OK, so I'm sitting here at work, listening to a little Black Sabbath on my mp3 player, and, well...

I swear I'm hearing two basses running around on "War Pigs."

I've heard this song about a zillion times, but I don't think I ever noticed this before. Now, granted, the mix is kinda crazy, and there's a lot going on in the instrumental sectiions, but I guess I always sorta self-edited the song and filtered it down to the basic elements after hearing it live so many times. I also haven't listened to the studio version of this tune in quite a while.

What say you, fellers? Am I hearing Geezer rocking out on pair of basses in there, or have my ears started to fail me?

HMM... I had to go and find it and give it a listen (it's been a while)... and it does kind of sound that way in a few spots, doesn't it?

DX

It could sound that way because of the limited number of tracks used. They had to come up with creative ways of getting everything they wanted with only 4 or 8 tracks so a lot of times two or more instruments played on the same track. When it came to the final mix, two basses may have came up.
Just a BS theory, I'm full of them.

I'll give it a listen if I get a quiet moment on the way home. Is there any part that it's really evident?

BTW thanks for your previous (similar) post about the drum pedal squeak on Since I've Been Loving You, now it's impossible to ignore.

I really hear it in the instrumental sections--one on the left and one sorta in the middle-ish, towards the right. Sounds like they did two different basslines to see which they liked best, but wound up leaving both in the mix because they don't step on each other.

They're both pretty sweet, really. I just wanted to see if anyone else could hear that.

Of course, the bass tone is, IMO, kinda lacking (sounds kinda like a rubbery, lower-pitch guitar sometimes), and very low in the mix, but yeah... I think I hear two Geezers in there.

Butcher... sorry about that, bro. I kinda like it, though. Makes me remember that, although Bonham was awesome, he was still a human and a prisoner of the technology he used to create music.

I think Sharon had Geezer mixed out out and Rudy Sarzo overdub his parts on your copy.

Welcome to the club! I really used to love that song. But ever since I started hearing that telltale squeak of the Ludwig speedmaster pedal, it's just about the only thing I can hear when I listen to the song. It really drives me up the wall. And I swear I've started hearing the squeak on some other tracks, too.

Is it possible they doubled the bass line in places, like they do vocal lines sometimes? I never thought of doing that before, but it seems like it would fatten it up some, make it heavier. I can see Sabbath doing that...

I'm listening again... I think the bass line is doubled all the way through, but, like the guitars during the solos, the bass part seems to split off a little during these parts.

It might be a panning thing, too, but I definitely feel like I'm hearing some slight discrepancies between the two bass sounds... like maybe there's a slight delay happening there?

This might be the difference between the miked cab and the direct signal combined with the panning of these signals or some such wizardry... I dunno. There's something spacey happening there for sure.

I'm probably just out of my mind.

In an interview I read quite a while ago, John Fogarty talked about having a lot of stuff to deal with in the old CCR recordings. Those old Kustom amps were famous for the 60 cycle hum that is inherent in their design. He said they had a lot of extraneous drum noise and rattle off the toms to work with/around in their recordings.

These days, you can make cleaner, better sounding recordings in your bedroom than they did in million dollar studios back then, and without any extraneous noise from amps or drum hardware, or anything else.

But even with all the improved technology out there, most folks want to work with huge, cumbersome analog tube recording gear, expensive and rapidly diminishing supplies of analog tape, cheesy little tube amps, old drums and all the stuff from the days when they had to work around all the problems that stuff caused that have been solved since then, because it sounds better.

The paradox is proven undenyably true; you have to be unhappy to be really happy.

I think I have a headache...

How awesome is Allen Woody's bass on the Govt Mule version?

They used to keep him in a cage.

I have seen footage of Geezer using a large number of basses for this song, maybe he recorded with two different instruments for flavor.

My old bass teacher got to play one of his basses when his band recorded at the Abbey Roads Studios a few years ago.

You can see it somewhat here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEVVTbZYluc&feature=related at the 3:40 mark. The audio is terrible in this video though. The songs didn't sound so good either.

Here is another video. I know it is a lot of guitar wanking, but this is one of the BEST live bands I have seen. The energy they give out is amazing.
And I don't really like Indie style music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7go6V03PzE

I wasn't complaining, I love this sort of stuff. These things are only the type of stuff musicians hear. I was teaching someone a little bit of g****r in hopes he would take off on it (never did, probably because I had no business teaching anyone anything) and he always thanks me for the way he hears things now.

