From the magazine March 2010: Legendary recording studios are closing every week. Abbey Road, the most famous of all, may be next. They're victims of recession, technology and Pro Tools, a piece of software that is changing our idea of what makes a great record. David Hepworth asks, is this the end of the road for the studio system?

Record buyers fall into two groups. There are those whose pleasure begins and ends with listening to the record. Then there are those who need to build up a picture of how the record was made. They want to know who wrote the songs, played on the tracks, produced the record and where it was recorded. This last detail is probably of least significance to the casual listener, who might reasonably assume that caring about the actual place where a track was recorded is as odd as caring about where a best-selling author was sitting when he typed his novel. To the serious record fiend, however, it is key information because legendary recording studios - and all studios that remain open for more than a couple of years qualify for that description - are sacred ground. The musicians making the record sometimes share that romantic view. Why would we have Abbey Road, 3164 Jackson Highway, The Trinity Session or Upstairs At Eric's if the musicians didn't believe that a record should be of special events occurring in a certain place at a certain time?

Over the years I have been lucky enough to visit a number of the recording studios whose names evoke visions. There are no surroundings so mundane that they cannot swell the heart of someone who first read their names on a long-loved record jacket, nor leave the rest of humanity colder. If you don't know that Dave Edmunds recorded his version of The Promised Land in the potato storage loft, then Rockfield is just another farm in Monmouthshire. Commuters hurrying by the rehearsal rooms of the English National Opera (above left) near West Hampstead tube station remain unaware that this is where Eric Clapton and John Mayall cut Bluesbreakers. The movie theatre at McLemore Avenue in Memphis is just another derelict property awaiting the wrecking ball if you don't know that here Sam and Dave and Isaac Hayes made the records that set the world on its ear. Ever since 1969, when the Beatles decided they couldn't be bothered to go to India to shoot the cover picture for the album they proposed to call Everest and instead settled for Abbey Road, even unbelievers have been aware that studios had a claim to specialness. But if they failed to note them in the past, they won't in the future. This is because at the rate the great recording studios are closing, there will be scarcely any left by the end of this decade.

The original Muscle Shoals studio in Sheffield, Alabama, where the Rolling Stones made their pilgrimage (left) to record Wild Horses, is now a museum. The Hit Factory in New York, where Bruce Springsteen made Born In The USA and Stevie Wonder Songs In The Key of Life, closed in 2005. The Record Plant on the water's edge at Sausalito where Fleetwood Mac did the vocals for Rumours, was repossessed by its financiers in 2008. Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, home of Gamble and Huff, was sold in 2003. The big studio two in Hansa in Berlin, where David Bowie recorded Heroes in 1976, has reverted to being a ballroom. The ones that started as stately homes have returned to their traditional use. The Manor in Shipton On Cherwell in Oxfordshire, where the young Mike Oldfield used down-time to record Tubular Bells and XTC cut most of their best albums, is now the country seat of the Marquess Of Headfort. Headley Grange, the former poorhouse in Hampshire where Robert Plant knocked out the lyrics of Stairway To Heaven in a single day, is a private home once more.

The places whose heritages have commercial potential are taking that to the bank. Paying customers can take tours around the former Memphis Recording Service facility on Union Avenue. In the same city they've hurriedly rebuilt the old Stax studios as a museum. But most recording facilities were too functional to be able to cash in on their past. The studios owned by the major companies have dropped away. The huge West End recording centre owned by CBS has shuttered. The studio near Marble Arch where Dusty Springfield and Scott Walker staged their orchestral dramas for the Philips label was snapped up by Paul Weller who thought he saw a commercial opportunity, briefly renaming them Solid Bond Studios before departing a sadder and poorer man. David Holley, formerly the head of EMI's recording facilities, recently oversaw the closure of the Town House, the Virgin-built hit factory in West London where Phil Collins' drum sound on In The Air Tonight, recorded in the studio's distinctive "stone room", had so many imitators. He repeats the old line. "You want how to make a million in the studio business? Start with two million."

