Immediacy and Impulse: The Vibration of the Take

Reflecting on my continuing fascination with recorded music in the After The Goldrush feature,  I couldn't articulate it better than that fascination being rooted in the recording process' ability to "capture a real performance, and in so doing, document a moment that can move you." It's what M C Taylor called the 'vibration of the take'. Below we collect some of our favourite thoughts on the topic:

“I got the chance to go back after hours and tried to improve some things and I realised it wasn’t possible. It was part of something that happened at the moment and you just couldn’t change it. It might have been more perfect, but it wasn’t as good. So I just said, That’s it. He knew what he was doing and this is how the baby came out. Honour the moment….I wish there was more of that stuff in music because as grateful as we are for the technology to do things we couldn’t do early on, sometimes we get seduced trying to get things perfect when actually I don’t think there is such a thing. Desire just has a feel to it. It’s visual. Bob was like a painter who was throwing paint on a canvas, but he knew what he was doing.” 

 

Emmylou Harris on recording Desire (as told to Mojo Magazine)
 

The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Daytrotter

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretense."

 Neil Young

"Don't spend too much time or too many takes on each song, try to capture the vibration of the first couple of takes even if it means leaving mistakes in. Keep overdubs to a minimum unless the song is begging for something special. Immediacy and impulse."

 M C Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

"At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

 Otis Redding

“[On Mirage Rock] a less-is-more approach freed up a lot of mental space just to enjoy the moment, I'd also say it stopped us from worrying too much about what we sounded like or what we can program into a computer to make it sound more cohesive. It was more organic, haphazard even, and I think that is so important when making a record. Because of modern technology, it's so easy to over think the process and lose focus on the actual songs. That was the most enjoyable part of the whole experience for me, and hopefully it's something I'll take away and use in the future.”

Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)