RICK WAKEMAN PLAYED A WRONG NOTE!!! 🤣​

[EricBarker]

OMG! Stop the Presses! I was transcribing "Long Distance Runaround" for an arrangement, and I discovered something unbelievable. At 2:34 you can (not) clearly hear him flub a note during the lightning fast instrumental break! I have lost all respect for him! He should be banished from the annals of keyboard history!

[stoken6]

Yup. Any muso who plays a wrong note isn't a proper muso.

 

I guess I'll be going then.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Delaware Dave]

I guess this makes me an all-star.

[AnotherScott]

There are isolated tracks where you can hear just the keyboard parts for the entire Fragile album, and you can find all the blunders. ;-) I guess they figured "close enough." Yes wasn't big yet, studio time is expensive, and a lot of it would be sufficiently buried in the mix anyway. 

 

I've attached the keyboard track for South Side of the Sky. The first time he plays the main riff (12 seconds in) it's messed up, but it's fine for the rest of the song. Kinda funny that he messes up so early and they just let it go. I'd kinda figure that if you messed up in your first 15 seconds, you might as well abort the take and start again.

[cassdad]

And it only took 50+ years to find the mistake….

[Shamanzarek]

The RMI doesn't have velocity response so if you happen to brush against a wrong note it will sound as loud as the correct note. It can sometimes double trigger since the keyboard is not weighted. Listening to the isolated track I kept hearing some of the chords being accented which shouldn't be possible on an RMI. Then I came across this other isolated track that accounts for the accents. Whenever I sit down with my RMI "Long Distance Runaround" is one my favorites to play on that keyboard. I also do the bass guitar part in the left hand.

 

[ProfD]

Nowadays, multitracking, unlimited track count and digital editing, allows recording engineer to erase every *wrong* note, replace sounds and correct bad pitch too. 

 

The sterility that comes with digital technology especially in recorded music gives some of us a greater appreciation for the music recorded with warts and all under less pristine conditions.

 

Rick Wakeman like so many other musicians has played a ton of *wrong* notes that have flown by fast enough to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

 

That's why we don't care about the 50+ year old flub. It's still a great performance and tune.😎

[harmonizer]

2 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

There are isolated tracks where you can hear just the keyboard parts for the entire Fragile album, and you can find all the blunders. 😉 I guess they figured "close enough." Yes wasn't big yet, studio time is expensive, and a lot of it would be sufficiently buried in the mix anyway. 

 

I've attached the keyboard track for South Side of the Sky. The first time he plays the main riff (12 seconds in) it's messed up, but it's fine for the rest of the song. Kinda funny that he messes up so early and they just let it go. I'd kinda figure that if you messed up in your first 15 seconds, you might as well abort the take and start again.

It sounds like they might have done a patch on that track. The first 11 seconds is panned hard left, and sounds unrelated to what follows. At about 0:12 the volume drops to zero, and then fades in, this time with the sound centered (present in both L and R). That fade in does not sound like something Wakeman did himself while playing the track in the studio. Perhaps someone liked the rest of the track that Wakeman performed, but there was something way off in the first 12 seconds, so they found some other sound that did not sound wrong from some other take, and dropped it into the first 11 seconds. 

[AnotherScott]

Yes, harmonizer, there is something odd at the beginning, that would seem like the combination of two takes... but they still couldn't easily fix that flub! (Or didn't care.)

[Stokely]

Nope not wrong.  Jazz.

I play a lot of jazz as it happens.

----

The point about modern music above hit me recently.  I was watching some "live in studio" (which it was, to a point) from a group called Dirty Loops.  Top-notch musicians but the music was sooooo perfect...even for studio recordings it was too perfect.   it was explained on a different forum that engineers to into Pro Tools(or other DAW) and line up things down to the note after the fact....this is not surprising with midi, we've had quantize forever, but doing that with recorded tracks?  It's nuts.   

The unfortunate thing to me is that the more that this happens, the more people expect to hear it.  Just like tracks aka karaoke live.  Anyone daring to play live in certain genres anymore would have audiences grimacing probably.  I wouldn't know because I don't go see bands that run them, on the local scene or in stadiums.  

 

[EricBarker]

1 hour ago, Shamanzarek said:

isolated

I also do Chris’s part in the left hand. My wife and I have been playing this one for years. We’re putting together larger band and I’m fixing the chart for my mates. I love that bass line during the instrumental sections. Really demonstrates just how central Chris is. The basic tune is kinda dippy, but he makes it rock!!!

[Ivan May]

Oh please. Rick Wakeman is a classically trained musician, so he's supposed to make mistakes!!

 

After all, has Greg Lake ever sung out of tune? He did on occasion....

[b3plyr]

Well, Miles Davis said something to the effect ‘’there is no such thing as a wrong note”, or conversely, “there is no such thing as a bad note”. What is important is how you handle the situation.

[Paul K]

33 minutes ago, b3plyr said:

Well, Miles Davis said something to the effect ‘’there is no such thing as a wrong note”, or conversely, “there is no such thing as a bad note”. What is important is how you handle the situation.

I think Miles said words to the effect of, "You should have played it twice" when a bandmate was bitching about a clam during the set.

