Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording From Edison to the LP by Susan Schmidt Horning

Author:Susan Schmidt Horning [Horning, Susan Schmidt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, General, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), music, History & Criticism, Recording & Reproduction, science
ISBN: 9781421410227
Google: TSCcAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2013-12-15T23:57:54.615262+00:00

“Hum Your Tune. Hits Start at Schneider Recording”

The forty-year history of another Cleveland studio, Schneider Recording, offers a view into a different kind of independent studio that flourished in the postwar period. Although Hank Schneider began recording polka musicians and advertising clients, just as Fred Wolf had in the 1930s, Schneider Recording remained a small, family-owned and operated business, offering a range of services in addition to recording. Hank Schneider was an engineer as well as a musician, but his studio never became as technologically advanced as Cleveland Recording. From the time he opened the studio in 1945 until his death in 1984, Hank Schneider and his wife, Kay, served a wide range of clients, from advertising agencies and corporations to professional musicians and amateur songwriters. They maintained a conservative approach to running the studio, never investing in more equipment than the business would support. By keeping it small and personalized, they weathered business fluctuations that put many other small studios out of business. Schneider Recording Studio Laboratory, as it was called in the early years, could indeed boast that it recorded the original audition records for several hit songs of the 1950s, as well as album masters for companies such as Decca and RCA Victor.52 Precisely because its doors were open to even those who had done no more than sing in the shower, Schneider provided an invaluable service to songwriting hopefuls who otherwise would never have entered a recording studio. Kay Schneider recounted that just about every songwriter who came through Schneider’s door would say something like, “Now I wouldn’t even be here if my tune wasn’t better than ‘Stardust.’ ”53 Whether it was or not did not matter to the Schneiders. Their interest was in providing a service, not in profiting from the songs they recorded, or in promising to place songs with artists, as did the “song sharks” of Tin Pan Alley.54

Hank Schneider possessed a unique background that combined technical training and professional musicianship that ideally suited him for the newly emerging audio engineering field. As a young boy, he built crystal radio sets and later opened a radio shop in Oak Park, Illinois. He started his own band at age fifteen, played trombone with Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa in Chicago, and later performed with orchestras on Mississippi riverboats. From the 1920s through the early 1940s, he arranged music for live radio broadcasts, and during World War II, he served with the Army Signal Corps. After years on the road as a touring musician, Schneider and his wife settled in Cleveland at the St. Regis Hotel. Schneider rented a downtown office space, initially as a place to do his musical arranging while he played with local radio orchestras and club bands. Soon he purchased a Presto disc recorder and a Brush crystal microphone, listed as Henry C. Schneider Recording Studio in the telephone directory, and offered his services as lead sheet arranger, musician, and recording engineer. Between that modest advertising and Schneider’s reputation among local

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