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Fleetwood Mac - Ugh.

The overall take was great so they left it in there. I'm not sure how easily they could have punched that in order to fix it...or maybe no one noticed until mixdown.
But it’s in the first 12 seconds!

It’s one thing to bury a mistake three minutes into the song. But that’s the first time you hear that progression in the song.
 
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Well, I hear it plain as day, and after 40+ years of writing, playing, and recording bass lines, I know a flub (fumble, stumble, clam, call it what you want) when I hear one, 'cuz I've certainly made my fair share. No way that was intentional. Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, say maybe he was doing some kind of slide or gliss from G to F, it's not musical or well-timed in the least. I vote "clam."

However, I can easily believe they left it in. It has actually happened a lot over the decades in pop music (before autotune and digital manipulation), on just about every instrument. Who knows what the prevailing mentality was, or where McVie's head was that day, but this might have been the best he was good for, and it's a relatively minor flub that doesn't wreck the track. It probably could have been easily punched in/out and fixed, but then you sometimes end up with an audible hiccup or volume discrepancy (again, pre-digital era).
I guess it shocks me that the bassist didn’t just go, ah screw it, I messed up the first F, I’ll do it again.

It’s not like when I listen to Stanley Clarke hit a bad note in a song but I realize all the band members were playing in the same room at the same time and you can’t be overly perfectionist there.

It just seems like a strange choice for a band that produces their material impeccably and doesn’t leave that many mistakes in their recordings. To be that early in the song.
 
when I listen to Stanley Clarke hit a bad note in a song but I realize all the band members were playing in the same room at the same time and you can’t be overly perfectionist there.

There is a good chance much of the basic tracking on Fleetwood Mac was recorded the same way.

It just seems like a strange choice for a band that produces their material impeccably and doesn’t leave that many mistakes in their recordings. To be that early in the song.

Fleetwood Mac, being the first release with the Buckingham/Nicks line up, was recorded within a relatively-short three months. It was after that initial success and with subsequent releases that they became more meticulous and took more time with details and tracking. I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to find a similar flub on any other Buckingham/Nicks-era release.

I think you may have inadvertently addressed your own curiosity. ;)
 
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It just seems like a strange choice for a band that produces their material impeccably and doesn’t leave that many mistakes in their recordings. To be that early in the song.

Easy these days to forget that - if it even was a mistake - they’d have to do a manual drop in where now you’d just pick a good note from somewhere else in the track and cut and paste.

Kids these days have it so easy, my day we had to make sure the wax cylinder was warm enough and the horses were going round the treadmill fast enough to power the generator...
 
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Hi,



Bassist (John McVie?) plays a G instead of an F at 0:12, and I can't believe they'd leave that mistake in. Every other time for this progression, the bass plays the correct notes, so it's like... why the first one? Why????

Come on, am I crazy? Why were they OK with this take? It's a I-IV-V and it's like the band don't even care if the bassist plays a V on an IV.


Forgive me for jumping in late on the conversation and reading only half of the replies. ;)

As many times as I've heard this track I've never noticed that "poor choice" with that note. But now that you've brought it to my attention I can't "un-hear" it. Who knows why they left it? I can only speculate. And we love to speculate, don't we? :p

It's possible that upon playback they listened to a big pair of studio monitors cranked way up and just didn't really notice it enough to force another take. I've been in recording sessions where the client would want to listen to the playback on smaller speakers at lower volumes because they could hear better. Or maybe it was late, or they were up against a deadline, and they just wanted to get it in the can. Maybe they were partying too hardy and loved it the way it was.

Wasn't it Rick Ocasek of The Cars who would take the recording out to his car stereo and listen to it? If it sounded good on his car stereo then he would be satisfied.

Anyway, an interesting bit of musical trivia.


Thank you for your indulgence,

BassCliff
 
The points discussed at 11:15ish and 12:25ish in this video resonated with my thoughts and feelings about the OP topic. I started having these same views discussed in the video about music in the early eighties as the digital revolution was really taking off in the music industry. I have heard comments about similar concerns from interviews with Jack White and Neil Young. To me, organic creativity with human error has a greater value and musical sound than “perfection”.


Setting aside any valid points the dude might have made,,I really hate that band.

Sorry, carry on.

Or led zeppelin. There is a 25-30 second chunk where the band falls entirely out of time with each other during a verse in Misty Mountain Hop

Wut?

Where? I have never noticed.
 
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Bassist (John McVie?) plays a G instead of an F at 0:12, and I can't believe they'd leave that mistake in. Every other time for this progression, the bass plays the correct notes, so it's like... why the first one? Why????

Come on, am I crazy? Why were they OK with this take? It's a I-IV-V and it's like the band don't even care if the bassist plays a V on an IV.

I hear it but it goes by so quickly that it doesn’t create a train wreck. Popular music is full of those moments and it’s no big thing. I don’t believe that perfection should be the goal anyway. Magic is what catches the listeners imagination and it happens when the song and the energy of the players come together in an engaging way that affects the listener on an emotional level.
I’ve been in recording situations where the producer effectively wrung all the excitement out of every track because he wanted it to be perfect. We aren’t perfect, we are all flawed human beings but we can create magic when we are allowed to relax and be ourselves. I’ve heard plenty of mistakes in well known recordings but if the groove and the energy are there, I don’t care.
 
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Setting aside any valid points the dude might have made,,I really hate that band.

Sorry, carry on.



Wut?

Where? I have never noticed.
It's in the second or third verse maybe? One of the versus page loses time with bohnam and they all found the one again just at the end of the verse. It's pretty subtle but it sounds off.

Quick edit. I just cant remember which verse but it should be the second or third verse.
 
I’ve just been listening to Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame... if you want to hear “clams” they left them all in that one :)
A lot of jazz is like that, I guess I expect it there. Pop rock, much less so.

All of you are starting to help convince me to some degree that it wasn't too awful of a mistake. :D