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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Interesting stuff. The Clapton “powpower”- when making our band demo years ago, I remember hearing the same faint pre-echo preceding every song, it sounds like the same cause, just louder. Must be an reel-to-reel analog tape thing…
Green Day’s Long View has a mysterious shout in the middle of it after Billy Joe says ” …Call me what you will.” It’s real obvious. I’ve always wondered what the hell it was though.
My all-time pick for most noticeable, most distracting, and hardest to get anyone else to hear or identify occurs in the left channel of the Smashing Pumpkins song Hummer at about 5:57. It’s a tone of about a half second that’s completely out of place. Billy’s like Floyd. Not really the kind of guy to let something like that go, so I can’t really explain it.
Go here : http://www.eastern-crates.com/slide-hampton-vaclav-zahradnik-big-band-bs/ and listen to track B2
(or just use this link :
http://www.eastern-crates.com/files/vzbs/3.m3u )
and listen to that (great) track up until 7:36, there is a absolutely horrible tape-cut there.
Not quite as noticeable as the tambourine in the Beatles song, but on U2′s Achtung Baby, at the 3:10 mark of “Ultraviolet/Light My Way”, Larry drops a drumstick. There’s about 5 seconds there where it’s pretty noticeable that the drums aren’t what they should be… From what I’ve heard, Larry badly wanted to fix it, but the rest of the band liked the raw nature of it and insisted it be left in!
Check out the reverb on the vocal in On Call by Kings of Leon when Jared sings ‘..be there…’.
It cuts out really unnaturally and it just jumps out as being wrong.
This is inexcusable for a modern band on a big label, surely they have a producer good enough to sort that out?
This song was really big in the UK as well
Awesome blog, and very interesting finds, but I have to disagree you with on one of them. In the Incubus clip you posted, the change is not accidental. The singer sings it the same way live, and unless I’m mistaken I think the clip was all in one take.
You are all morons missin the point and hearing things that arent there. Please feel free to post your flawless recordings.
On one of Velvet Revolvers newer singles “The Last Fight” at about 3:07 Scott Weiland sniffles… must be dippin in on that rock star lifestyle again… REALLY easy to pick out.
Btw, the high note on Radiohead’s ‘you’ is actually a top b.
Hasn’t anyone noticed the mess-up in Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, around just before 4.43?
another good one is on billy joel’s “downeastern alexa”…going from the chorus to the second verse, there is a cut in the vocal takes (when i was younger i always wondered how he did it with his voice….finally realized there are just 2 takes put together badly).
go listen to weezer’s pinkerton album for TONS of errors that were left of purposly to add to the raw nature of the album. for instance, at the beginning of across the sea…you can hear someone walking and shutting a door after the piano stops. also, the voice at the beginning of falling for you was from a radio transmition picked up through the amp. the band felt it worked because of the japanese theme to the album (even tho the voice is in korean!)
the point of these are just to have fun…..
Has anyone ever noticed when Paul McCartney comes in on Eleanor Rigby his vocals are both in the left and the right speakers ? than they abruptly cut him out of the left channel. It happens for a split second at around the 14 second mark. Clearly a mixing glitch but then again who cares ? :) Revolver has to be the best album ever made !!!!
Just passing by, I noticed this article and found it rather interesting, I’ve always been quite curious about studio quirks.
But I must point out a few notable studio mistakes that no one here has mentioned yet:
1- While You See A Chance (Steve Winwood): two mistakes in one track.
First, I found out that the synth intro was quickly made to replace another intro that Steve accidentally erased while recording the vocals, of which only an audible faint tambourine track remained. The most noticeable blooper appears 3’55” into the song, on the line “and there’s nothing left worth knowing”: when he double-tracked it, he mistakenly sang “NO ONE left worth knowing” on the second vocal and never corrected it! So, it sounds like some kind of “nothlong” thing.
2- Lifeline (Spandau Ballet): in the passage from the second verse to the chorus (right before the harmonized “Lifeline”) there’s something squeaking…could it be a badly edited tape?
