Bob Marley and his sound engineers recording techniques

Bob Marley Exodus album was released in 1977 and the engineers behind the scene were Karl Pitterson , Guy Bidmead and Ferry Barham .The label which released exodus album was Island ILPS 19498 the record format was 12” vinyl and was released in Italy.

The recording techniques used are: two takes for the vocals with different microphones , the great thing about those two takes are that the sound engineers switch between the two recordings thru the track for a grater sound quality some pieces of recording might be clipped somewhere and that is why they switch between them and for instance a microphone can catch higher frequencies and the other no.The main rule of Bob’s recording is never mix down too much because of the quality loss , the guitar is always overdubbed and it follows the keys and vocals he also prefers more lead vocal .For some reverberant sound they use an EMT Echo plate , spring reverb maybe some Urei Compression a little bit of delay and ADT for backing vocals. When the “Exodus” album was recorded the equipment was very limited , when Bob was recording he liked to play different types of distortion thru amps , the sound engineers achieved a great guitar fuzz out of the Helios desk by overdriving the line. Because of the lack of multi track Bob Marley’s sound engineers recorded the drum kit by putting 2 microphones one for the kick drum and one for the rest of the drum kit great sense of solid sounds.Bob used in 1977 a Newmann U87 microphone which ran into a Helios console and then an 1176 compressor.

Terry Barham

Karl Pitterson