The Alan Boyd Thread
Joshilyn Hoisington:
Alan, I have a question about "Friends" era tapes. And I suppose 20/20 as well.
At that point, what was the general "track-to-vocal" track ratio? To your knowledge, was there a lot of bouncing down going on or do most of the the master 8-tracks have all the elements of the final master?
For instance, how many tracks was the instrumental mix of "Be With Me" on Hawthorne spread across?
Alan Boyd:
Yes.... and yes.
With the eight track masters there was often some track bouncing going on - the basic track would be spread out over several tracks, and then these would be mixed down to two or four tracks, leaving several open for vocals. On almost all of the eight track recordings, everything is there on the multitrack masters - usually there was no further overdubbing as they mixed down 8 to 2 or 8 to 1.
"Be With Me" is a good example of this. Here are the documented tracks from the first generation master:
Master
1 - Horn
2 - Horns OD
3 - Flutes
4 - Drums OD
5 - Drums - bass
6 - Picolo
7 - Rhodes
8 - Fife
After this, the song was dubbed dwon, the basic track mixed down to leave room for overdubs and vocals:
Leader - Dubdown 1
1 - brass
2 - brass OD
3 - flute
4 - keyboard rhythm
5 - vocal
6 - vocal
7
8 - strings
Alan
Joshilyn Hoisington:
Thanks, as always, so much. I really appreciate the time you take to fill me in on this stuff.
Joshilyn Hoisington:
Another tape related question:
On a lot of the post Surfer Girl LP/Pre All Summer Long LP stuff, we've got the interesting stereo mixes where the track is dead center, Brian's double-tracked lead is off to one side, and the group vocals are off hard to the other side.
How did they pull this off with 3 or 4 track tape? Track, Brian, Brian, Group, Group equals five tracks. At first I figured they did some of it live to the final mix, but then how would they do the stereo mix with all the correct vocal doubles?
Some examples would be Warmth of the Sun or Don't Worry Baby.
c-man:
Are you sure Brian's leads are doubled in these examples? (at the moment I'm just too lazy to check). I always thought Bri's lead on "DWB" was single-tracked, and he sang a falsetto part with the group on the other track. The stabs of lead guitar were recorded along with one of the vocal tracks, if I remember right. And the first track has the band's basic track. So three tracks total. IF I remember right.
Not sure about "WOTS". Now, they may have done some pre-mixes to a "second generation" multi-track...they were definitely doing a lot of that by the time of the "Today!" album.
C-Man
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page