This retrenchment is not the familiar story of lack of vision on the corporate floor. The great independents have disappeared at the same rate. Olympic Studios in Barnes, which was where the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and many others made their best records, went in 2009. Soho's Trident (left), where David Bowie worked with Ken Scott and Rick Wakeman was the keyboard specialist, has moved into other forms of audio. Ramport Studios, the Who-owned studio in the shadow of Battersea Power Station which was both inspiration for and venue for Quadrophenia, is now a doctor's surgery. Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, which opened its doors to Queen in 1975 and closed them on Jamie Cullum in 2002, is available for your wedding reception. Yet the ghosts of all that music refuse to depart entirely. Wessex Studios, a converted church in Highbury, where the Sex Pistols made Pretty Vacant, is now a residential development. It's called "The Recording Studio", a name that may prove to be as quaint to future generations as "The Forge" or "The Buttery" do to us.

All these studios have been hustled towards the door of history by a combination of technology, economic recession and the consequences of a flattening world. At the centre of this momentous change is the question not just of how a record is made, which is quite interesting, but what a record is, which seems more important.

We have a mental picture of how a record is made, burnished by a thousand biopics. Young artist finally gets a chance to make a record, going to a large room where there are a number of experienced musicians. This is separated from another smaller room by a glass panel behind which sit the producer and engineer. The tyro stumbles through a few tunes without impressing anyone very much. At this stage the producer tells everyone to take five and then, placing an avuncular arm round the young musician, suggests that he should just relax and be more himself. Encouraged by this advice the musician loosens up and truly hits his straps with the next tune. The drummer suddenly perks up and looks impressed. In the control room the producer and engineer look at each other and smile because now they feel that they "have something". This scene is played out in the movie of Ray! and remains clear even when it's dubbed into Italian.

That something was a performance. From the invention of recording up until the early ’70s it was assumed that at the centre of everything had to be the best performance you could muster. In the beginning those performances took place in hotel rooms. The people doing the recording had to go to where the artists were. Hotel rooms were the only facilities they could hire at short notice. Fred Gaisberg, the first talent spotter of the company that became known as EMI, doorstepped Enrico Caruso in Milan in 1902 and offered him £100 to come up to his room and lay down a bunch of his tunes. Robert Johnson was captured by the same technique in San Antonio's Gunther Hotel in 1936. Even in the ’50s Ray Charles was recording some of his classic sides in the studios of radio stations of cities that happened to be on his never-ending tour.

When EMI opened their Abbey Road studios in 1931 their template was the film industry in Hollywood. They intended to own the means of production and to centralise it in one place. The studio had three rooms. One, big enough to accommodate a full symphony orchestra, was opened by Sir Edward Elgar. As he climbed the steps to the conductor's podium the players, many decked out in wing collars, applauded him. "Try to play this as if you've never heard it before," he said, before launching directing into Land Of Hope and Glory. The second studio, which the Beatles later made famous, was big enough for a dance band. The third was for soloists. EMI subsequently started local versions of Abbey Road all over the world, leveraging the quality of their house-trained engineers, knowledge of studio design and record manufacture like a colonial multi-national. Paul McCartney, in search of a break from his normal routine in 1973, wound up recording Band On The Run in the company's studio in Lagos.

When they acquired Capitol in 1955 EMI discovered that the Americans were ahead of them when it came to recording pop. Wondering why the West Coast recordings of Sinatra and Andy Williams sounded so much easier and more polished than their own starchy efforts they sent engineers on a fact-finding mission to identify the piece of technology that made the difference and, if possible, bring it back to St John's Wood. They were finally forced to conclude that it wasn't technology that made the difference. It was the quality of the musicians. These players, whether the road-hardened jazzmen who worked with Sinatra in the ’50s or the open-necked generation who became known as the Wrecking Crew for their work on the pop masterpieces of the ’60s and ’70s, had unprecedented skill and an instinctive ability to adapt to new idioms.

In an effort to get the best possible performances on tape the early studios set them up like live appearances. When Frank Sinatra recorded One For My Baby in the Capitol studios in June 1958 the A&R man encouraged as many company employees as possible to come downstairs to witness it. When he did the definitive take there were seventy spectators in the room and Sinatra was lit by a single spotlight, just as he would be in a club. It's difficult to believe that even today's most self-confident contemporary performer would volunteer to record in front of a room of typists and janitors. In that era producers set the bar high, believing that the performers would rise to the challenge, like athletes in the midst of a contest finding an extra yard they would never have discovered in training.