I still need to analyze this further (packed train and bus ride). It is amazing what these guys were able to do with such limited resources (thanks Les Paul for kicking gear in the nuts to get things going).

Yeah. There are two bass parts going on in the instrumental section for sure. I've always heard that but never really paid enough attention to make my brain realize, "Hey dumbass, there are two distinct bass parts going on there". It's cool. I love stuff like this.



So it would not be good to start brain dumping all the little subtle things like this that I know of here? Like the phone ringing in Led Zeppelin's "The Ocean"? Or the annoying delay on the keyboards that going all the way through a certain Van Halen song? Or all the horrible punch-ins during Kirk Hammet's solos on <insert nearly any Metallica album here>?

I'll not do that then.

What about the mistake that John Paul Jones made in Good Times, Bad Times? Or the one that Duck Dunn made in Soul Man?

When I play the songs should I play them exactly as they were played on the record or should I play what they would have played if punch-ins had been available?

I play the mistake in Soul Man. I like it.

I've always found that to be rather charming.

I do too... but not on purpose...

DX

Both wonderful examples. The JPJ one is especially amusing when you consider it was song #1 of album #1 and the bass player makes such a glaringly huge error.



I usually play the mistakes as recorded. It gives me something fun to do and I like to see if anyone ever comments on it afterwards.

Me too. For the longest time I knew about it and couldn't hear it. After I finally heard it I can't NOT hear it. It jabs me in the ear with a hot poker now. RING! RING!

That's like listening to our own recordings. You can't hear the band you can only hear yourself.

Davo

See, I love this kind of stuff. It's part of the magic of the whole thing. It's good to be reminded that recordings (especially the classic ones) weren't made to be these pristine, perfect things--they're real, honest documents of real bands playing in real environments. I think that's neat.

Slightly off topic... I am onto Black Sabbath's Volume IV right now... and if there's a heavier song than "Supernaut," I've never heard it.

Ahdunno, mang...I'd have to say this one competes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnFPKj5rBao

*Note the 100% guitar solo on Expert

Wow, after hearing this song countless times, I never noticed it before. Nice.



Not only 'Supernaut', but the roots of heavy metal being laid down on their first 6 or 7 albums up until Never Say Die is just ridiculous. Too many to pick from, but I am currently spinning Master of Reality and 'Into the Void' simply kills.

Hell yeah.

All the Ozzy Sabbath for that matter. They just killed it and took no prisoners.

"Paranoid" has some genuinely heavy stuff. The intro to "Fairies Wear Boots" is right up(down?) there, and "Hand of Doom", and of course the title cut. Some folks say Zeppelin was the beginning of "heavy metal", but I think Sabbath was the band that really got it going.

My old band played Stray Cats - "Rock this Town" and there was a little mistake in the guitar part that our guitar player insisted on playing. Kind of funny. Although most people probably didn't realize that it was recorded that way and just thought he was making a mistake playing it live.

Yep. Zep is more or less classic hard rock, whereas Sabbath had the riffage and mental imagery that's still relied upon by many metal bands, esp. the darker genres like doom, death, black, stoner (?) etc.

OK, here's another one...
This morning, listening to "Chocolate City" by Parliament...
I can hear the click track bleeding through someone's headphones (the drummer?) during the intro when nothing else is playing but a guitar and a bass. Never noticed that before.

It's either a click track or the hi-hat... because when the drums kick in later, the hi-hat is playing at the exact same thing. If it's the hi-hat, I guess it was bleeding into either the guitar or bass amp ISO room... or both?

Another I've noticed before but not really made the mental connection, "Hey dumbass, that's probably not supposed to be there". It almost sounds like a china cymbal being hit lightly and near the center of it - obviously to keep time until the drums come in. GAININ' ON YA! Can't ya feel my breaf? Ha.

What was the common click track sound back in Ye Olde Daye? The drum machine had existed for some time by 1975 (when Chocolate City was released) and through the magic of teh interwebz I just discovered that the first programmable one was also released in 1975.

Bone-us sillyness: Van Halen's song "When It's Love". The keyboard intro has this stick click delay thing going on. Listen carefully and you'll notice that it's actually part of the keyboard patch and continues through the entire song. This will haunt and annoy you whenever this song comes on the classic rock radio station from now on because once you've heard it you can't unhear it. Thank you. Drive through.