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
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Surprised I haven’t seen this one mentioned yet…listen to the very end of Guns & Roses’ “You Could Be Mine”. I remember working in FM radio when that song was out (the height of Terminator 2 anticipation, for which this song was the theme), and putting on my headphones to prepare for a break and backsell.
I noticed that the verrrrry long note Axl holds at the end has some sort of crossfade edit. My PD and I used to laugh about it a lot, figuring he threw a long wail in at the end of the song just to show he could, but we were pretty sure he “couldn’t”.
Absolutely superb article.
Since I’ve been loving you is my hi-fi test track. If you can’t hear the squeeky pedal the stereo sucks. If you can hear Robert Plant breathing in before lines then we’re in business.
Age has deprived me of ability to hear some of the ‘obvious’ flaws cited here. Is that bad or good?
Everybody in all these posts has a good point. But in the end, its only music. You can choose to make it photoshop perfect or you can leave it raw. There will always be a human element in anything we do. Perfect or not, it is, what it is. Imperfection is perfection! But one rule of music is universal. Whatever music we make and whatever method we choose to edit it, it must move you. All these songs had all these imperfections but yet they sold millions, why? Because they move the listener. Autotune or not, over produced or not. Move me please!!! Who freaking cares if i can hear a mouse pharting in the mic on track 7, lol. Who made these standards anyways? Just Be…
Every time I hear BTO Takin Care of Business, I cringe when the guitar solo comes up for how flat it is. I take it that a decision was made to keep the track because the energy level was good. I’ve never heard Bachman refer to it, but considering how picky he professes to be, even if the engineer missed it, Randy should have realised it even as he was laying it down. I wonder how it got to vinyl?
Hmm that was weird, my comment got eaten. Anyway I desired to say that it is good to know that someone else also mentioned this as I experienced trouble finding the same info elsewhere. This was the first place that told me the answer. Many thanks.new weight loss
Kings Of Leon song supposedly has a gated reverb on the vocals (i.e. they wanted it to sound big and then suddenly cut off).
Not a mistake. It may be that you don’t like it but they deliberately chose to make it sound like that.
Ice Ice Baby: Vanilla Ice’s sample of the bass line in Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” has a 60hz hum under it – as if they used a turntable that wasn’t grounded. I never understood how that made it all the way from mixdown to master and nobody caught it.
On a lot of their recordings, the Beatles left stuff on tape that these day’s would be deemed highly un-acceptable in the sterile brave new world of recording. If you ever listen to the multi tracks of A Day In The Life, on one of the tracks the amount of back ground noises and even chatter is really surprising, pretty cool too. Could be that multi tracking was still basic and studio time more expensive that if you could get away with it…you did.
Christian said (summed up):
March 8, 2010 at 9:23 pm – “It’s got a human element. In the end, no matter the path taken, it is still very much music.”
I could not reply more perfectly that this. For instance, the Lennon track needed this necessary change in timbre.. He sounds tired (like a working class hero). It adds a certain spark to the piece and that is what makes a GREAT producer.. choosing the bits and pieces (no matter how devised) that make a special recording which enters the brain on a deep level for most of the people most of the time.
“Out On The Weekend” by Neil Young (from “Harvest”)
Just before Neil goes into the harmonica solo, you can hear him scrape it across the microphone.
“Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd
Just before the acoustic guitar comes in, in the beginning, you can hear Gillmour cough and then sniffle.
A perfect example of a compressor being used badly/incorrectly is the Alanis Morrisette album “Jagged Little Pill”. There are many examples on here of Vocals jumping out at you, and sibiliance to the maximum.
Hey excellent blog, very impressed!
I just noticed one in one of my favorite songs of all time – “Kickstand” by Soundgarden…an amazing little minute.5 slice of poppy-punky rock on Superunknown. There’s some sort of slapback delay added to the chorus line “come stand me up…come stand me up…” But whoever was “automating” this slapback either missed their cue to the last verse (reprise of the first verse), and it slaps back the first syllable of that verse, “Kickstand you got..” at 1:07. Miniscule, yes…have I listened to the song for years without looking for it…yes…is it because I was listening to it with noise cancelling headphones…probably. But now that I’m a studio engineer/mixer I look for these things and I want to attribute it to laziness but maybe someone just honestly missed it. In 2014 (20th anniversary) I demand a remix, please!!! :)
If you want to hear some examples of letting it all go for the vibe, check out ANY Van Morrison track! The vocals and horns are so pitchy you could bale hay with them! Lucky I wasn’t the engineer, I’d have stopped tape PLENTY of times! :-D
Re: Roxanne. I don’t think that’s a punch as much as a tape splice. Back in those days the “Hit Producers” would rearrange songs completely sometimes with a razor blade on the master tape. Artists had little to say about it, and often weren’t even present. The engineers of course, were there to realize the producers vision, and not to argue technicalities.
Really cool article, and it makes me feel all the more accomplished knowing hit songs aren’t always perfect recordings.
I don’t know why I’m commenting on this, but I feel like I have to say two things:
1) I don’t think it’s fair to say that Christina Aguilera’s headphone bleed is a cop-out, and I especially don’t think it’s fair to blame the mixing engineer for a tracking engineer’s bleeding. Christina probably could have done another take because she is just such a great vocalist, but Dave said it himself, “that was one of the most honest vocal performances I had EVER heard.” Plenty of producers decide every day to use the scratch vocal, and they learn to deal with the microphone bleed. I’m sure Dave was echoing Linda Perry and even Ron Fair when he said what a great take that is, and I’m POSITIVE that a production of that caliber didn’t at least consider a low-bleed overdub. They probably did one and decided that it didn’t have the same honest magic as the bleeding take that was used. But everyone involved in that song has great ears and a lot of mixing resources so I’m sure they knew the bleed was there; this was some heavy-handed tape edit mistake like some of the other ones in this article.
2) I agree with others on this forum; “Roxanne” sounds more like a tape splice to me. The attack of the r in “roxanne” is missing, as well as the breath before it. In the first example you can definitely hear him inhale. A punch would have been more obvious in that you’d hear a cut-off inhale or less of the r sound, and if they were at a point where they were punching I doubt the reverb would be on the same track as the vocals.
Still though, I think it must also be said that the engineers probably weren’t “lazy” in any of these recordings. These are all examples of hit records that were either signed by big labels or were artists who were already successful. In no way were these examples taken from ballsy, experimental records that might yield a lenient, cheap engineer. People put money into this stuff, and I’m sure that at some point there were more than person listening to these songs and deciding that the mistakes were worth it. I’m sure the engineers knew about it and told their producer, who probably didn’t care because the music and the performances make each of these recordings work.
Oh wow, how have I never heard these before? I guess I’ve never really paid too much attention to the mixing in pop songs…probably because I don’t listen to many pop songs in general hehe.
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