Neil Brockbank (left) still records in the same way, which makes him unique among today's producers. I went to see him in his tiny studio in Camden Town. This is named Gold Top in honour of Hollywood's Gold Star, former home of Spector and Brian Wilson, and the fact that it was once a dairy. Working with artists like Nick Lowe and Geraint Watkins, Brockbank follows the old way of doing things. A recording in his view should be a performance. To illustrate he reaches for a CD of Roy Orbison's It's Over and plays it through the studios huge, warm speakers. This was recorded, he explains, in 1963 at RCA Studio B in Nashville. He describes the scene. On one side of the glass was Orbison with his guitar. Alongside him was a backing band of studio musicians. For this tune, dramatic even by Orbison standards, there was a string section. On top of that you had the backing singers, the Jordanaires. All of them would have been rehearsing the number for an hour. Now it was time for a take. To make that work required the undivided attention of twenty-five hardened professionals.

Orbison strums a chord and then sings, as if to himself, "your baby doesn't love you any more". Then the gentle drum tattoo begins; it will continue throughout the tune. The song builds inexorably to a climax, drops back and starts again, finally finishing on a note of terror as abrupt as a sudden blackout in the theatre. Listening to it is a tense experience. Playing it must have been nigh-unbearable. The concentration needed by the musicians would be more than matched by the engineer who would have to balance the sound as the musicians were playing. He wasn't dealing with a number of different elements he could mix together later on. There might be four tracks: one for vocal, one for band, one for strings and another for backing vocals. He was riding the faders to effectively make the record while it was being played. Sex Pistols engineer Bill Price points out that these faders were raised up so that the engineer could operate them standing up. There was nothing relaxing about the process. There's a famous picture of Bob Dylan, his producer, manager and musicians listening to a playback of Like A Rolling Stone in the CBS studios in New York in 1965. What they're hearing is pretty much the finished record.

While Orbison was making this record in Nashville, four thousand miles to the east a bunch of no less road-hardened but less formal personalities were showing what could be done when the strict division between producer and musician was broken down. The Beatles made virtues out of mistakes, turning the feedback at the start of I Feel Fine into a hook, exploring the catchiness of a composed on-the-spot doggerel like She's A Woman and, in defiance of all precedent, starting Eight Days A Week with a fade-in. EMI's traditional engineers didn't always relish working with the Beatles because the sessions went on far beyond the normal three-hour limit and the clients refused to confine their creativity to the studio floor. Once they ceased touring Abbey Road became The Beatles' arts lab as well as the place where their factory. Between them and George Martin they changed the relationship between band and studio and producer for ever.

The next band to effectively take up residence in an Abbey Road studio, Pink Floyd, had to deal with technology that was as unwieldy as it seemed pregnant with possibilities. Early synthesizers, an ever-expanding number of tracks and the new possibilities offered by so-called "outboard" technology seemed to conspire to make Dark Side Of The Moon as descriptive of the obsessive behaviour engendered by too long spent in a darkened room as it did about its declared subject, mental illness. At the same time there was a groping towards music that was all about atmosphere. Clare Torry, the vocalist who supplies the scat singing on the album's climactic track Great Gig In The Sky, recently recalled the Sunday evening session when she recorded her contribution. She had never met the band before that evening, in the course of the session nobody told her what to sing or gave her any guidance at all - except they didn't want her to use the familiar "oh baby baby" formulations - the track had no name and she departed assuming, after two takes, that it had been a failed experiment. This vagueness is worlds away from Orbison's crisp discipline. The desk on which Dark Side Of The Moon was made is still kept in Studio three at Abbey Road. It sits in the corner like all Abbey Road's other talismans. Next to the massive gleaming digital flight decks of the modern studio it looks like a Lancaster parked next to a stealth bomber.

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When Trevor Horn met ABC in 1982, he recalls, "they were a capable band. They could play. But I said to them 'how good do you want this to sound?' and they said 'as good as it can'. So I said 'I can programme the rhythm section and then after that it will be like painting by numbers.'"

The rhythm section had always been the most problematic bit of making records, the bit least amenable to being "fixed in the mix". George Martin recognised this when he insisted that a session player be on hand to play the drums parts on the Beatles' first sessions. The drummer was always the first member of the band to be replaced when they were signed by a record company. The Clash got rid of Terry Chimes. Oasis dispensed with Tony McCarroll in 1995 because, according to Noel Gallagher, he "wouldn't have been up to our songs". Reliance on the drummer is even stronger in bands that appear to be playing quite elementary music. Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett recently concluded "there are probably about 10 people in indie rock who know how to play the drums."

