1/27/2024 0 Comments The byrds spanish harlem incident![]() But do listen carefully to old recordings. It's nice to know that the fun stuff is what you remember 30 years later (as opposed to all those times you had to lug a Sunn cabinet up four flights of stairs). If I wanted a Hagstrom 8-string at two o'clock in the morning, we'd just go rent one. ![]() My favorite thing was the nearby 24/7 instrument rental store. They also had these new-fangled gizmos called Dolbys that helped get rid of hum and other junk noise. Somebody could screw-up and we could actually fix it. and recorded at Elektra, where they had (count 'em) 16 TRACKS! It was a big breath of creative freedom, like being let out of prison. I don't think I ever got my own track until 1972 when we went to L.A. It was the first chance most of us ever had to hear what our bands actually sounded like, since most of the modern gizmos which will do a half-way decent unofficial recording job at a club or concert hall didn't exist yet. Once in a while you can hear a little bit of bleed in quiet passages of old recordings.Įven with all the hassles, recording was really neat, even with only four tracks. By storing the tape re-wound backwards, any echo would be displaced (either backwards or by enough time, I can't remember which) that it wouldn't be easily noticed by the average listener as some strange repeat of what they had just heard. This could, and sometimes did, create a faint delayed echo a few seconds later that was audible on the recording. This was because the recorded sounds on the various layers of tape, wound on the reel, would sometimes "bleed" onto the next layer during storage. Ate a lot of ramen noodles during that period.Basic tracks are pretty boring to play and after five or six attempts to get four people to all play a perfect one, you start looking at the clock and thinking about what it's costing and how far you're willing to lower your standards.Īnother interesting thing was that they always stored the tapes wound backwards (tail first) on the reels. Recording a song or two for demos usually meant that the money we would make for the upcoming weekend's gigs was gone before it was even earned. ![]() Time was money, too and in the early '70s we were paying $100 per hour in the studio, which was a lot of money for a struggling band. I had an old B-15 that sometimes buzzed so loudly that you could hear it on the tape and we found that if you layed it on it's side it would often quiet down for some strange reason. Basic tracks often ended up with so many different things on them that you took the best all-round group performance with no way to quickly "duck" a misplayed note on the board because the entire rhythm track would wink-out with it. During the four-track days we just about had to make a map of what could be recorded in the first wave and then mixed down onto one or two tracks to leave the other tracks open for vocals, guitar leads and other fluff-stuff that really needed to be actively adjusted during the final mix. Cymbals falling over, people opening doors, spectators walking into the little booth you were playing in looking for the bathroom, etc. You younger guys wouldn't believe some of the junk that used to get left on recordings.
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