have guys play alternate notes in the chords, so we would flesh out 6/9 or a 7/11 in the chord or a raised 9th. You have to not only voice switch to fatten the chord, but you have to add alternate voicings on overdubs. And that’s how it sounds like 40 horns, instead of three. It created this wall of sound.” “Pankow is so talented at arranging,” Lamm says of his bandmate. “He was very good at the unique voicings, to make the most of three horns. And that, combined with how Jimmy Guercio recorded them, it created our signature horn sound. He really made them sound distinctive and unique, and nothing like it had been done before.” The same method was used by Guercio when tracking background vocals, which he did upon the band’s return to L.A. on August 19-20. On “25 or 6 to 4,” the trio recorded an A pass, then tracked a B mixed live with A, and the same for the C pass, again EQd differently to give each pass its own tone and voice. But, in this case, the original A pass was kept and included in the mix, as well, placed in the center, providing a total of 15 voices. “With the way it’s tracked,” says Tim Jessup, “you’ve got six voices on one side, three in the center and another six on the other side.” MIXING The album was still far from complete. Once Kath’s vocal was added, the tapes were brought to Puluse at the CBS 42nd Street studio in New York. Mixing typically took place in one of the 10 editing rooms on the fourth floor, as was the case with Chicago. By this time, Puluse could mix his own recordings, though that was not the case when he started at the studio. “A few years earlier, the engineer in the studio would do the recording, and then it went up to the fourth floor to a mixing engineer,” he explains. “But when rock and roll came in, the groups and producers were not going to work in the studio with one person, with complicated tracks, and then have it go up to a room and be mixed with somebody else. It changed the whole culture there, really.” Each mix room had 16-track Ampex and 3M tape machines, mixing to Ampex 350 2-track ¼-inch. “Every channel in those rooms had EQP Pultec limiters and a Kepex noise gate. And there were selectable Universal Audio 1176s and LA2As and 3As,” Puluse recalls. “So we had choices. There was nothing in the signal path that couldn’t be changed.” For reverb, you turned to one place. “There
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“Robert created a rock and roll anthem with that song. Every beginning guitar player plays that riff. And who would have thought it would have started with a guy sitting on the floor with a half-strung 12-string guitar, looking out the window and writing down how he felt at 4 in the morning ‘cause he’s shot from playing a gig. It’s a masterpiece.” —James Pankow was one room, on the third floor, and it was like a morgue of EMT plate reverbs, 40 or so of them in this one room,” Puluse says. “You’d go downstairs and select which one you wanted to use via the patchbay— if it wasn’t being used by somebody else—and you could adjust that EMT.” Spring reverbs and other options were also available, but Puluse tended to stick with the plates. “I would always experiment with the ‘chambers,’” as he typically refers to the plates. “You could pre-delay them and you could postdelay them. You could change the time, and you could noise gate the end, if you wanted to. But I very seldom used noise gates for anything but a correction. I didn’t use it for effects on Chicago.” Mixing was performed on one of CBS’s custom consoles, built by chief engineer Eric Porterfield for each mix room. “They had Penny and Giles faders, as well as rotary pots, and there were two sets, one above the other,” Puluse says. “We had a lot of speakers, and a lot of problems
with speakers at that time. For consistency, we had chosen Voice of The Theater A7s, which was a very unusual choice. The ‘new’ version, with the decorator box, not the exposed box. Before that we had 604s, the ‘Big Reds.’ And we always had little Auratones, so that we could just check the mix, to see how it would sound on a smaller system.” Puluse would always be sure to create a rough mix following a recording session, to have available during mixing. “When you do a rough mix, it’s very organic. And then you go into a room—even in the same studio—and you start spending time perfecting things, and you really lose that original feel. So it’s always important to keep the rough as a reference. “Jimmy [Guercio] really wanted a very tight, present sound,” he continues. “Those recordings were really pretty dry. We tried to get the tightness, to make [the horns] very present. That’s why everything was pretty close-miked. I wasn’t going for a big room sound on these things.” Kath’s guitars were given analog delays, again, via the EMT plates. “Sometimes, I would actually take the echo and reverb the echo. But very subtly. We weren’t adding a lot of effects to this music. We were making it sound like the room.” For vocals, Puluse would limit his use of compression. “I try to learn the music and handgain things. Background vocals, I probably used an 1176. But for lead vocals, I would only a little. I would try not to use it as a crutch.” Following mixing, the album was mastered by one of several mastering engineers up on the fifth floor (Puluse points to two of note, Jack Ashkenazi and Vlado Meller). The album was released shortly thereafter, on January 26, 1970, with “25 or 6 to 4” issued as a single in June (backed with “Where Do We Go From Here”), appearing as a carefully cut single edit, paring the song down from 4:50 to 2:52 (which Puluse recalls doing himself) by eliminating the second verse and chorus and two-thirds of Kath’s solo. It reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. “Robert created a rock and roll anthem with that song,” says James Pankow. “Every beginning guitar player plays that riff. And who would have thought it would have started with a guy sitting on the floor with a half-strung 12-string guitar, looking out the window and writing down how he felt at 4 in the morning ‘cause he’s shot from playing a gig. It’s a masterpiece. These songs are timeless.” n