GRAMMY Museum location for An Introduction To Recording


Dateline: November 17th. Los Angeles: Nominated for no less than thirteen GRAMMYs over his career to date, Alan Parsons felt very much at home during October’s filming session at the GRAMMY Museum, a backdrop for the first section: An Introduction To Recording.

Alan Parsons in the GRAMMY MuseumSituated in ‘currently-being-revitalized’ downtown Los Angeles, the GRAMMY Museum features interactive exhibits that let you monitor recorded sound quality from the wax cylinder to 96k Surround, and investigate everything from the role of the producer to the power of a plug-in.

Alan recorded a number of segments in and alongside many of the ‘pods’ and ‘spaces’ in the museum’s Third Floor, drawing frequent attention from a stream of visitors who felt that an exhibit had somehow come to life in front of their eyes.

An Introduction To Recording traces the development of sound recording from Edison, Emile Berliner, and Valdemar Poulsen, through to multitrack tape and digital. Along the way Alan comments on his own personal experiences with The Beatles and Pink Floyd at Abbey Road as the studio moved from 8 to 16 to 24 track systems.

“But as the Grammy people know so well, great music is not about the technology, it's what people do with it that counts,” says Alan in one sequence. In another, Alan reveals that Academy’s original name of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was a “natural influence” for the title of the program.