This one popped up in my feeds… I love these deep dives into the craft of music making used by previous generations of artists, especially when it’s about creating a new sound that can’t be otherwise created. I know that some look at the music industry and its use of “studio tricks” to “fix” the shortcomings of vocal talent on the part of signed artists as an example of how bankrupt the industry is. But here’s a case where the artists wanted to build something using their voices and the pre-digital 1970s studio technology of the time. I remember in the 70s experimenting with layered recordings using audio magnetic tape and discovering how much noise was added to the recording with each layer of sound being recorded. I know I could never reproduce the sound 10cc accomplished in their studio, but marvel at the amount of work that went into creating this song. 

After looking into all of the work needed to create this recording, it only makes sense to listen to the recording, in whole. But I didn’t want to post the silly “performance” music videos produced around the time with the band appearing to perform the song “live” (in one version, the lead singer mouths the line, “big boys don’t cry” even though it’s clearly the recorded voice of the female studio secretary, ack). There was another video with the “voices” replaced with a full orchestra, which is nice, but misses the point of the BREAKDOWN video. Enjoy.

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Tags: 10cc I’m Not in Love, 1970s music, creatingmusicandsound, music track breakdown, video Fridays

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