Neil Brockbank describes the standard way of making a pop record from the ’80s onwards. "I worked on records by Curiosity Killed The Cat, for instance. We're talking about a band who've been signed by the label because they look great and their gigs have got 300 people at them. That method is still current today. You get everybody together live but you're only looking for the drums. The producer wants to hear something like the whole record. Then he'll replace all the elements one by one. First the bass, then the guitar, then the keyboard, then the vocal. That works with young bands where they're not fantastic players."

Producers who remember the days when records were played rather than assembled are candid about what they see as a decline in standards. Eddie Kramer, who engineered Jimi Hendrix's records, told me "if you want to make a record like they did in the early ’70s first of all you've got to be really really really good players, in a way that nobody is any more." Joe Boyd, who produced Nick Drake and Fairport Convention at the end of the 60s, says he stopped producing when he could no longer get the band to perform a song and then comment upon that performance. Brockbank goes further.

"The role of the musician has been usurped over the years by the engineers and producers. They take the responsibility. They say, I can sort it out later. We'll edit it together. We'll loop it. I don't even know why you're here. I can probably make a record on my own. Essentially, technology has put the control firmly in the hands of the technocrats. Going back to the Roy Orbison record the arrangers and producers had to do a lot of work laying the ground but once it was in the hands of the musicians they were like football managers. Once they're in the dug-out there's not much they can do about it. The engineers and producers are not the facilitators any more. They're taking performances and correcting them to the point that they're not recognisable any more. You don't have to sing in tune or play in time any more. I think that's piss poor, personally."

But surely the average musician is better nowadays? It certainly seems that way when they're playing live.

"Anything sounds good loud. Live is very different. To do that in the studio is a massive step up. It's another world. There's a social pressure. You don't want to make a mistake because everybody else in the room is relying on you not to. if you make a blunder playing live, it's gone. Whereas in a recording if you make a blunder that could have ruined what might have been a Grammy-winning performance, which might not come back again. Must musicians haven't got the patience and the touch that it takes to play live in the studio."

Brockbank plays in a hobby band with Word editor Mark Ellen, who recalls the experience of recording in the Brockbank way: "We played in a circle - the saxes and trumpet, the drums, the guitar amps, all of us through microphones. And we had one atmosphere mike to get the full acoustic of the room. He made us play this three-minute tune seven times in a row with a two-minute break between each take. It's impossible to convey, even at this pitifully amateur level, just how thrilling this was. You realise how routinely perfect those session musicians must have been that they could be note-perfect every time; nothing can be changed if you hit a bum note as your sound spills across several mikes. So what you get is twofold - 1) the magical dynamic of instruments actually playing off each other, which you clearly can't achieve if each is being layered in separately; and 2) a fantastic feeling of mutual support, all willing each other to get it right. To have played on those old '60s hits must have felt like being on the side that won the FA Cup - truly, a team effort."

Neil Brockbank is aware that he is like the master brewer in the era of gassy lager. Who else records like this today?

"Nick Lowe. And Bob Dylan. Nobody else."

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Financial necessity being the mother of invention, the really significant breakthroughs in record-making came not from the experimental wing of avant-garde rock but from the relatively rough and ready world of chart hit making. The Bee Gees were recording Stayin' Alive at Le Chateau in 1977 when their drummer had to attend a funeral. In desperate need of a recording to play Hollywood producers they decided to take a snippet of the drum part from the already recorded Night Fever and loop it to form a rhythm track for the new tune. Thus Stayin Alive became the first hit record with an automated rhythm track. The same snippet was used on further hits for the Bee Gees and Barbra Streisand, anticipating the era of hip hop when old records would be routinely cannibalised for spares out of which new ones could be made.

The same effect that the Bee Gees had painstakingly achieved with a piece of tape and a razor blade would soon be available, along with thousands of others, at the push of a button. As the record business boomed in the early ’80s the new independent studios vied with each other to offer the latest desks and the most advanced outboard enhancements. One of these was the EMU Emulator which allowed musicians to sample any musical sound and then use it as the sound source for a note on a keyboard. Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks started off preparing sounds for the Emulator but soon decided that they could combine the previously separate functions of recording, sound-making, editing, mixing and effects into one computer program that would eventually put the studios out of business. This was Pro Tools.

