Tom Dowd

If you have followed my blog then you know that music is a huge part of my inspiration. Primarily the music of the sixties and seventies. I believe that music had it's greatest advancements in creativity during this time.

Tom Dowd was a music engineer and producer that help change the way music is recorded. There is a great documentary running on IFC this month called Tom Dowd & The Language of Music. You get an inside look at the eveolution of the recording process and the motivation that it gave to the artist based on how Tom recorded and produced. It is set to run again on Feb 25 @5:10 pm, set your DVR. If you click on the title link you can hear a NPR interview with the director of the documentary.

Here is some info from Wikipedia on Tom Dowd.

Dowd took a job at a classical music recording studio until he obtained employment at Atlantic Records. He soon became a top recording engineer at Atlantic Records and recorded popular artists such as Ray Charles, The Drifters, The Coasters, Ruth Brown, and Bobby Darin (Dowd recorded the legendary "Mack the Knife") and capturing jazz masterpieces by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Thelonius Monk, and Charlie Parker by night. His first hit was Eileen Barton's "If I Knew You Were Comin' I'd a Baked A Cake". It was Dowd's idea to cut Ray Charles' recording of "What'd I Say" into two parts and release them as the "A" and "B" sides of one 45 rpm single record.
Dowd worked as an engineer and producer from the 1940s until the beginning of the 21st century. He recorded albums by many artists including: Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rod Stewart, Wishbone Ash, Cream, Chicago, The Allman Brothers Band, Joe Bonamassa, The J. Geils Band, Meat Loaf, Sonny & Cher, The Rascals, Willie Nelson, Diana Ross, Kenny Loggins, James Gang, Dusty Springfield, Eddie Harris, Booker T. and the MGs, The Drifters, Otis Redding, The Coasters, Bobby Darin, Aretha Franklin and Ruth Brown. [3] Dowd received a Grammy Trustees Award for his lifetime achievements in February 2002.
He died of emphysema on October 27, 2002 in Florida, where he had been living and working at Criteria Studios recording studio for many years.

Tom Dowd helped to shape the artists that he worked with, and because he worked with an array of great artists on some of the world's greatest recordings, Dowd was highly influential in creating the sound of the second half of the 20th Century. It was he who encouraged Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records to install an Ampex eight-track recorder, enabling Atlantic to be the first recording company to record using multiple tracks.[4]
Dowd is credited as the engineer who popularized the eight-track recording system for commercial music and popularized the use of stereo sound. Although stereo had been invented in the 1930s, Dowd was the first to use it on a record. He also invented the use of linear channel faders as opposed to rotary controls on audio mixers. He devised various methods for altering sound after the initial recording. [1]
In 2003 director Mark Moormann premiered an award-winning documentary about his life entitled Tom Dowd and the Language of Music. In the 2004 biopic Ray, Tom Dowd was portrayed by Rick Gomez.