The selection was made not only based on the technical qualities of
the recording studio, but also by the audio engineer working in it: in
the case of Callejo’s productions, the change from Saar to Fonit Cetra
studios – where the first single by Fórmula V was produced – was deter-
mined because the engineer Plinio Chiesa, in whom Maryní trusted the
technical part of her recording productions, moved there. In any case, the
decision to record the second album at Saar studios in Milan responds to
the search for technical parameters that were not found in Spain:
In Milan, we went to record on 4 Telefunken tracks, and thus we could
put the battery and the bass on a track. Being able to independently
raise [the volume of] the battery and the bass seemed incredible to us.
On another track, we put the two guitars. The voices were in another
track and the soloists, in another.
The decision to produce the second album by Los Brincos in Italy was
therefore determined by what has been called the multitrack war and the
search for full-range frequency quality. The Radiotelevisión Española his-
torical archive possesses images of the recording of the first album by Los
Brincos in the old studios of RCA record company – which later would
become a property of Philips – in Madrid.
6
Manolo González, bassist in
Los Brincos, recalls in an interview his experience of working on this
recording with the sound engineer and with the music producer:
The studio hired by Zaro, which did not have its own studios, was
that of Fonogram, which belonged to Polydor [both labels were
business-related with Philips, which was the one who acquired the old
recording studios that belonged to RCA]. It was placed in Madrid, on
América Avenue, very close to CEA studios, in what was then called
Barajas Motorway. The engineer who had to record us was José María
Batlle, a nice guy as well as an excellent professional who, from the
very rst moment, took the job as if he were one of the group. The
production was carried out by Maryní Callejo. She could be consid-
ered as the fth Brinco, given her great enthusiasm and dedication to
the project.
7
The record companies that did not have their own recording studio, as in
the case of Zafiro, had to necessarily reach an agreement with other record
42 Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas
companies in order to make their recordings. The recording of the album
takes place, therefore, in the studio of another company, in a moment in
which professional studios belong, in general, to the record companies.
The recording made in RCA
8
studios, placed on América Avenue in
Madrid, takes place during a period of transition in which the studios of
this company are being acquired by the record department of the Philips
firm. The magazine Billboard documented on September 22, 1962, in an
article signed by the music journalist Raúl Matas, the signing of the agree-
ment in the following terms:
Philips Records has acquired the RCA studio and pressing facilities
here in a move to increase its importance in Spain. Negotiations have
been top secret, but it is believed the terms will say RCA will continue
to use the setup for the present, and Philips will take over the large
installation on Airport Highway, only a few miles from here, in the
near future. Philips has also completed negotiations with Siemens in
Germany and will handle Polydor, Coral and Brunswick and DGG
labels in Spain. Julio Sampedro will continue as general manager with
José María Quero and Ricardo F. de La Torre continuing as A&R ex-
ecs. Philips will also increase promotion and distribution of Mercury
and aliated labels, and its jazz titles acquired through the Interdisc
organization. These include such American jazz independents as Blue
Note, Riverside and Contemporary.
The acquisition of RCA studios by Philips determined the transfer of the
facilities and staff from Delicias Street to América Avenue in a clear com-
mitment of the company for the development of its record department.
Curiously, the studio in which the first project directed by Maryní Callejo
was recorded would end up being the administrative location of her future
productions, although the latter would be mostly made abroad.
Manolo González points out how the technology used in this studio
was far from what was used in other countries and that, in Spain, it
would take yet a few years to appear: “Abroad, you could already record
with sound qualities practically unknown in our country” (Ibid.). The
old RCA studio – in a stage of transition in which it had already been
acquired by Philips – had Philips two-track recorders, so the instrumen-
tal base had to be recorded live through “an extensive set of microphones
dedicated to each and every instrument” (Ibid.). In the images that fol-
low, we can appreciate two different stages of the recording process. The
first shows the recording of the musical backing made by drums, electric
bass, and two electric guitars; and in the second, we can see the record-
ing of the voices.
