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Favorite "mistakes" in great recordings

buldog5151bass

buldog5151bass

Kibble, milkbones, and P Basses. And redheads.
Oct 22, 2003
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#1
The Sound of Silence thread got me thinking. I think music has suffered in the digital age, where the goal is technical perfection, as you can digitally alter everything, and you have virtually limitless tracks (which some people seem to think you have to fill them all.

What are some of your favorite recordings where there were "flaws" in fantastic songs? One of mine is the Abbey Road medley. In the last minute, the tuning changes almost half a step.
 
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#3
Vocals come in too soon after the guitar solo, vocals stop, pauses and then resumes (at about 1:58). What do we expect for a $64 recording? "Take 1." Very likely is in the top 3 all time greatest rock n roll songs EVER! A guitar solo to DIE FOR!

Great song!

Major goof that was not even bothered to correct! LOVE IT! Perfection is not desirable!

 
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#5
Tommy Bolin breaking a string on Spectrum




Leland Sklar, bassist on four of the songs, remarked, "Spectrum is such a benchmark for so many people. There was a sort of fire in it. It was new ground and it wasn't very analytical. It was more flying by the seat of your pants. That's where great accidents happen, which seems impossible these days. We never did more than a couple of takes on any of it. It was more or less a two-day record. It went by so fast."[2] Sklar and Hammer recall that the music was recorded live and was not fixed in any way afterwards[3], which, in particular, resulted in capturing Tommy Bolin breaking his high E string while soloing on "Taurian Matador" (approximately at 1:45 into the track) and continuing playing.[4] Bolin used Fender Stratocaster and Maestro Echoplex delay unit, prominently heard on "Quadrant 4". Sklar attests that he played his 1962 Fender Jazz bass through a small Univox amp with a single 12″ speaker.[5]

Not as well known at the time, Tommy Bolin plays lead guitar on four songs. Cobham had met Bolin years before, when he was a member of Zephyr. Bolin had recently joined rock band James Gang, and recorded his first album with that band just two months prior to the Spectrum sessions.[6]
 
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#6
Eddie Van Halen's dropped beat at the start of VH's Unchained is one of the most obvious I can think of that my friends and I noticed and spoke of when young. Ironically, was the drummers that brought it up most. Alex was held in very high esteem for being able to reign in Eddie's lack of counting ability. And once I heard, felt, the drop? I couldn't unhear it. My bands play that mistake.

There's also Bonham's creaky kick pedal all over Zep lV. Not technically a musician's mistake. But one an engineer maybe would have fixed today. Glad these and other mistakes were left in the recorded tracks. Eliminating the "Human" in art is, well... Inhuman. Heh.
 
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#7
Another favorite goof.

The Flying Burrito Brothers song Christine's Tune (Devil In Disguise). Nearing the fade out, Chris Hillman in one channel and Gram Parsons on the other channel are trading the vocal.........in disguise. Gram's voice cracks, he stops and does an audible clearing of his throat.

I never noticed this until one day I listened to the song with headphones.

I can't hear it on the Youtube video but I'll include it anyway. (About 2:40 in.)

 
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#9
Jimmy Page, coming out of the guitar solo section in "I Can't Quit You Baby," hits the A to A# chord tag one beat too early; JPG and Bonham then play what would have been the correct parts for that tag, one beat later, but by then it's such a mess that Bonham has to corral everyone in with an off-the-cuff "here's the @#$% one!" to fix the problem.

Pete Quaife, bass player of the Kinks, on the original version of "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," sounding as if he had been told the chords for the song just before the take and had to make up his part on the fly: slides where he gets lost, dropped notes, misplaced notes, etc. He starts to get comfortable about halfway through, but the damage is done.
 
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#15
Vinny_G said:
Rick Beato explains it very well, as usual:

Click to expand...

The irony is that I'm working mainly in a DAW but paying people from all over the place to play real instruments so that I can bring some live feel into the stuff I'm creating. Not everyone likes the quantized-to-death sound of modern music.

These tools make it easier to edit problems and issues but they can be (and usually are) greatly overused. It's cheap to make music that way, which is one reason they do it.
 
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#17
buldog5151bass said:
The Sound of Silence thread got me thinking. I think music has suffered in the digital age, where the goal is technical perfection, as you can digitally alter everything, and you have virtually limitless tracks (which some people seem to think you have to fill them all.

What are some of your favorite recordings where there were "flaws" in fantastic songs? One of mine is the Abbey Road medley. In the last minute, the tuning changes almost half a step.
Click to expand...

The big one that comes to mind is Zappa stumbling on the preamble to the muffin man!

I'm sure there are more. Will add to the list of I can think of them.
 
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#18
bassdude51 said:
Another favorite goof.

The Flying Burrito Brothers song Christine's Tune (Devil In Disguise). Nearing the fade out, Chris Hillman in one channel and Gram Parsons on the other channel are trading the vocal.........in disguise. Gram's voice cracks, he stops and does an audible clearing of his throat.

I never noticed this until one day I listened to the song with headphones.

I can't hear it on the Youtube video but I'll include it anyway. (About 2:40 in.)

Click to expand...

Sometimes you'll hear stuff like this in the fade, and then you realize that's why they faded it there.
 
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#20
LBS-bass said:
LOL it's the guy reading behind him. Read it wrong!
Click to expand...

Did you mean Will Lee or Paul Shaffer?
They're both reading it, Will is playing synth bass (not a common thing, but not unheard of, either) and Paul is probably thinking whether this keyboard part reminds him more of "Lorelei" or "Baba O'Riley", judging by how uncomfortably he's playing the line, when the bar with the extra beat comes up.
It's Paul that goes off the rails (doesn't help matters that, at that precise moment, he's got his back towards the rest of the band. :meh:
 
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