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Speaking of tracking and drum machines and BeeGees


Bookumdano2

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There's a cool documentary thing going on now at the BBC radio station with mostly playbacks of isolated BeeGees tracks ranging from their 1967 approach and on to the later Criteria stuff. Cool to listen to.

 

I spent a lot of time at Criteria and its interesting to hear the tone of the rooms on just drums.. just clavinet .. etc . Along with the human irregularities in the playing. Which with daws and grids et, we don't often hear now.

 

The isolated analog tape slap + dry vocal of Barry's lead vocal for "You Should Be Dancing" is very interesting to hear too. Isolated snips of vocal harmonies, drop ins/outs of strings, studio bleed on overdubs ... all kinds of isolated little warts and snips that are cool. Along with comments from Robin, Karl, etc.

 

An interesting thing about their studio work in the 60's ... the brothers were granted unlimited studio time from their first deal on (which was rare), so although they initially only had 4 tracks to work with, if they'd get to a point in tracking and bouncing where they felt thiings weren't right ... and of course bounces could not be "undone".... they'd simply just start all over again tracking from square one !!!! Can you imagine ???

 

The doc also plays the drum "loop" the guys grabbed from the MCI machine for the completed "Night Fever" multitrack ... which they then recorded to a 2nd MCI and then used that to "build" You should be dancing. Except they kept starting over, speeding up the loop over and over until they arrived at the tempo the song now has. Then built from there. Which changed the tone of the drums quite bit from the Night fever raw track. Side by side A-B of the drums. Cool to hear !!

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