In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner recounts how Ricky Martin's 1999 hit Living La Vida Loca was the first major hit to be produced entirely "in the box", as the Pro Tools environment came to be known. An engineer described the new control that it gave the producer over not only the instrumental sounds (all the musical tracks were layered on top of the original beat box demo which had been saved in Pro Tools) but also the vocals (within Pro Tools Desmond Child could move syllables in the delivery ever so slightly to place the emphasis where he felt it would be most effective). This ushered in a new era of exactness in pop record-making, much as it did in film editing and page design. But as in those two areas, that precision didn't meet with everyone's approval. The late Ian Macdonald, in his Revolution In The Head, might have been expected to say "its once flexible human rhythms replaced by the mass production regularity of the drum-machine....pop is now little more than a soundtrack for physical jerks" but more surprising is Peter Gotcher saying "to me it's all the idiosyncratic qualities and faults in a human performance that makes music interesting...Pro Tools is being used to manufacture a product that I personally am not that enamoured of. But really it is just a tool, and there are plenty of ways to make bad records on tape machines."

What this doesn't take into account is the sheer amount of music that is now not only being made but being recorded and, to use a computer term, saved. Pro Tools quickly moved from being a luxury only available at high-end studios to a piece of home software which would cost the average act about as much as a new bass and would be significantly more use to them in advancing their careers. Bands used to spend their advances on studio time and a producer. Now they can take their much reduced advance and spend a few hundred pounds of it on a version of Pro Tools and record, or at least start to record, their own album. This is what Goldheart Assembly, a young band from London, did recently on signing with Fierce Panda. Using an industrial steam museum which the drummer's father happens to run in Norfolk, they started recording. Leader Jake Bowser oversaw the recording but, he admits, it isn't easy to keep a sense of perspective in that capacity. They were grateful when somebody suggested bringing in Laurie Latham, an experienced producer, to ready the record for release.

Latham learned his trade observing the techniques of Gus Dudgeon as he produced Captain Fantastic & the Brown Dirt Cowboy with Elton John, worked at Manfred Mann's studio in the Old Kent Road on his big hit Blinded By The Light in the mid-’70s and produced Ian Dury's New Boots & Panties and Paul Young's huge hit No Parlez among many others. He has the mild manners which serve producers well during their long stints in uncomfortable circumstances. Latham and the band are in Helicon Mountain studios, a facility owned by Jools Holland in suburban south London. Across the wall of the studio is painted the motto "the greatest of mortals have passed through these portals". The band were initially booked into here for a couple of weeks but have now been told they can stay until Christmas. This suits them, particularly those members who have horrible flats to go back to. At the end of this day's recording some members of the band leave while others show no sign of wanting to quit the womb-like warmth of the studio to risk the cold and confusion outside. "That's why bands love residential studios," says Latham. "Half the time they're homeless or starving. In these places in the past they'd have a chef or a hippy chick to do something with lentils and somebody else to do their washing. They'd love it."

Latham, who remembers the days when a recording budget might be £200,000, reckons these days it's more likely to be £20,000. "Budgets don't really exist nowadays. You have to try and do deals all the time now. It's so tough. I've got speculative fatigue. I keep getting asked, can you do this on a speculative basis? We'll put you on points. A point of what? With producers nowadays it's quite common that if you're going to work in a speculative way to have a bit of the publishing."

David Holley watched recording budgets go up in the ’80s and ’90s but saw less of that money coming through to the studios: "The recording budgets went up but studio spend went down. Producers rates climbed and the producer would then hand over to a mix engineer. That's the real extra slice. Studios had become effectively commoditised. You'd reached a point where there wasn't much difference between your technology and anybody else's. It's easier to beat the studios down on price than it is to get Spike Stent to charge less if you want him to mix your record. Bands go 'I want Spike Stent' and he says 'that's my rate'. The mixers are the people who pump the sound up and get your record on the radio after all."

