The Smiley Smile Message Board

This is something i've wondered for a long time and have never really found an answer. During sessions, when the musicians were going through takes and the tape was rolling, why would tape continue rolling in between takes instead of pausing to save tape? It is a gift from God that we have the in between takes stuff, but it seems odd that this was common practice. Especially when you consider that this was a time when recordings were considered disposable, and you have examples like Columbia throwing out the GV vocal tapes a mere months after the single was released. Obviously a different time than today. No one back then could have ever guessed that there would be archival box set releases of stuff that was being made then. Yet here we have an immensely revealing document of what happened then, perfectly suited for stuff like these box sets. I'm also wondering, was this common practice in all studios? With all groups? When did they start doing it this way and when did that stop being the norm? 

i think we were just really lucky

I'm no expert in this area, but I get the impression that Brian was an exception - certainly, there's very little Beatles session chat from Abbey Road, and I believe that one of the engineers stated that they only rolled tape during actual takes.

Additionally, Brian built the tracks in the studio, and could well have taken log tapes home to go over (it's an established fact that Chuck routinely ran a 2-track slave in the control room).

Oh there is pauses when Brian goes out in the main room to teach the guys stuff, when he was confident they guys new their parts it was basicly just nailing the songs, and who knew they might get something good so why not keep the tape running?

I think the answer is simple. Chuck Britz was a figment of Brian's crazy imagination, so there wasn't actually anyone there to stop the tape. Spooky eh?

I think you pretty much nailed it.  George Martin has made mention that in the sixties it was EMI's practice to conserve tape whenever possible.  That is why unfortunately almost no rehearsals of Beatles songs exist.  Martin has mentioned that he did tape their rehearsals (when they were learning a particular song) but would then reuse the tape when they started tracking proper takes.  That is why a number of Beatles multi-track tapes have rehearsals at the end of them due to the fact that the proper takes didn't always erase all of the rehearsals they taped over.

You would think that if this was EMI policy that Capitol Record would've fallen in line behind it's parent company but again maybe Brian was the exception although it should be noted that it appears from the snippets included on their boxset that The Mamas And The Papas also recorded continuously as well although they were obviously signed to a different label.

I don't know the answer to this, but I will say studios charged their clients (say, Capitol) for recording tape in addition to studio time. Not to be cynical, but maybe if Brian didn't explicitly say ""stop," they just kept rolling. George Martin, btw, worked for the client, Parlophone, not the studio. Dunno who paid Chuck. Andrew might. Good thing for us in any event.
Also, stopping and re-starting a multitrack in those days wasn't as simple as hitting Pause twice, and no engineer likes to be caught missing something magical.

I don't know either but apparently Brian either requested it or didn't mind. You hear the group questioning saving all of the unused takes instead of recording over failed takes. The engineer says he doesn't know why, he wasn't told to, and asked if they want him to record over. Does anybody direct him to do different? I don't remember Brian, the producer, giving any direction even when asked directly. Did he?

Brian was special apparently and was given free rein by everyone it seems, Brian said jump and everybody asked how high. It wasn't normal to spend a whole or several sessions on one song either.

yeah unfortuantly they didn't push "pause" and kept it paused while recording SIP....

SIP was recorded on Pro-Tools.  ;D

Say what you want regarding the album as a whole, but there was nothing to complain about with the vocals. There are a few songs on SIP that get more play time than say, MIU or the 85 album.

I have the full Unsurpassed Masters Set, it wants to talk to you.

One of the Wrecking Crew - it may have been Hal Blaine - revealed one of Phil Spector's working methods in the studio. He would have what I believe they used to call a "journal reel" recording everything that happened in the studio. It could be as simple as running an aux output to a tape machine to capture everything that was going into that board and being heard in the control room, including effects and fader moves (as we hear later with Brian and others). As the musicians started warming up, rehearsing parts, messing around, etc, Spector would have a tape of all of it.

Therefore, he could say "play that drum fill that you did between takes 4 and 5", and they'd ask "What?". Then Spector had the tape to play back. Some of Spector's sessions leaked, but I couldn't say if they're the "journal reels" or something totally different.

I think Brian had a similar reel running. If you notice the chronology, the early BB's sessions didn't really have as much of this session chat and whatnot on tape. But his sessions with the Wrecking Crew are full of takes, banter, etc. They're still not complete, but as Brian got more successful (i.e. bigger budget, more clout, etc) and could run reel after reel of tape on demand, and as he got more into working as Spector did in the studio, I'm sure the "journal reel" idea became part of his regular session methods.

