Hotel California bad edit?

Smithers XKR

Smithers XKR

Well-known member
Let me just say that Eagles are one of my favourite bands and Hotel California is one of my favourite ever songs.

But something that has bugged me all these years....

They recorded this track in the multi million studio and the zenith of 70s production techniques..

But every time I listen I hear a bad edit after "bring your alibis" after the second chorus.

It just doesnt sound right. Is it me? Can anyone else hear it?

🙁🙁
 
Smithers XKR said:
Let me just say that Eagles are one of my favourite bands and Hotel California is one of my favourite ever songs.

But something that has bugged me all these years....

They recorded this track in the multi million studio and the zenith of 70s production techniques..

But every time I listen I hear a bad edit after "bring your alibis" after the second chorus.

It just doesnt sound right. Is it me? Can anyone else hear it?

🙁🙁
Click to expand...


Sorry, link posted now 🤥
 
It doesn't sound like a bad edit to me. It's more like they muted the echo return at the end of that phrase, either by choice or perhaps to work around some leak they couldn't get rid of any other way. A flawed edit would either jump or lag in time and/or exhibit some kind of noise at the cut. This does neither.
 
Smithers XKR said:


Sorry, link posted now 🤥
Click to expand...

If you listen with headphones, then the left hand side has a definate abrubt cuttoff of a fading dynamic from a guitar part maybe. Nothing on Don's vocal or the overall mix and it is very very subtle but I do hear it. I am amazed that it was not picked up in the mixdown.
 
RRuskin said:
It doesn't sound like a bad edit to me. It's more like they muted the echo return at the end of that phrase, either by choice or perhaps to work around some leak they couldn't get rid of any other way. A flawed edit would either jump or lag in time and/or exhibit some kind of noise at the cut. This does neither.
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Listen with cans on, the left hand side has a definate cut of of the fading dynamic of an instrument.
 
RRuskin said:
It doesn't sound like a bad edit to me. It's more like they muted the echo return at the end of that phrase, either by choice or perhaps to work around some leak they couldn't get rid of any other way. A flawed edit would either jump or lag in time and/or exhibit some kind of noise at the cut. This does neither.
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You could be right, maybe I am being a pedant 😅😉👍
 
Smithers XKR said:
If you listen with headphones, then the left hand side has a definate abrubt cuttoff of a fading dynamic from a guitar part maybe. Nothing on Don's vocal or the overall mix and it is very very subtle but I do hear it. I am amazed that it was not picked up in the mixdown.
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Sorry, don't hear it. If you really want to hear bad edits, listen to the original stereo mixes of Sgt. Pepper.
 
RRuskin said:
Sorry, don't hear it. If you really want to hear bad edits, listen to the original stereo mixes of Sgt. Pepper.
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Listening very closely now and it just sounds like a little click on the guitar that has been left out of the editing process of total silence between the end of the 2nd chorus and the 3rd verse. Can you hear?
 
Er, it’s an edit. Where the next chunk was spliced in. It’s perfectly fine. Nowadays, we can slap cross fades over these things individually and at different points in time to allow events to finish nicely. Back the the engineer would breath in hold their breath and cut the tape. At best they just rocked the tape back and forth and made a mark at the best place. Worse was that diagonal cuts were the least audible , but the least accurate, so you had a choice to make.

I’d judge that edit a success not an error. As mentioned, Pepper had worse ones, and some tracks from the 70s had loads that now we’d consider faults. Back then edits were common and some very difficult to do. Multitrack edits were always far worse as your cuts separated tracks in time, so you might want to cut at a certain point, but the snare drum was preventing it. Some had to lose a generation with a dub, so you could do a three machine mix, assuming you actually had two multitracks and a 2 track.

listen to the Beach Boys music of the same period. Some songs were edits of two or even three separate songs and some edits were pretty crude.

We’re spoiled now for this kind of thing.
 
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rob aylestone said:
We’re spoiled now for this kind of thing.
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Wow never really gave it that much thought as I never did any tape editing..ever... but slicing tape to remove a part YIKES. I always love the story of how Winters Frankenstein came to be. How crazy difficult it must of been, how much of a pro you needed to be to get the scissors out and do audio surgery. :eek:
 
rob aylestone said:
Er, it’s an edit. Where the next chunk was spliced in. It’s perfectly fine. Nowadays, we can slap cross fades over these things individually and at different points in time to allow events to finish nicely. Back the the engineer would breath in hold their breath and cut the tape. At best they just rocked the tape back and forth and made a mark at the best place. Worse was that diagonal cuts were the least audible , but the least accurate, so you had a choice to make.

