Nostalgia corner: a Band recording 'as live', a lost art
It occurred to me, when listening to a 'deluxe' album, remastered from a 1970s classic, with loads of bonus tracks, that recording music used to be a lot more fun, a lot more spontaneous.
In 2023, in fact since about 1983, so for the last 40 years(!), recording music is about assembling parts of a jigsaw - drum parts here, bass there, keyboards there, vocals, and so on. All of which are recorded in 100% isolation and can be replaced, broken up, and generally juggled until the rendered whole, down to stereo, is as the artist wants it.
I have some knowledge of all this, having at first done lots of home recording onto Foster and Tascam multi-tracks, then recorded an album in a real studio, plus lots of 'live' recording along the way in a variety of settings.
So I'm listening to some of these 1970s out-takes and bonus tracks and it's blatantly clear how different recording was, especially for rock bands. Several tracks started with studio chatter "This might be the one!", and so on, before the whole band kicks in and they play the song through together 'as live'. No obvious ways to fix errors, at least on the core instruments, so if someone messed up then you either lived with it or started the song again. "Take six", etc!
So yes, the disadvantages of this approach are self-evident. They were partly limited by the primitive recording technology of the time, but also by the ambitions and abilities of the band concerned. The typical rock band would far prefer playing a song together, to have more 'feel', more 'vibe'.
No matter that drums and bass and guitars were all bleeding into each other and into the vocals microphone - it didn't matter because each take was essentially its own 'thing', and often different to the ones before and after. The band would pick the take they liked best, perhaps overdub an extra instrument or sound effect, maybe some backing vocals, and then they were done.
And you know what? I can overlook imperfections here and there in order to enjoy that 'as live' sound. Listening now, in 2023, to 1970s out-takes, it's as if I'm there in the room listening to the band experimenting and tweaking, almost playing a part in picking which take should be used for the final album. And it's all enormous fun, hearing a song develop and fill out, in many cases.
Sometimes one take would be trimmed (intro/outro) etc, to create a final version, other times it would - yes - literally be a question of picking the whole-band-take that was liked the most.
In 2023, you can go from home demo to studio release with just one person doing everything - a far cry from needing a whole band, with their amps and effects and studio environment and professional engineers...
Are things easier today? Oh, way easier, but as I say, a lot of the spontaneity is missing, So many 1970s classics have improvised vocal or instrumental sections that 'worked' in the room at the time and so became 'canon' for that particular track. But would they have made it at all in a modern sanitised, everything-planned-out, software-adjustable, recording environment? I don't think so.
For some people, the end result on an album are what matters - for me, it's imagining myself with the band, either at a gig or a fly on the wall of the studio, if you will. That's half the fun of the music I enjoy!
Playing - genuinely - live, at a gig is exciting in its own way (and I've done some of that), but there's always something wrong with the sound mix - the compromises of the rapid set-up and stage and hall take care of that. Playing 'as live' in a studio is the way to go, as you can take as long as you need to get each instrument sounding right and then just go for it.
I've refrained from quoting examples of all the above because I don't want readers to get the idea that I'm fixated on a particular band and I don't want to bore anyone, but there are plenty of modern examples of (in this case cover) bands recording all in the one room, 'as live'. See the Martin Miller Band on YouTube, for example. You hear the music, you see what they're all doing, you see their interactions, you see the enjoyment. No overdubs, no taking out sections and replacing them later in a software, just good old fashioned musicality and 'riffing' off each other. Love it.
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