[Iconoclast]

Having listened to the stems from Fragile many times, I was amazed at how...inexact?...most of the performance actually is. There's certainly some parts that are in the stems that were mixed either out or down so low that they're not audible in the recording because they clash.

Certainly not a bash on Ser Wakeman. Just a testament to the way they literally jammed out each section as a live-in studio group, and then went back to adjust, add or mix out their mistakes.  How I wish there were movies of them actually writing Fragile or CTTE similar to the recent Beatles Get Back videos.

[Tusker]

On 1/18/2023 at 1:27 PM, EricBarker said:

I love that bass line during the instrumental sections. Really demonstrates just how central Chris is.

Indeed Chris Squire makes Yes the unique super group that it is. Even swopping between two very good and different drummers, Yes had an unconventional and distinctive rhythmic foundation, because of Squire’s unique musical personality.

[AnotherScott]

To me, Squire was Yes, or at least most of what I most liked about them. I liked his voice better than Anderson's, he was a co-writer on what I think are almost all of their best work (notable exceptions: Roundabout and SIberian Khatru), and he was the only one to put out a great solo album, which, itself, was better than most Yes albums.

[Tusker]

[Slightly OT] Could you please point me to examples of Chris Squire's voice quality?

 

I just need to get more educated, I am mostly aware of his terrific songwriting, melodic bass phrasing and very beautiful vocal harmonies. Would that solo album be a place to start?

[AnotherScott]

Yes, the solo album, "Fish Out of Water," he's doing all the lead vocals on that. (And then knowing what his voice sounds like also makes it easier to identify where you're hearing him in Yes.)

[Biggles]

When are you folks going to learn that there is no such thing as a wrong note.

 

Only a note played in the wrong order.

[Still VanDerGraaf]

On 1/19/2023 at 8:26 PM, Tusker said:

[Slightly OT] Could you please point me to examples of Chris Squire's voice quality?

 

I just need to get more educated, I am mostly aware of his terrific songwriting, melodic bass phrasing and very beautiful vocal harmonies. Would that solo album be a place to start?

Check out many of the tracks on Going For The One.

 

His harmony vocals on "Parallels" are incredible. This is the one album where he his vocal harmony and counterpoint never fails to amaze and move me. 

 

I might not be a bass player, but I feel more influenced by Squire as a musician than Wakeman. 

[harmonizer]

I find listeners are much less tolerant of a note played at the wrong time, than a note played with the wrong pitch.

And there definitely is a wrong time to play a note, regardless of how good or bad you might consider its pitch to be.

[MathOfInsects]

I miss hearing mistakes. 

[Mark Schmieder]

If only he had played the wrong note twice, it would have been jazz!

[KuruPrionz]

On 1/19/2023 at 7:21 AM, b3plyr said:

Well, Miles Davis said something to the effect ‘’there is no such thing as a wrong note”, or conversely, “there is no such thing as a bad note”. What is important is how you handle the situation.

I started incorporating my "wrong" notes into my sound a LONG time ago. If our job is to create tension and release then a well placed wrong note can certainly create tension. It's fun, it's freeing and it is useful for creating your own sound and style. It only doesn't belong there if you don't know where to put it... 

[David Emm]

On 1/20/2023 at 3:52 PM, MathOfInsects said:

I miss hearing mistakes. 

 

Come on up to th' house. We can have a drink and I'll show you bushels of 'em.

 

Take one home to the kids, dump it in the floor and say "Don't let this happen to you!" 😬 

[bill5]

On 1/19/2023 at 10:59 AM, Paul K said:

I think Miles said words to the effect of, "You should have played it twice" when a bandmate was bitching about a clam during the set.

Actually I believe it was Stan Getz who said "if you play something wrong, do it again; people will think you did it on purpose." Or some such

 

 

 

[EricBarker]

Chris Squire and Jon Anderson have somewhat similar voices, or at least Squire is really good at modifying his tone to blend with Jon's. The main difference is that while Jon naturally has an incredibly pure and "choir boy" voice, Squire has just a bit more character and color. Not too far from Sting, really. Frankly, Chris has a more interesting voice, and he's doing no less vocal work than Jon is. In an alternate universe, Chris took over vocal duties and fronted one of the greatest Yes albums of all time... but alas, that never happened. We did get "Fish Out of Water", which is just as good as any Yes album.

But don't discount Jon yet. He was an absolute master of nothing, but he was a creative powerhouse who brought fantastic building blocks for the band to expand on. He really needs technicians and editors to make his wild ideas come to life (I never cared for any of his solo albums), but he was basically just this massive ball of inspiration that kept the group pushing forward. Squire was usually the one who made it all happen though. Jon was this spirit, Chris was the brains and the energy.

It's funny to think that Jon wasn't the best singer in Yes, but it wouldn't have been Yes without him. (not dissing Drama, btw... damned good album and another discussion)

[David Emm]

I'm such a starry-eyed devotee of "Olias of Sunhillow" that I should have the album cover tattooed on my back.

Just below the KORG logo. 🙄

[Ivan May]

2 hours ago, David Emm said:

I'm such a starry-eyed devotee of "Olias of Sunhillow" that I should have the album cover tattooed on my back.

Just below the KORG logo. 🙄

And I'm such a starry eyed devotee of "Tarkus" that I should have that giant robotic armadillo tattooed on my back .