When I listen to one of my favorite albums, I imagine how awesome it would have been to watch them record it in the studio. I would assume other feel the same. Second to that, I would love to see a video of them recording the album. But… these videos don’t seem to exist.
It would be so easy to set up a camera in the studio while the album is recorded. And I would assume fans would love to watch it. So why don’t bands do this?
You mean whole albums? Because I have seen hundreds of music videos and documentaries where there’s footage of recording in the studio.
Recording an album can easily take months, sometimes years. Filming the whole lot would be a huge expense and hassle, and incredibly boring to watch. A snazzily edited work of the footage would be better, but production costs would climb fast with that, for a very limited return.
Because it’s not as fun to be in on the making as you assume.
Usually, it’s not done in one continuous take. There’s a lot of doing the same thing over and over with slight variations. There might be layering of sounds, so you only hear part of the composition at a time with the recording later layered over each other for the final effect.
In other words, actually recording an album is often boring, repetitious, and not nearly as nice as the finished product. Which, after all, has been worked and edited to sound its best.
As noted, there might be footage of some of the music recording, but it will be edited excerpts.
Aye; gotta agree with what Toxylon wrote.
ETA: Broomstick too.
But hey, here’s two videos about recording vocal tracks:
Yup - kinda like why you don’t want to watch your favorite sausage being made…many parts of the process Are Not Pretty.
This, pretty much. Very few tracks on rock albums are the result of one take, with every band member playing together in the studio at the same time. Most of the final tracks are the result of many takes, and may be stitched together from different bits of those takes; they are also often the results of the musicians playing separately (sometimes not even in the same location, much less at different times).
Edit: I imagine that it would not be unlike watching footage of a movie being shot. A whole lot of standing around, a whole lot of footage of technicians adjusting the lighting and the recording equipment, then a minute (or less) of actual movie footage being shot, then repeat the process.
Sort of what the OP might be looking for: documentary on the making of Tom Petty’s MOJO
Let It Be.
That’s why nobody ever did it again.
Although Peter Jackson is redoing/revisiting the footage and The Beatles: Get Back is supposed to change peoples’ minds about it.
If Peter Jackson’s sneak peek/trailer is anything to judge by, the new movie looks to be quite a different animal than the 1970 film.
How about a video of the creation of the video on stage AND the music in the studio.
And just for fun, it’s a cover of an old Velvet Underground song. It’s odd, give it a chance.
Black Lips, “Get It On Time”
I agree with everything that has been said in this thread, but sometimes a director is a the right place at the right time: most of Jean-Luc Godard’s “One+One” depicts the recording process of the Rolling Stones classic “Sympathy For The Devil”. The rest of the film is rubbish, but the studio scenes are fascinating.
I came in here just to mention this movie.
I went with fellow Stones fans, and we all thought the studio footage was rubbish as well, and it just just went on and on and on… remember how many Doo-doo!'s the boys did for the background vocals? Doo-doo! Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name… Doo-doo!, Doo-doo!.. Now imagine how many takes each one took. I can still close my eyes and see all the Stones, doing the “holding half a headphone on one ear” and Doo-doo’ing into a boom mike above their heads.
Over and over and over… and over and over and… none of us had ever walked out on a movie before, but as we ran out into the parking lot and could finally breath deeply of the sweet air of freedom, it was worth it.
I am no great Springsteen fan. In fact, I don’t think that I bought one of his albums when people bought albums, but I have really enjoyed two documentaries about his recordings -
Letter To You and
I think it’s possible to make a compelling documentary film about the recording of an album, but I didn’t get the sense, from the OP, that that’s what he was looking for. I had the sense that he was picturing more of a real-time film/video of a band recording an album. (Then again, he hasn’t weighed in since his OP, so I may be wrong.). Such “blow by blow” footage would, as has been discussed, nearly always be be an awful lot of very boring footage, with a few interesting bits mixed in there.
To use an example that @don_t_ask shared, consider Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album. The documentary is 1 hour, 25 minutes long; Springsteen and the E Street Band recorded the album over numerous sessions, stretching from June 1977 through March 1978. I would strongly suspect that a full film of that album’s recording would be hundreds of hours long.
Something closer to the original idea @Crafter_Man envisioned, but for only one song, and no doubt completely synthetic and staged: Alan Parsons Project, “Games People Play”
Good points.
I understand there’s lots of downtime, lots of takes, etc. when recording an album. I certainly wouldn’t want to watch hours and hours of that stuff. But it would be nice to watch an condensed/edited version where it shows the musicians doing their final takes. Especially the singing.
However, after reading these comments, I now understand that that’s easier said than done.
The OP might be interested in checking out the documentary “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, which follows the band Wilco during the making of their iconic “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album.
Another interesting insight into the studio process is “Gimme Some Truth” about the making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” album. It’s quite entertaining and gives authentic views on the creative process.
ETA: I just remembered that the extended version of Pink Floyd’s “Live At Pompeii” besides the live footage has also studio footage from the recording sessions for “Dark Side Of The Moon”.
VH1 had a series called Classic Albums that, while not a video of recording, shares a lot of vintage photos, and interviews with musicians and other production folk.
