JT: And we put a digital recording desk in the living room.
It's a fun and educational place that brings the "Bristol sessions" to life through displays that allowed me to add vocals in a recording booth and play with recording desk sliders to create a mix for a song.
The fact that I have a recording desk that was in Abbey Road and was used on those Beatles sessions is testament to the fact that it's still some of the best equipment ever made, in some of the best hands, with some of the best ears.
Equipment used for this session included 60 microphones, a pair of mixing consoles and a 16-track recording desk.
There are hidden animations to come across entering a room you might see an engineer busying themselves at a recording desk, or producer Giles Martin himself tinkering in a control room and a wealth of archive videos, photos, and information you can access by clicking on various icons.
The idea that Susan Rogers, who'd sat for countless hours by his side at Paisley Park's recording desks, "knew anything" about his music was, he said, risible.
"But once you get everything lined up in the way they made records before recording desks got big in the 70s, when there were less tracks, it's all very simple – less microphones and everybody has to play together with dynamics.
For example: the walls are made from soda bottles and vinyl records, our desks are all old doors, our floor is covered with scrap carpet pieces and the list goes on.
I used to wonder where case managers hung out, until one day in Santa Fe I opened the wrong door on the administrative hallway to a scene out of Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: rows upon rows of case managers diligently plowing through medical records at desks arranged with military precision.
Vinyl records serve as desk partitions; desks are old doors.
