Yesterday I was watching a YouTube
video
with record producer Tony Visconti diving into the multi-track recordings of two
T-Rex songs, "Jeepster" and "Ride a white swan". "Jeepster" was started in Los
Angeles and was recorded on 16 track, but Visconti points out that he was used
to working with 8 track recorders and so only about 12 tracks were used, leaving
4 empty. "Ride a white swan" was recorded at Trident Studios on 1 July 1970 and was an 8 track recording. Visconti played the various tracks and noted
that they initially recorded three tracks of backing vocals that were bounced
down to one track, freeing up two tracks.
Wait a minute - Van der Graaf Generator recorded "The least we can do" at the
end of December 1969 at Trident studios, at least four months before "Ride a white swan". All of
the songs bar one were recorded on 8 tracks, but the final song, "After the
flood", was recorded on 16 tracks. There were problems with aligning the 16
track machine which is why recording that song took longer than the
others.
So if Trident had fixed their 16 track machine by the end of December 1969,
why was Visconti recording T-Rex on 8 tracks several months later? It's not as
if Visconti misremembered, as he played each one of the eight tracks. At this
stage in their career, T-Rex was still considered a dippy, trippy act ("Ride a
white swan" was their first hit) so Marc Bolan would not have been paying for
the recording time. Maybe the record company didn't want to pay the extra cost for
using the 16 track machine.
A conundrum to which I will probably never find the answer.
This day in history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Little criminals | Randy Newman | |
| 407 | Continuing the diet | Diet, Acupuncture | |
| 757 | Walking with the GPS | Health, Mobile phone | |
| 1073 | Literature review - I don't believe this! | ERP, DBA | |
| 1169 | Vinyl log #29 - 17 September | Vinyl log, City Boy | |
| 1425 | Popup menus: a misconception | Programming, Delphi |
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