A Tom Moulton Mix

[Zzzptm]

I do a funk/soul radio show on Mondays and, as a result of that, got to thinking about doing a feature on the origins of disco.

Well, that's a rabbit hole, especially if you discover why "A Tom Moulton Mix" shows up on so many disco classics - the guy had a magical touch making good singles into dancefloor monsters. He hated producing, because he didn't like haranguing the talent to do their job right, but he loved doing the mixes. And I'm loving those mixes that he did.

We were talking about "calibration" songs for stereo systems - a good Tom Moulton Mix is absolutely a candidate for such. And if you enjoy house music and its offshoots, thank Tom Moulton for getting the ball rolling on that front.

[Vyn]

Have never heard of Tom Moulton. Education time!

[Zzzptm]

Have never heard of Tom Moulton. Education time!

WELL


Guy had a start as a record label promo man in the 50s and was shattered over the Payola scandal - where DJs were being paid to play rock'n'roll records - and, disillusioned, tried to find a career outside of the music biz. But, when he noticed that people at clubs felt kinda jilted when a song ended after 2-3 minutes, he came up with the idea of extending the single to make it more danceable. Working at home for 80 hours with early 70s kit, he made a 45-minute cassette tape that he tried out at the Sandpiper club. It was a huge hit, and he got asked to make more.

Word got out that this guy Tom Moulton could do this stuff - which made the parent singles all the more popular - and labels wanted to get him into their pipelines to do mixes for them. His requirement beyond salary was that he got credited for doing his mix. He also required that his preferred mastering guy, Jose Rodriguez, also got credited.

When the record companies wanted to market the extended mixes as singles, the 45rpm record was out. Too short to fit 8-11 minutes on one side. This turned out to be a blessing, because, as Moulton said, the 45s were "all middle" and couldn't support richer bass and treble sounds. Moulton and Rodriquez first used 10" acetates but ran out of those. So they switched to 12" acetates and the 12" single was born. With that format and only one track, they could really fill things out and those singles had much richer - and louder - sounds than what was possible on a 45 or a more crowded LP.

Moulton and Rodriguez were VERY busy in the 70s, doing over 3000 records then. Moulton even had a minor heart attack while mixing Doctor Love by First Choice, but held off going to the hospital until he was done with the mix.

Moulton credits most of his innovations not to some kind of inner vision, but pretty much due to either accidents or as expedient ways to get through problems in mixing tracks. One of those expedient ways was the "disco break" where everything is stripped back to a drum beat and then reassembled. In modern EDM, that's practically mandatory on a track. But in Moulton's day, it was what he came up with to take a track that had pretty much finished back to the beginning, especially if they'd modulated up a half step and he needed a smooth way to de-modulate. Just go back to the drums as a palette cleanser and rebuild the track from the bass up.

Moulton also pioneered the elimination of breaks between songs on LPs to have them flow into each other, something he started on Gloria Gaynor's first album. The whole first side plays through 1-2-3, nice and smooth.

All this and more at a collated series of Tom Moulton interviews at http://www.disco-disco.com/tributes/tom.shtml , including a great story on why Disco Inferno isn't 3 minutes long.