Some of the better audio verite material on that Monkees "Headquarters Sessions" box set came from a similar journal reel that was compiled, edited, and thankfully saved for posterity by producer Chip Douglas, who either saw the value of saving it even in '67 or just wanted to document his work with the band. On that set you can hear some really cool engineering stuff going on, like adding compression to a guitar track, etc.

I honestly don't know why more bands did not do this...and that is why the original question and discussion is such a good one: we miss a lot of history by bands not recording sessions, if you're into that part of the history.

There aren't any rehearsals of Beatles songs on any bootlegs except the "Think For Yourself" session from November, 1965 and of course the "Get Back Sessions".  Everything else is proper takes of songs.

I recall someone else having explained this to me the same way....a separate tape deck running throughout the sessions.  Hence the infamous Murry tapes.

That was Chuck's 2-track slave.  ;D

Not so.  The Beatles [aka White Album] Deluxe boots have stacks -- there are, for instance, 44 minutes of 'Blackbird' rehearsals.

True but I'm talking multi-tracks.  The "Blackbird" rehearsals are from film reels.  The point being generally speaking EMI did not preserve rehearsals of Beatles songs with the exception of "Think For Yourself".  Now there are some that were inadvertently preserved on the end of multi-track reels but that is just because the material recorded on top of them weren't enough to wipe the rehearsals.

True enough.

And the reason why Think For Yourself was saved was to gather Beatles quips, jokes, and one-liners to edit into one of the Christmas records, wasn't that the case? If I remember that was done specifically to use for a purpose.

I got the impression that not only was EMI very cheap, but they didn't seem to place the Beatles in much higher regard than any of their "serious" clientele, who sold a fraction of the records as the Beatles. I don't think saving and archiving session reels would be an EMI deal, although I'm guessing if The Beatles themselves wanted to do it, they'd pay the bill and roll tape. For whatever reason, there isn't much of that available so they must not have wanted it, beyond the proper takes. And up to a certain time, the guy who was in charge of running the tape machine was in a separate room than the actual artists, board, studio, engineer, and producer! They communicated by intercom...which is absolutely absurd. And it was changed.

Of course, remember the big issue is that The Beatles as a self-contained band worked differently than the super-producers like Spector, Brian, etc. Spector and Brian depended on outsiders to come up with brilliant parts sometimes by accident where The Beatles knew each other and simply rehearsed like they had done in Liverpool, and they could read each other. A Spector session Monday might have 4 different players than his session Thursday...assembly line versus a core band. "Self contained" might be the operative word. Just a thought.

EMI was certainly cheap.  Ringo tells a story that when they got this new multi-track recorder in they didn't spring for the plug so they could plug the thing in.  I think somewhere George also told a hilarious story about EMI trying to conserve toliet paper or something.  Can't remember all the details on that one.

Elvis has quite a few sessions seemingly preserved. There are pauses but there is a lot of studio chatter with him. My 2 cents is that the more bootleged artists have a kind of folowing where people dig up this kind of thing. Myself I would love to hear session tapes of some of the more obscure bands I like buit nobody's bothered to find them and I certainly don't know how to get them if they do exist. Why were these tapes left on for The Beach Boys is probably that Brian probably wanted to study the tapes when he was making decisions early on. From 1967-77 they often used Brian's studio and later Brother and they all liked to work with older ideas and old tapes from time to time.

And hasn't it been proven that the much of the Time To Get Alone boot as well as significant other portions of leaked session material going back to 1982 (not SOT stuff, think Please Let Me Wonder vocal takes, Do You Wanna Dance vocal takes, Don't Talk rehearsal and take 1) come from tape copies from Chuck's slave? Not saying Chuck was the source, of course.

It would be very interesting to locate a first-generation copy of that 1982 material, as it has something on it that apparently isn't in the vaults -- a doubled lead vocal for "Do You Wanna Dance" (on the a cappella version).  Mark could theoretically sync up that tape with the instrumental multitrack to create the true stereo version of that song -- something he wasn't willing to do for the singles box set, because he only had a single-tracked lead on the multitrack.

Lee

There are even some early studio sessions of The Beatles that don't even exist anymore. Their version of "Tip of My Tongue" is a good example. This was a song that was recorded but then discarded. I think that when there was a recording that was rejected by a group or producer, the tape was either erased and reused, or simply thrown away. I think this practice was stopped at around 1964.