"One take" studio recordings that were hits

[Cluricaun]

@squeegee

Fair enough, and that’s the way I’d define it as well, but there seems to be some confusion here about what the OP means.

I’d add that recording a reasonably complex song “live”, in any number of takes, with no later overdubs for vocals or solos, is pretty cool as well.

I absolutely agree, to my way of thinking it’s more honest than it is synching everything up with pro tools and computers. If you can’t play it live everyone is (well your fans at least) are going to find out the hard way when you suck in concert. I’ve never been a big fan of studio songs that can’t be adequately perfomed live because of all sorts of trickery and cheating.

[squeegee]

@Cluricaun

I absolutely agree, to my way of thinking it’s more honest than it is synching everything up with pro tools and computers. If you can’t play it live everyone is (well your fans at least) are going to find out the hard way when you suck in concert. I’ve never been a big fan of studio songs that can’t be adequately perfomed live because of all sorts of trickery and cheating.

I’ve gone back and forth on this. On the one hand, there’s a band like Led Zepplin, which basically couldn’t do more than a fraction of their material live and have it sound at all like the album, because the album works were so layered with stuff.

Then there’s, say, the Eagles, who really could play all their stuff live (or reasonably so; I think Hotel California had like six layered guitar tracks, so “live” you’d get some still impressive subset), because they had a lot of members who played guitar and most of them sang.

Then there’s Steely Dan, which wasn’t really a “band” at all. Everything was layered in a studio by a raft of different people. On the other hand, SD would put together a touring group, which in the recordings I’ve heard, and the one live show I’ve been to, sounded dead-on like the album when they wanted to, and when they departed from the recording were even better.

[Cluricaun]

Well and I have great affection for the band Ween, who thankfully do not sound much like their recordings when playing live and actually become one of the best live bands I’ve ever heard when in concert, but I still prefer the honesty of a White Stripes “record it like you play it” ethos over a less intellectually organic artist like Beatles who while great in concert early on couldn’t have possibly hoped to reproduce the layers of studio effect that was applied to the recorded versions of their songs.

By all means I do enjoy both types, but my respect is higher for someone who can really bring it like they swing it.

[wolf_meister]

I believe that Edwin Starr in just one take did “WAR… good God y’all … What is it good for? Absolutely nothing !!!”

Really amazing that such a powerful, driving tune could be developed in just one take.
Great song.

[RealityChuck]

Elton John recorded the album 11/17/70 live in a studio in one take. It was actually a radio studio, but the quality was so good that the album was released just as it was recorded. No hits, but the album did reach #11.

[Voyager]

Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland was recorded in one take, because the Nashville session musicians had no idea of how long it was. The description of the session I read said that they started rolling their eyes at each other as Dylan sang verse after verse after verse.

[Kent_Clark]

@squeegee

Maybe a distinction should be made between:

1. Recording a song “live” in the studio – no later overdubs, no fixups, no nothin’, straight to disk, and
2. Recording the song in one take (which would encompass definition 1).

I mean, jeez, I’d think the band would get to the studio, tune up, check the levels, then rehearse the song a few times. Then nod to the engineer to start recording (“one, two, a one two three!”). Is that one “take” ? They just played the song more than once, but only had the tape rolling the final time.

@Cluricaun

A “take” is the first time that the recording information is turned on. Rehersals and warm ups don’t count, but when you’re taking up tape, you’re taking. If you do it 10 times while the tape is rolling before you nail it, then that’s 10 takes. If you did it just walking in off the street, picking up the instruments, nodding to the engineer and blowing it away then you did it in one take “cold” which is even more impressive but in the annals of rock history that kind of thing is mostly reserved for guitar solos. I’ve not heard too many storys of too many bands who could pull that off without just even a little warming up.

@squeegee

Fair enough, and that’s the way I’d define it as well, but there seems to be some confusion here about what the OP means.

I’d add that recording a reasonably complex song “live”, in any number of takes, with no later overdubs for vocals or solos, is pretty cool as well.

I guess I need to explain myself more thoroughly.

By “one take” I meant what Clurican said – warm up, rehearse, level check, etc. But the first time you record the song, that’s the version you use – no sweetening, no additional instruments or vocals, etc. As in “that’s great, let’s go with it.”

[WordMan]

I’m stuck on BlackBerry but want to chime in with Kind of Blue by Miles Davis - it was famously recorded live with pretty much with every song having only one take fully recorded. I think only one song has a fully recorded alternate take. And most of the songs were only sketched out - Davis came in with a few modal notes sketched on scraps of paper and told the band to try them out.

[squeegee]

@kunilou

By “one take” I meant what Clurican said – warm up, rehearse, level check, etc. But the first time you record the song, that’s the version you use – no sweetening, no additional instruments or vocals, etc. As in “that’s great, let’s go with it.”

Again, fair enough. But it may depend on what you mean by “sweetening”. A recording engineer can provide more detail, and correct anything I’m misinterpreting, but my understanding is that on any modern recording (say, the last 30 years), all the instruments, mics, etc are captured on separate tracks, and must be mixed down to stereo (or these days perhaps a superset of 5 or more channels). Doing a down-mix happens after the live recording, and is a creative process in itself, with many individual decisions about how the recording should sound. This may include doing some EQ, and other refinements.

So, where’s the cutoff? Does the recording need to go unmixed into the can, with a premixed setup to stereo? Can the musicians use monitors to hear the other players during the session (that’s another submix right there). Can the engineer apply a filter to one track to cut out a 60hz ground loop?

If you want to be all scorched earth about the rules, you’d need to have the band play with only two mics in the room, and all the vocals and instruments are recorded from those two sources from various means of amplification - guitar amps and a PA of some sort for the vocals, and perhaps unamplified drums (and horns and other ‘loud’ instruments), and the result ends up on vinyl (or modern equivalent).

My guess is you mean that one “take” is one recording session, and anything in mixdown, including mild forms of ‘sweetening’ such as EQ are okay, as long as no new recordings are added. Otherwise I don’t see a fair way to make this work. Fair enough?