Getting an experienced producer in to effectively post-produce a record which has been done in a version of somebody's bedroom is a little like asking David Lean in to top and tail your holiday videos. Although the equipment available to the home recorder is improving all the time - the latest kit is the Reflexion Filter which sits behind your mike and makes your hotel room sound as dry as the 70s room in Konk Studios - there are things a producer or engineer knows about the placement of microphones and the properties of a room that no band will stumble across by accident. The great producers of the past were often scientists first - Tom Dowd, who recorded Aretha Franklin and Derek and The Dominoes, learned his trade on the Manhattan Project. The hot ones now are the ones with a commercial ear. They work in close collaboration with their paymasters at the label. Laurie Latham saw this coming twenty years ago. "SSL was the first desk to offer Total Recall," says Latham. "That meant you could do a mix and the computer would remember it. Record companies love that. They're desperate to enter the creative chain as soon as they can. They traditionally did that when you presented them with the finished mix. With Total Recall they know they can ask 'is there a mix with the vocals a bit higher?' They know that you had one mix like that in search of the one you decided on and they know it's in the computer."

Neil Brockbank explains that in his way of working, once he's captured a satisfying performance, the job is 80% done and he'd be happy to release the rough recording. This is the mathematical opposite of the way most things are done nowadays. Says David Holley: "The art of recording is dead. Because it's not about recording, it's about manipulation. You're effectively putting your sounds into this box and then you're starting the game. Before it was getting wonderful players in a room so they can play and then getting a microphone system set up so that you could capture the ambience of that sound in the most conducive way. That required huge musical knowledge and huge technical knowledge and a creative bridge that sat across the two of them." It's interesting in the light of that that Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien, the producer/engineer team on the three Michael Jackson albums that redefined popularity and pioneered the most compelling sounds, were both born just as Hitler came to power and cut their teeth recording Sarah Vaughan. In Vaughan's day the best record was the best take. Today all recordings are provisional versions. One of the first records done in this mode was the 1982 hit by Rockers Revenge, a record that spawned so many versions that, when asked what he did for a living, producer Arthur Baker said "I remix a record called Walking On Sunshine."

While researching and writing this feature I listened to music with new ears. Listening to rock records from the ’70s I was struck by the rounded rumble of Paul Thompson's drums on Roxy Music's Love Is The Drugand the sense of differing planes in Robert Palmer's Get Outside. Most of all I was struck once again by Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side, the record my local hi-fi store still use to demonstrate new equipment on. Recorded at Trident in St Anne's Court in Soho in 1973 and utterly dependent for its commercial appeal on the contribution of session bass player Herbie Flowers and three session singers, few records can equal its drama or its sense of being captured at a particular place and time. This contrasts with the later period of all these men's careers when every snare sound was the twin of the one before, the sound patina seemed to be flooded with artificial colourant and everything seemed to be dependably commercial rather than commendably strange.

Then I hit the "genius" switch in iTunes and the program compiled a list of music that it felt would go with a song by Neko Case. It reeled out M. Ward, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, the Decemberists, Wilko, Rilo Kiley and others. All contemporary American bands, of course, but also, I suspect, more homogenous in sound and in emotional pitch than if you'd done the same exercise in, say, 1979. Even the artists who've prospered with albums made in their bedrooms, people like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, are aware that Pro Tools can make things sound cold and flat. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver admitted "sometimes music just doesn't breathe when you're in front of a computer screen" and confessed it took a lot of work from the mastering engineer to "wrestle the treble to the ground".

Tom Whitwell, who's blogged extensively about music and technology at Musicthing, and wrote in these pages about "the loudness wars" says "cheap Chinese music gear and powerful computers mean anyone can record 128 tracks of pristine digital audio at home. In the case of singer songwriters, they do it alone, overdubbing one track at a time, editing and looping as they go. Thirty years ago, Mike Oldfield did that and it was considered a strange novelty – nobody was surprised how weird and soulless his record was. Everyone else got musicians together in a room, practised and practised until they were good enough to record. So it's a very different experience, in terms of creating and writing music. You might play a riff literally once in a jam, loop it across a track, then come back months later to learn how to play it live."

One of the great ironies of "in the box" recording is that it has created a big market for "plug-ins" designed to make your recording sound authentic and old. A great deal of these are signature collections from the same legendary producers who were put out of work by the new technology. You can buy The Ken Scott Collection which offers, among other things, "Seven Advanced Expressive Drum Kits in the style of artists such as David Bowie, Supertramp, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Dixie Dregs, Missing Persons, Elton John and The Beatles." Waves offer the Eddie Kramer Collection which includes, among its effects, "H-Slap, which emulates tape at 15 inches per second." All these plug-ins have on-screen interfaces that painstakingly reproduce the bakelite dials and ripped mesh of the thing that is no longer there. If you look on the web you can watch Woody Woodmansey going into the studio to record his drum sounds so that Pro Tools users can call up his fills any time they want to plug a gap with a distantly familiar effect. There is even a Virtual Room Emulator which allegedly allows you to "design" the notional room in which your recording was made. There is talk of engineers going into legendary recording studios one step ahead of the removal men to simply record the ambience, probably in the hope of capturing the magic dust in the air.

