Inspired by “engineering screw-ups” on Gearslutz, here’s a list of recording and mixing bloopers that made it past the mixing room onto the final release.
These aren’t performance missteps, where the band missed a cue, or the singer came in too soon. There are certainly countless examples of those but most were included intentionally, to add character or realism. Rather, the flubs below highlight mistakes in recording or mixing that could have been corrected before the track was released.
Some of the mistakes probably went unnoticed. Some, I’m sure, were noticed and begrudgingly accepted because of a deadline. But reassuringly for us amateurs, they all prove that even the pros aren’t perfect.
Botched Edits
The edit in question happens at 0:09 in the clip below. I scratch my head every time I hear it. So many questions: What went through the mixing engineer’s head? Why didn’t Clapton object? What’s powpower?
Recording and mixing engineers traditionally build a vocal track by “punching in” (re-recording a rough spot) and “comping” (building a single vocal track from the best parts of multiple takes.) Before digital editing, this was a manual procedure prone to timing errors. So the example above, recorded in 1970, is forgivable (although puzzling, because it’s so obvious.) Today, however, it’s common practice to digitally automate the punches and comps, which means the next two examples really shouldn’t have happened:
You was the first track on their first album, so the band surely aimed to make an impact. And without question, Thom Yorke bellowing high A for 8 seconds is a great hook, perhaps even the song’s defining moment… until you realize that his wail is comped from shorter sections. Listen for the cut at 0:05:
Notice how the vocal timbre changes in the middle of the word “yeah”, after “eyes deceive me.” I can’t fathom how this edit made it to mastering. Unlike the Radiohead example, which is only obvious on close listen, this cut simply sounds distracting!
Here, the tonality changes completely at 0:10, and again at 0:30. Lennon supposedly recorded a demo on his home tape recorder, and at mix time, he and Phil Spector (who produced the track) preferred the emotion in the home recording for one verse only.
This is a cop-out. There are “perfect takes,” for sure, but for a professional (or a self-described genius like John Lennon) there’s no such thing as a take so perfect it can’t be recreated.
Strange noises
This is the best example of John Bonham’s notoriously squeaky bass drum pedal. Jimmy Page discussed the squeak in a 1993 Guitar World interview:
The only real problem I can remember encountering was when we were putting the first boxed set together. There was an awfully squeaky bass drum pedal on “Since I’ve Been Loving You”. It sounds louder and louder every time I hear it! [laughs]. That was something that was obviously sadly overlooked at the time.
(Note: I boosted the high frequencies in this clip to highlight the pedal sound.)
Some lessons I’ve learned from The Beatles:
- All you need is love.
- The walrus was Paul.
- If you drop a tambourine while recording, stop the tape and re-record.
I can see this slipping by unnoticed because it almost sounds musical. Almost. But listen to the clip a few times, and it becomes obvious just how out of place that tambourine is. (For more details, check out What Goes On, a fantastic reference for the little nuances like these in Beatles recordings.)
As Aguilera sings, you’ll hear a faint rhythm track in the background. This is headphone bleed – sound leaking from her headphone monitor into the microphone. (Note: I boosted the high frequencies on this track to make the bleed more obvious.)
Dave Pensado, who mixed Beautiful, discusses the noise here:
The song was about being beautiful and honest in EVERY way. That bleed is honest. It was one of the most honest vocal performances I had EVER heard. It was actually the scratch vocal.
This is another cop-out. Mixing engineers have their own version of the fourth wall, and Pensado broke it with this mix. Honest or not, the bleed reminds listeners of the technology used to record, and that distracts us from Aguilera’s performance.
Technical screw-ups
As Rick Wright holds the last piano chord, the tape speed wobbles for a second:
This was not done on purpose, as some claim, to fit the song on side A of the vinyl album. (LPs ran up to 30 minutes per side, and Dark Side Of The Moon‘s A-side was less than 19 minutes.) Rather, this is a simple tape speed glitch.
This clip plays two phrases from the 2nd verse of Roxanne. Compare the reverb tail at the end of “night” and “right.” The first decays naturally and cleanly, the second ends abruptly.
Most likely, this is the result of a vocal punch-in or comp, where the reverb was recorded directly to the track, rather than added during mix-down. (The moral: Don’t print your effects to tape too early!!)
Does Natalie’s voice sound odd to you on the word “parents?”
Autotune is a powerful tool, to be sure, and used on the right material, it can enhance a recording. But here, it’s noticeable and distasteful: Natalie has a great voice, and the engineers did her a disservice by not re-recording the note. I like to think there’s a special seat in hell reserved for those who abuse Autotune this way.
Lessons
These clips hold a couple of lessons for amateur producers and home recordists:
1) You don’t need to be perfect. The pros know this. Most mistakes will simply go unnoticed, some mistakes add character, and sometimes a looming deadline trumps all.