The recording, at this stage, is technically carried out live with all
the instruments within the same room, which is acoustically conditioned
with a large curtain designed to absorb the reflections of the room. The
microphonic pickup is made through a set of condenser microphones
intended for the recording of the four sound sources: a large diaphragm
condenser microphone at the top for the overheads, two for each guitar
43 The Role of Women in Music Production in Spain
amplifier, and another for the bass amplifier. An analysis of these images
allows us to determine that all of the microphones share the same char-
acteristics (identical transduction method and diaphragm, etc.), without
taking into account the characteristics of the sound source, something
that indicates that there was no real sense of the production beyond try-
ing to make the recording as faithful as possible to the sound of the
instruments of the band.
The microphone technique used is based on distant miking, possibly
following the instructions that the recording studio gave to the engineers
in order to guarantee the durability of the technical gear. Although the
“emulation” they tried to do of the sound of The Beatles was an approach
to the “color” of their recordings, the recording studio itself was a limita-
tion in terms of technical means. The separate location of the components
of The Beatles in Studio 2 at Abbey Road or the use of panels between
instruments – mainly for the drums – minimized the effect called “spill-
age” or “leakage”, that is, the unwanted sound that inevitably reaches a
microphone from a different source to the one that it is intended to capture,
for example, the sound of the snare or the cymbals that leaks through the
microphone of the bass drum. Although the “spillage” or “leakage” among
the different elements of the drum set is something inevitable even in the
current musical recording, the setting of the microphones in the recording
room in the case of Los Brincos contributes to this phenomenon on the rest
of the instruments as well as the drum set.
Figure 3.1 Microphone Setting and Disposition of the Musicians in the Recording
Room
Source: RTVE Archive.
44 Marco Antonio Juan de Dios Cuartas
In a second sequence of the images taken from the archive in Radiotele-
visión Española, which documents the recording of the song I Can’t Make
It, we can appreciate how the voices were recorded in a second phase,
monitoring the musical base through headphones, in what is one of the
first instances in Spain of the overdubbing technique.
In this image, we can appreciate a closer microphonic pickup of the
voices (“close miking”) through some condenser microphones that seem
to be used in a standard way in both instruments and voices and the absence
of a “pop filter”.
9
Another significant fact is the setting of the microphone
with the capsule pointing upwards in the case of the main voices of Juan
and Junior, and the capsule pointing downwards in the case of the voices
of Fernando and Manolo, in a search for different tone colors in the cap-
ture and with a different position “off-axis” of the microphone in both
cases. This fact leads us to think that there actually was an awareness of
microphone techniques and their repercussions for the final sound of the
production, starting from the premise that the mixing process begins to be
“visualized” at the moment of placing the first microphone.
The recording of the first album by Los Brincos was made using almost
exclusively Neumann U47 and U67 condenser microphones, a method of
acoustic-electric transduction that implies certain precautions when plac-
ing the microphones – these do not generally support the same level of
sound pressure (SPL) as other transduction methods such as “moving coil”
microphones – conditioning their distance from the source. The original
U47 – actually distributed by Telefunken
10
– appears in 1948. It is the first
interchangeable polar pattern condenser microphone; that is, it allowed
capturing the sound from different angles, allowing a more or less direc-
tional and even omnidirectional recording of the source, which would
entail the capture of a greater number of room reflections. The omnidi-
rectional polar pattern could be interesting in order to add a natural reverb
that would glue all the elements in the mix, taking into account that the
possibilities of applying mechanical methods of reverberation through
plates or springs were really limited and reduced to their application to the
main voice and/or choirs. The U47 is a tube microphone that incorporates
a VF-14 amplifier and that provides a characteristic color to the recording.
The U47 only allowed the use of cardioid (directional) or omnidirectional
patterns, which justifies the use of a U67 for the capture of the voices. The
U67 already included substantial improvements compared to its prede-
cessors by incorporating a high pass filter
11
that reduced the “proximity
effect” when doing “close miking”, or a greater versatility when selecting
polar patterns. The use of a bidirectional pattern – also known as “fig-
ure 8” – allowed the simultaneous recording of two opposing voices while
cancelling the lateral leakage of the other two that, located in the same
room, were recorded simultaneously using another condenser microphone
with the same polar pattern (as can be seen in Figure 3.2).
The voices were recorded in a smaller room, taking into account that in
this case the reverb would be applied by artificial means and not acousti-
cally, achieving a greater presence and definition in the mix. In contrast, the
distant miking technique can be appreciated when listening to the sound
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