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Great records are made in unlikely places. Tricky's Maxinquaye was done in the artist's flat in Kilburn with the floor literally covered with the old vinyl from which the music was shaped. The Band's second album was recorded in the swimming pool house attached to the former home of Sammy Davis Jr. Crowded House's Together Alone was made in a house halfway up a mountainside on the remote coast of New Zealand. The Rolling Stones' first album came out of an egg-carton-lined demo studio in Denmark Street where the two-track Revox was attached to the wall. Telstar was cut above a shop on the Holloway Road. In the early days of Atlantic records they used to pile up the desks in a corner of their New York office and record Big Joe Turner direct to disc. Little Feat did lots of their best stuff on a house boat-cum-studio that subsequently sank to the bottom of Baltimore harbour. Phil Spector got his sound by packing so many musicians into Gold Star studios that the room served as its own compressor.

It's possible that this year may see the sale or closure of the most famous recording studio in the world, Abbey Road. Guy Hands of Terra Firma has enough problems on his hands paying the interest on the sum he borrowed to buy the studio's owner EMI Music. If there is a fire sale the famous old studio will go. It's my understanding that the company have already investigated and rejected the possibility of turning it into some kind of Graceland-type heritage attraction. I'm told by people in the know that demand for recording studios is now so low that if you were prepared to drive a hard bargain you could get a day in a legendary studio, including an engineer, for £250. Considering that not long ago this would have been nearer £2,000 it almost seems like the perfect birthday present for a middle-aged musician with a dream to fulfil.

If Abbey Road closes its doors with it will go the philosophy on which the record business was founded. The modern sound manipulation environment has no need of control rooms or bulky multi-track tape machines. It does not need bright rooms for recording orchestras or dry rooms for close-recorded instruments. It does not need a purpose-built echo chamber. The only perfection its users reach for is the standard it takes to get on the Radio One A list or sound good on an Ipod on a busy street. Talking about our new tolerance of lossy formats like MP3, Greg Milner says that while the holy grail of the old recording engineers, the quality for which Led Zeppelin named their album Presence, implied capturing every noise that was made in the room, "today we try to capture as little as possible while fostering the illusion of everything. We don't want everything. We want just enough." This could be why one of the reasons why the critically-acclaimed rock albums of today don't seem to match the grandeur, ambition and scope of Led Zeppelin II, the warmth of After The Gold Rush or the rude vigour of New Boots And Panties. Most records of the present-day have not been breathed into the open air so much as posted into a box of tricks, a box in which it's theoretically possible to make everything brighter, more exact, better. Neil Brockbank contrasts this with the theory of the near-miss. "The near-miss is more beautiful than the direct hit in sound recording. The horn section on your favourite ska record is not in tune but it's beautiful. There's something slightly disappointing about 100% accuracy in terms of a rhythm track. It's disturbing. The tempo in most kinds of music has to move. When it gets to the exciting bit it ought to go a little faster. Because that's what music does."

In recording circles in 2009 the hot listen was the eight-track master tape of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine". We played it over Neil Brockbank's studio system. The basic track, which was done live, is bass, drums, guitar, organ and tambourine. The strings and the backing vocals were put on later. We're listening to Marvin Gaye do the lead vocal. It's April 10th, 1967. We can hear him talking as the piano intro plays. "Yes," he says. "I been tasting but I'm not plastered." Then the drums start. ""Ah. Drums in my ear. Just what I need." It's another day at the office. Heard It Through The Grapevine wasn't a product of the free play of artistic inspiration. It was an ill-tempered, nit-picking business. The producer Norman Whitfield had been arguing with him about how he wanted it sung. Marvin eventually agreed to sing it Whitfield's way. Under pressure he proceeded to deliver the most enduring vocal in pop.

Neil Brockbank and I sit back and luxuriate in the majestic music that emerged from all this wrangling and wonder what a producer would do if he could feed these elements into the modern sound manipulation system.

"Ruin it."

This feature was first published in The Word March 2010. You can buy back issues here.