2) That said, there’s no excuse for releasing sub-par material when you have the time and the skills to improve it. The Incubus, Dixie Chicks, and John Lennon examples especially are obvious to the point of annoyance, and mostly just make the mixing engineer seem lazy!
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Tags: humour, mixing, professional-engineers
126 comments
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Nice…I never noticed any of these…pretty interesting that this stuff happens, especially for such big acts.
I’d not noticed most of these, except for the You one.
The thing that never made sense to me there is that Thom could, at the time, totally hold a high note that long (cf: Some version of Creep where he holds out the last note of the bridge section for ridiculous amounts of time)!
My pet theory’s always been that they recorded it after doing a bunch of other stuff, and he was tired and couldn’t quite make it that day.
Great post!
Not musically-based, but in the video game Oblivion, there was a section where you’re talking to a gossipy woman, and one of her lines went something like this: “Did you hear what happe- Ah, wait. Can I do that one more time? I’ll get it eventually… … …Did you hear what happened?”
A pretty serious miss on the sound designer’s part!
Cool list, makes you wonder who’s listening to a final version before giving it the go-ahead.
This reminds me of the bit from Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything where he introduces a segment called “Sounds of the Studio,” asking listeners to try and find all the engineering mistakes on the album (bad editing, tape hiss, etc.). I’ve never listened closely enough to the rest of the album to see if I can hear them in the other songs…
Andrew, that’s awesome! Too good not to share:
Rundgren cracks me up.
> Thom could, at the time, totally hold a high note that long
Oh man, and how! I saw them live a few times touring Pablo and The Bends, and even after witnessing it, I still can’t believe the guy’s stage voice.
> Not musically-based, but in the video game Oblivion, there was a section …
LOL, talk about breaking the fourth wall!!!
There’s a super squeaky bassdrum pedal on a ton of James Brown stuff as well. Once you notice it, it’s all you hear…
Nope, don’t believe the one about Dark Side of the Moon. 1) Too creative to be an accident. 2) Don’t believe that Floyd would have left it uncorrected.
I discovered the clicking in Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” a long time ago.
It’s a good album, but the mastering is poor as hell… there are some very annoying high frequency harmonics in the vocals all over the record…
Oh for gods sake.
How can you sit there and complain about music that has been incredibly successful? Maybe you may have missed the point here, maybe we all actually like the “wrong” natural sound that these songs have.
Music isn’t about seperating all the channels and having deadly silence in between vocal parts, its about the whole sound. How it feels when all the layers play together, a bit of over spill from the metronome isn’t going to make me shout:
“oh my god, they are recording this with real people and i can hear the other muscians in the background, shock horror”…
The example you used with the Police, both endings are equally perfect – why you think the second sample must mask some sort of mathamatical formual with the previous sample is beyond me.
Music is what feels good to the ears, and what flows, it’s not the caged structured metal box you seem to think it should be.
All the songs you chose have been very successful which proves that you don’t need to over produce a song, as can ruin the original sound and make it too clinical, you want to avoid this.
If I were to pick some badly produced songs, I would of started somewhere that actually needed the attention, ala Sean Kingstons awful over use of a vocoder??
Interesting blog, but I totally disagree!
afanku
Perfection is boring.
The Pink Floyd thing is deliberate, and mimics tape stretch as much as anything. Curiously enough it’s a mechanical effect – slow the tape platter with the palm of the hand on playback for mi
The thing is, Pink Floyd were notorious for their perfectionism — they threw out the entire original first version of “Shine On your Crazy Diamond” because some drum reverb leaked into the tracks; it was pretty much unnoticeable. Also keep in mind the subject of Dark Side — instability and madness.
The Clapton sounds like a mannerism to me, a deliberate slur or semi-stutter.
The Lennon is pretty demented, though. Then again, Lennon liked to do that sort of thing, and certainly wasn’t averse to doing things in a lo-fi manner.
I agree with the above commenters about the Floyd; I always liked that sound. Seemed to be part of the overall feel of the work to me…
I tend to agree with the first point in the conclusion: this highlights how even professional, highly-produced recordings have errors on them, and that those little things didn’t hurt their success (and probably weren’t even noticed by 99% of the audience). And no matter how much capability you have at your fingertips, eventually you just have to stop polishing and be done with it.
That said, this is a fun game :)
There is a interesting sound in Rod Stewarts “Every picture tells a Story” where someone in the background gets so into the sound that he yells “yeah”. Rather than taking away from the song, it emphasizes the spirit of the song. I think it happens right after the lyrics “Maggie, I wish I had never seen your face.”
