Overdubbing Quotes

I don't like overdubs, never liked them.

It's so easy to make albums with overdubbing and editing these days, but I really prefer playing live and just getting the music to sound right because the musicians, the songs and the performances are good.

Singing and playing live can be difficult. Like, in the studio, I would record either the music track first or the vocal first. I don't necessarily do them together.

Trent likes to record guitars direct, whereas I've always preferred playing through an amplifier.

Before I joined The Beach Boys, I was working at Columbia Records as a producer, and saw The Byrds come in and do their first overdub before Terry even met them.

Whenever I record more than two or three layers, it starts to get cluttered up, and you can't hear the cut of the guitars as good. It's hard to get four guitars to hit at exactly the same time and keep the attack tight.

After discovering the Ramones, I discovered really crude ways to multi-track by taking another cassette recorder and plugging that into the eight-track, playing it back, so that as I was recording with the mic in my guitar, I could have another cassette player I had recorded on feeding into the recording.

I felt that the studio recording process makes you stand still too long.

Everything is minimal, and if it's over, it's over. We're abrupt with things: in and out. Especially if it's an overdub - it's gone. It does something that's not real.

I loved the idea of recording. The idea of sound-on-sound-recording captured me as a young kid, and once I realized what it was I had an epiphany. Before I was even playing the guitar, I would create these lists of how I would record things and overdub them, like Led Zeppelin song, 'I could put this guitar on this track...' and so on.

Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?

I love the weird overdub style, like 'The Madcap Laughs' by Syd Barrett, where you can tell it's being overdubbed and it's kind of warbly. It creates a different experience. Or the 'White Album,' where you can tell it's overdubbing. But there's something about a band in a room - it's a feeling you can't replicate. There's a feel to the music.

It all comes down to what you truly love doing, and what I love doing is overdubbing and making new sounds out of things that are sometimes quite ordinary on their own, but when you put them together, they make something new--or something that sounds new. Just discovering things like that musically is a pleasure.

I'd sometimes do 50, 60 takes of song.

It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.

You just went right in and just recorded songs and listened them, and if there were any mistakes, then we would correct them and just went on... one take or two take.

There's nothing I love more in the world than layering voices.

I used to link up boom boxes, record one take, play it into another boom box then play all that back into the other one until I had six tracks. It was unlistenable!

There's a certain urgency that comes from the records of the early 60s before overdubbing and multitracking came into play.

The number of times that anything is overdubbed on 'Frampton Comes Alive!'... the rule was, if it didn't make it to the tape, then we can redo it because it needs to be done. If it made it to the tape, and it sounds good, we leave it. So nothing was overdubbed on that album at all that wasn't absolutely necessary.

This was the rule that I had when we made 'Frampton Comes Alive!': being known as a live performer, I'm not going to go into the studio and overdub.

I have a little basement studio set up here at my house, and I do probably 80 percent of the recording here on my own. With multi-tracking technology, I can play various parts on top of one another.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.