From John Mellencamp's website -
"Meanwhile, more information on John's tentatively-titled forthcoming album "No Better Than This" has been made available. Recording will take place during the summer in Savannah, Georgia at the first African-American church in the U.S., as well as at the historic Sun Studios in Memphis and possibly the Brunswick Building in Dallas where legendary bluesman Robert Johnson recorded. To achieve that vintage sound, John will record using a 1951 Ampex portable recording machine and only one microphone, requiring all the musicians to gather together around the mic. The entire recording and mixing process, then, will be in mono-and in the same manner as those classic folk blues recordings of the 1930s and '40s"
I am excited about this!
I found out through the Ampex list that it will be done on a 600 series Ampex portable "field recorder".
Some absolutely amazing stuff was recorded using techniques similar to this.
The older recordings mentioned at the end were of course actually recorded direct to disc, some on portable units from Presto and the like.
The thing is, I have lots of this sort of equipment and microphones and good rooms and friends that are acoustic artists in various styles.
And I think that for every step we have taken forward in quality with going to dead rooms, multi track and now digital, we have lost some essence of the sound they got when capturing all that sound energy from the room and the performance of the musicians all entering the recorder via limited micing with acoustic balance, simultaneously.
I think I am going to have to force my self to do the hard work necessary to restore some semblance of this sort of portable tape (and disc) recording equipment, both mono and stereo, and go out and make some of these types of recordings with it before I die.