Are you sure the “cut” on the high A in Roadiohead’s “You” is really a cut? It sounds to me like Thom might have let his voice break and wobble a bit on purpose. It’s a legitimate vocal technique — for one thing, it lets you hold high notes longer. It creates such a good effect in that moment and Thom is such a consumate and skillful singer that I have a hard time believing it was a mistake. Then again, as a singer myself, I worship Thom Yorke so maybe I just don’t want to admit anything less than perfect intent! ;-)
Sorry. The Rod Stewart recording sound is in “Every Picture Tells a Story”. The line is “But the slit eyed lady knocked me off my feet
God I was glad I found her” then in the right channel … we hear “yeah!”. Rocking baby.
Note: I’m a fan of music and modern tonal melody, but by no means an expert or audiophile.
On the vast majority, I agree with you. On a few, I questioned it but gave you the benefit of the doubt.
On the rest, since I don’t know the tracks well enough to place a context, I’m of the opinion that they’re deliberate (1) or worth commentary (n-1),
Incubus – MFTVM
– Sounds normal in what context I have, and a deliberate edit
– On re-re-re-re-review, yes it definately seems edited, but the tonal shift seems necessary to demonstrate the emotion.
J/L
– Sounds like the guitar just changed chordes (mostly)
– The singer dropping an octave actually sounds in place
– finally noticed the guitar changing chords, agree it’s an edit, but again, it stresses the intent of emotion, not the actual original sound, and I can see it justified
C/A
– Sounds like it’s revving up a beat, and building the underlying rhythm — I don’t know the song/record, so I couldn’t prove that.
– Still, it sounds like a deliberate edit, but I’ll give it’s quite possibly incompetance.
P/Fl
– I admit it sounds like a recording error, but I could also buy that their pianist slipped on the pedal — but I’m more willing to believe oversight in this one. — Either way, re-record would’ve been my choice.
You left out a classic example (that admittedly most people have never heard). Its The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Soothe” off the b-sides compilation “Pisces Iscariot”. Billy Corgan recorded it in his apartment in Chicago and in the middle of the song you can hear a bus stop to pick up passengers outside the window!
I heard a rumor that event was alluded to in his lyrics to another song with the line “the hiss that we had missed”.
[em22]
> maybe we all actually like the “wrong†natural sound that these songs have.
But (with the possible exception of Zep,) these sounds AREN’T natural. Poor edits, glitches, and autotuner abuse are studio creations, and have nothing to do with the band, or how the band sounds. Quite the opposite.
[em22]
> Music isn’t about seperating all the channels and having deadly silence in
> between vocal parts
You’re right, music isn’t about that. But music production certainly is. By definition, even!
[John Keogh]
> It sounds to me like Thom might have let his voice break and wobble a
> bit on purpose. It’s a legitimate vocal technique
Ya, I know what you mean about the vocal technique. But listen to it a few times with headphones on. There’s definitely a cut there.(I wasn’t sure at first either, but I got consensus on it from 3 friends who are audio engineers.)
[A Bofh]
> C/A – Sounds like it’s revving up a beat, and building the underlying rhythm
On reflection, I think that’s what they should have done! But the mixing engineer, Dave Pensado, discusses the issue on Gearslutz (the link I included in the article) and there’s no question: It’s headphone bleed.
I swear I can hear autotune on most modern vocal recordings, not just in sudden pitch changes, but in vocals that are absolutely uniform and precisely on pitch for a long period of time. (“long” being relative, like over half a second.)
And there is something strange, unnatural, maybe chorusy, that happens in the tone of corrected stuff. There are a lot of nuances in flapping vocal cords, and there’s a lot of math in changing flapping at 421 times per second to flapping at 420 times per second. Some of the nuances are lost.
Talented and natural beats untalented and fixed, every time.
I’m showing my age (thank me for planting the redwood trees) when I insist on bringing up the passage in “Angel Baby”, where Rosie stops singing for the standard eight-bar bridge, and the piano player — perhaps Rosie herself — either falls asleep or trys to bring the song to a close before realizing that she needs to come back and finish the thing. Whatever the reason, the piano playing falters. It’s a classic moment.
I hear autotune blips like the one from that DC clip all the time, and it annoys the hell out of me. Whether it’s more annoying on an obviously (usually) good vocalist or obviously terrible one is up for debate though…
An example of some lousy editing just recently: Kins of Leon – On Call
Horrible clipping of the echo in the lead singers voice after almost each line in the choris.
I’m on call, to be there. (MAJOR CLIP)
One and all, to be there. (MAJOR CLIP)
And When I fall, to pieces. (Major CLIP)
Lord you know, I’ll be there waiting
The song is great except for this one tiny little extremely avoidable decision.
Since you took the time to write it, I figure you desergve to know I’m talking about you behind your back. Reposted from alt-country.org in a thread discussing your list:
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