3- Atomic (Blondie): right after the bass solo, two bars of kick drum and suddenly there’s a weird reverbed guitar note sounding, followed by some feedback. My theory is that the bass was punched-in to replace a not-so-great guitar solo, but the tape-op pressed the stop button too early and left the guitarist’s crappy ending for posterity!
OK, that’s all for now, I hope you all can manage to check out these examples for yourselves, they are striking in the fact that they all belong to such a precise-studio-work-influenced musical decade as the 80′s.
Ciao a tutti
Lorenzo
P.S. great blog, keep it up!
This one is REALLY obvious… U2 Unforgettable fire title track. Larry starts too early with stick clicks… stops… mumbling is heard (Adam asking “what the f**k are you doing?!” well probabaly not :), but you DO hear someone speaking, and he restarts again. I’ve heard it so many times its become part of the song for me and adds to the ambiance… but listening to it with virgin ears, youre like, “What the hell?”
There’s a couple more in some Beatles songs.
In the original version of Long and Winding Road, toward the end of the song, at about 3:14 after the line “Don’t keep me waiting” you can hear Paul repeat that line in the bleed over from the scratch vocal.
In Hey Jude, at about 2:57, you can hear Lennon in the background yell something like “Oh….fucking hell.”
A lot of bleed overs from scratch vocals were apparent then.
“A lot of bleed overs from scratch vocals were apparent then.”
There’s a classic example of this on Babe I’m Gonna Leave you off Led Zeppelin’s first album: At 1:42 you can clearly hear the scratch vocal in the background (the line’s “I can hear it calling me”) doing a vocal line TOTALLY different from the take that was actually used. It sticks out a mile.
Still one of my favourite songs, though.
“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!”
I prefer other teaching methods and don’t like pointy fingers… well, I’m just an amateur.
I agree with most but the Incubus example. He does that a lot with his voice. I have a live DVD that sounds the same.
I actually agree with the article as far as the incubus song goes. It’s such an old “producer’s trick” to grab an edit during a change in timber instead of replacing a whole word. And as a little secret — producers will do these types of things all the time as either inside jokes or just to be able to say they DID them. I mean seriously, imagine spending 12 hours a pop in a closed room in front of a screen and/or console listening to the same music over and over and over and over. Producers will do these things sometimes just to break the monotony.
Nothing personal to anyone, but I seriously doubt if anyone here who disagrees with the article actually listened to that example more than once. It’s definitely an edit. And you can tell because, not only does the singer’s voice’s timber change, but the ambient timber changes as well.
Another U2 one-
In the original version of “Staring at the Sun” (the one from Pop, NOT the re-edit from Best of 1990-2000) there’s a really obvious vocal track edit that happens (if I recall correctly) around the lines “I’m nearly great but there’s something missing/I left it in the duty free area…”
Nice blog, I like to read what others are thinking and saying about the industry. I have a son that spends weeks on a song and really ruins his hearing and the takes by overproducing and trying to correct every mistake and every glitch. There’s a good friend of mine that also drives himself crasy with perfection and never seems to acomplish much. If you’re getting out there and people are listenning, then be happy, do the best you can, be proud of what you do. You will always have the critics, thank God for them, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do at the time. One of my demos was produced in Canada before I had the perfect take and it has become one of my most downloaded songs to date. Loved the blog, but take it in stride and do your best no matter what part of the whole you play.
Watch the recent John Lennon Plastic Ono Band Classic Album DVD to prove your assumption wrong about Lennon’s Working Class Hero. As well, track down an interview with Alan Parsons about the speed increase at the end of Great Gig. It was done on purpose for no other reason than just to do it. No glitch.
Oh! you left out a so infamous example: In the Michael Jackson’s song “Beat it” you can hear someone knocking at the recording room. It can be heard at minute 2:45 before the Van Halen’s guitar solo kicks in. It’s now a natural part of the song to me and I have even seen back tracks to the song that include that knocking lol!!!
Listen to “Every Picture Tells A Story” Rod comes in early…he says, “I sincerely felt I was so complete..” Then he flubs with an early “Lo…look how wrong you can be” Classic! And very obvious!
Actually that’s the backing singer that comes in early.
That is a great one though, I ALWAYS hear that.
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