I’d judge that edit a success not an error. As mentioned, Pepper had worse ones, and some tracks from the 70s had loads that now we’d consider faults. Back then edits were common and some very difficult to do. Multitrack edits were always far worse as your cuts separated tracks in time, so you might want to cut at a certain point, but the snare drum was preventing it. Some had to lose a generation with a dub, so you could do a three machine mix, assuming you actually had two multitracks and a 2 track.

listen to the Beach Boys music of the same period. Some songs were edits of two or even three separate songs and some edits were pretty crude.

We’re spoiled now for this kind of thing.
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It's definitely an edit but I contend there isn't anything wrong with it.
 
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I agree - for the time, it did exactly what was intended. We can do so much now that was simply impossible then. Nothing to worry about. If you had some kind of edit competition in the 70s, you'd be looking at clicks, abrupt edit ins or outs, level differences, changes in noise and the smoothness. An edit at a close to zero point, like this one would have scored highly.


However - if you want a really horrible tape edit that never got fixed - how about Eric Clapton near the end of this two takes are edited together really badly.
 

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rob aylestone said:
I agree - for the time, it did exactly what was intended. We can do so much now that was simply impossible then. Nothing to worry about. If you had some kind of edit competition in the 70s, you'd be looking at clicks, abrupt edit ins or outs, level differences, changes in noise and the smoothness. An edit at a close to zero point, like this one would have scored highly.


However - if you a really horrible tape edit that never got fixed - how about Eric Clapton near the end of this two takes are edited together really badly.
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This is all really interesting stuff about tape editing in the 60's and 70's, really into the whole history of it 👍

Listened to Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper and yes I can hear what you say. But in those old days they had 4 tracks and Sir George was working with an orchestra and Brian was working with 20 or so electric musicians.

By 76, they had 16 track (or even 24?)

But same principles of cutting and splicing I suppose.

Must have been an artform to not screw it up! 😄😄👍👍
 
Yep - half inch tape was not too bad for editing, but the biggest I ever did was 1" tape, and if you needed to be really accurate with time, as in the edit had to go at a certain place - maybe the start of the bar, you had to do a straight cut, but this meant changes in background, any hiss, or noise suddenly started or stopped. On ¼" you could do pretty good 45 degree cut which gave a very quick crossfade, but still left one channel leading- just a bit. This hid edits better, but multitrack editing was always scary.
 
rob aylestone said:
Yep - half inch tape was not too bad for editing, but the biggest I ever did was 1" tape, and if you needed to be really accurate with time, as in the edit had to go at a certain place - maybe the start of the bar, you had to do a straight cut, but this meant changes in background, any hiss, or noise suddenly started or stopped. On ¼" you could do pretty good 45 degree cut which gave a very quick crossfade, but still left one channel leading- just a bit. This hid edits better, but multitrack editing was always scary.
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We had a two inch 24 track machine in one of the studios at Newcastle College in the early 90's. It was a monster, horizontal based and about the size of a chest freezer ! 😄😅😉👍
 
Smithers XKR said:
By 76, they had 16 track (or even 24?)

But same principles of cutting and splicing I suppose.

Must have been an artform to not screw it up! 😄😄👍👍
Click to expand...

It would have almost certainly been 24 track on a production like that in 76. It would also have been unlikely that they would have edited the multitrack. What probably happened is that there were too many adjustments that needed to be made between the chorus and verse to be able to do it in real time so they stopped the tape after the chorus, made the changes, rewound a short way, and then continued with the mix. The edit would have been performed on the stereo mix tape. Doing these sorts of edits was standard practice - every recording engineer would have been expected to do it regularly. If you screw it up you just mixed that section again (although edits are pretty easy with practice).
 
Smithers XKR said:
We had a two inch 24 track machine in one of the studios at Newcastle College in the early 90's. It was a monster, horizontal based and about the size of a chest freezer ! 😄😅😉👍
Click to expand...
My recording lecturer worked in a pro studio at the time, but it never got as far as edit cutting, I dont ever remember him attempting that. By that time we had the Advent of ADAT
 
jamesperrett said:
It would have almost certainly been 24 track on a production like that in 76. It would also have been unlikely that they would have edited the multitrack. What probably happened is that there were too many adjustments that needed to be made between the chorus and verse to be able to do it in real time so they stopped the tape after the chorus, made the changes, rewound a short way, and then continued with the mix. The edit would have been performed on the stereo mix tape. Doing these sorts of edits was standard practice - every recording engineer would have been expected to do it regularly. If you screw it up you just mixed that section again (although edits are pretty easy with practice).
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Interested to know how that would be connected back together? Presumably there would be an ultra thin adhesive film to reconnect the tape back together on the non magnetic side? Also would the magnetic side need to be treated in any way as there would have been a tiny groove where the tape rejoined?

Good stuff Rob 😉👍
 
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