Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: The Non-Tape-Loop



<the first take broke down>

This expression has nothing whatsoever to do with the tape literally 
breaking down.
It refers to when a band in a recording session would make such a bad 
musical mistake that the
whole recording had to be stopped and recorded over again.

Before the advent of digital recording,  a band had to play a song from 
the 
start to the finish
as perfectly as possible in order to get a good recording.  This could be 
very demoralizing
in a band setting because you might have every single person playing 
flawlessly in a take and if
the drummer made a bad mistake in the finally chorus, the whole song had 
to 
stop and be recorded
from scratch again.  Of course, in those days  some things were fixable 
with 
punch ins and we really
got good at being able to reproduce exact performances to be able to fix 
things, but if the whole band
made a booboo,  you just had to stop and start over again.

Even when playing to a click track it was incredibly problematic to try 
and 
physically splice
one well recorded portion of a song onto another.  It was done 
occasionally 
but it was extremely
rare in most recording studios,  especially more inexpensive local 
recording 
studios.

In hundreds and hundreds of recording sessions I never experienced the 
tape 
physically breaking
to stop a take.  I"m sure it may have happened but I am certain this is 
not 
what these phrases refer to.

DIGITAL RECORDING

That all changed in the 80's with the advent of digital recording and 
digital crossfading.

Since the advent of digital recording and the proliferation of relatively 
inexpensive ADAT
digital 8 track recording machines in the 80's,  many full band recording 
sessions
could be continued if a band, as an example, played a great verse but then 
screwed up the
performance of the next chorus of a song.

I'll never forget the very first ADAT recording session I was at.  I was 
blown away because
as soon as we screwed up the first chorus, the engineer said, "Everybody 
play along with the
tape and I'll punch in the entire band on the down beat of the chorus."

We did,  he punched it in and on playback we were astonished to not be 
able 
to hear the punch.

The ADAT allowed for digital crossfading between the two sections of the 
song.

This was amazing!!!!!  It so radically sped up the process of getting so 
called basic tracks
recorded in a studio that it wasn't funny.

In a way, it also meant that bands did not have to be as proficient 
musically.

Even in a pop song it is frequently difficult to play perfectly for 3 to 5 
or 6 minutes.

Digital recording allowed bands to just play for one section of a song.

When I first tracked bass guitar parts, engineering myself on an ADAT, I 
had 
just learned how to play bass by
learning the beautiful and melodic bass lines that my wife had composed 
for 
her project Lackadaisy, that I was
producing at the time.    The bass player quit before the recording 
started 
and Chris (my wife) had been struggling with
a bit of tendinitis so she wanted to eschew playing the more physical bass 
lines herself.

She gave me one bass line that was just out of my league technically on a 
song called "Still Live on Mars" (the title track).
I'll never forget learning that bass line, one or two bars at a 
time...........using a click track and the crossfade possibilities
of the ADAT.    On the record you are literally hearing a bassist who 
could 
not possibly and physically play that bass line
from start to finish like in the old analogue tape recording days. 
Amazingly,  it sounds great having recorded it, one
bar at a time all the way through the piece.

Now if you hear the phrase  "the first take broke down"  it generally 
means 
that the computers have crashed..................lol.