... and even the pros get it wrong every now and then

[chris p]

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/08/23/10-recording-bloopers-that-made-the-album/

There's a few of these sorts of threads around, but I like this one because it highlights many of the same errors that I have made in some of my projects - including the squeaky kick drum pedal. In my case I had put in a LPF to trim it out, but my feed to reverb was ahead of the filter in the chain (noob error to which I confess), so the squeak wan't there but its reverb was!

Anyone else feel the urge to confess after listening? At least I don't have any tape wobble.

[Chinagraf]

When I was younger I engineered a bunch of kids albums. We did an amazing version of twinkle twinkle little star a la the Beachboys 'Surfer Girl' harmony wise. I though it would be good to do the vocals in the control room all together around one mic which sounded great except we also had an MCI 24 track in there as well that had a little squeak on one of it's hubs, which became a huge squeak after you tracked up a lot of passes. No way I could get everyone back in to re-sing as it was all improvised on the spot. I didn't notice till I was mixing and I had to add a track of crickets chirping in the background of the mix to kind of mask/disguise it. The artist thought the crickets were a stroke of genius and I never confessed why I had added them to the track.

[wez]

Some days I hear edits in real life. I really need to get out more.

[rightintheface]

The guy that wrote that article sounds like such a whingy bitch... just sayin!
The beatles one is just ridiculous - he even admits that it's musical himself, why the hell would you drop an entire take because of a tambourine drop? And a bit of tape warble during DSOTM... who gives a rats! If anything, it ADDS to it!

I recorded an acoustic duo at my old place, as a rookie with condensers blazing despite no acoustic treatment or anything in the room. You could hear birds very faintly chirping towards the end of one track, but it sounded great!! The duo loved it, I loved it, so out it went.

[chris p]

Your point Mitch is entirely valid. I had a take where the songwriter laughed in the background during a harmony vocal line by the soloist, but it was beautifully timed and it fitted with the vibe of the song perfectly - not to mention that the harmony line in question was both spontaneous and utterly mesmerising.

The issue is that I do aim for production and engineering quality. I also recognise that performance is everything and my role is to get out of the way of an artist doing their thang. The reality is that these two perspective collide more often than you might think.

I knew about the Beatles' tambourine before the article, but however "musical" it might be said to be, I have always heard it as a mistake. I don't think it belongs in the song, and for me its a distraction.

So the production question raised by this thread remains. How do you make the call between deadlines, artistic merit and perfection?

[wez]

One of my daily production mantras is... once you've decided to leave a 'mistake' in, it's no longer a mistake but a production decision.

I could give countless examples... but the track I'm working on now was recorded in a freezing house in the otways with a wood fire burning in the same room. every couple of minutes you hear the fire crackle or a log shift... and that sense of space, that feeling of capturing a moment in time is what will stay with me every time I hear that song in the future. That's the sort of thing I want to take away from every recording I do.