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Looper's Delight
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<the first take broke down> This expression has nothing whatsoever to do with the tape literally breaking down. It refers to when a band in a recording session would make such a bad musical mistake that the whole recording had to be stopped and recorded over again. Before the advent of digital recording, a band had to play a song from the start to the finish as perfectly as possible in order to get a good recording. This could be very demoralizing in a band setting because you might have every single person playing flawlessly in a take and if the drummer made a bad mistake in the finally chorus, the whole song had to stop and be recorded from scratch again. Of course, in those days some things were fixable with punch ins and we really got good at being able to reproduce exact performances to be able to fix things, but if the whole band made a booboo, you just had to stop and start over again. Even when playing to a click track it was incredibly problematic to try and physically splice one well recorded portion of a song onto another. It was done occasionally but it was extremely rare in most recording studios, especially more inexpensive local recording studios. In hundreds and hundreds of recording sessions I never experienced the tape physically breaking to stop a take. I"m sure it may have happened but I am certain this is not what these phrases refer to. DIGITAL RECORDING That all changed in the 80's with the advent of digital recording and digital crossfading. Since the advent of digital recording and the proliferation of relatively inexpensive ADAT digital 8 track recording machines in the 80's, many full band recording sessions could be continued if a band, as an example, played a great verse but then screwed up the performance of the next chorus of a song. I'll never forget the very first ADAT recording session I was at. I was blown away because as soon as we screwed up the first chorus, the engineer said, "Everybody play along with the tape and I'll punch in the entire band on the down beat of the chorus." We did, he punched it in and on playback we were astonished to not be able to hear the punch. The ADAT allowed for digital crossfading between the two sections of the song. This was amazing!!!!! It so radically sped up the process of getting so called basic tracks recorded in a studio that it wasn't funny. In a way, it also meant that bands did not have to be as proficient musically. Even in a pop song it is frequently difficult to play perfectly for 3 to 5 or 6 minutes. Digital recording allowed bands to just play for one section of a song. When I first tracked bass guitar parts, engineering myself on an ADAT, I had just learned how to play bass by learning the beautiful and melodic bass lines that my wife had composed for her project Lackadaisy, that I was producing at the time. The bass player quit before the recording started and Chris (my wife) had been struggling with a bit of tendinitis so she wanted to eschew playing the more physical bass lines herself. She gave me one bass line that was just out of my league technically on a song called "Still Live on Mars" (the title track). I'll never forget learning that bass line, one or two bars at a time...........using a click track and the crossfade possibilities of the ADAT. On the record you are literally hearing a bassist who could not possibly and physically play that bass line from start to finish like in the old analogue tape recording days. Amazingly, it sounds great having recorded it, one bar at a time all the way through the piece. Now if you hear the phrase "the first take broke down" it generally means that the computers have crashed..................lol.