The making of David Bowie's "Heroes"

For those of us who have recorded or spent time in the studio, I think you'll find it very interesting!  This was a fascinating collision of musical genius, and producer Visconti gives a very intimate inside view of how a masterpiece is constructed.

Thank you!  I had the EXACT same feeling about songs I've recorded in makeshift studios!  We would layer processed sounds onto each other, amplifying children's keyboards that were miked through guitar effects such as phase shifter, mike sheet metal and old tools for percussive effects, and ended up with a very big sound! One of these days I'll have to digitize this old music...some of it is pretty cool! 

It sounds like the approach each of us used was the same - record the instrument as the musician heard it, rather than recording a clean track & processing the track later on!  With primitive tape recorders in the mid to late 1970s, this was the standard method of recording.  

This Youtube clip is required listening for anyone curious about Eno's approach to song construction!  

 

Which is the part that you have to remember ... sometimes, the individual parts are not as good as they would be if they had a counter-something, or opposite to work of it. This is one of the "secrets" in directing on the stage ... you are putting together vastly different people for a common purpose, and in the end, it is to have a very satisfying relationship to the audience, and sometimes this is not something, in DETAIL, that appeals to a lot of folks, specially when you have defined what it meant for you already ... thus, a break down, tends to break up your own view some ... but you should give yourself some space ... and know that you have an artistic mind that can create these things, and thinking that anyone else's is better than what you have and can do is nutz ... you're as creative as them ... but you kinda "don't know" that, or have found a proper application for that ability.

 

And any other art ... if Picasso tells you that he was a child, and the carnage he saw out of his window is exactly what "Guernica" is all about, your appreciation of Guernica drops ... because of the reality behind it, and how we dislike ugliness (not that we should like it), instead of punishing it. In essence, seeing things like that is the same as thinking/seeing ... I don't know how to do it, or say it, and on top of it I'm afraid ... and a lot of that is getting over this "fear" and stop being a "fan" ... you have, first of all, to be YOU, not anybody else ... that you appreciate someone else is not what writing this piece of music is about ... what you want to do with the next note or sound, is!

 

Massive difference! And it defines a "master" and "artist' from another top ten and nothing musician. Or as I like to say ... a musician plays notes ... an artist plays music and feelings!