What I love most about this is when he exclaims, "I did this alone, with no friends and no band". How many times have we said to ourselves "If I only found the write collaborator, a better drummer, someone who writes good lyrics, and engineer", etc. There is no substitute for doing it yourself, you learn more than anyone could teach you. Plus, there is a grace and magic in finishing any project, big or small.
Having done it all for multiple albums, the few times I have collaborated with people are my favorite to listen to. When you give your song up for interpretation with no reserve, what they come up with will usually be so different than what you would have chosen that it will inspire and elevate your own playing. It takes an absolute eternity to do everything from performing to editing to mixing and on. I highly recommend the more interesting and faster method of finding people who are better than you at their instrument and set them loose on your tracks.
You kinda blew up your whole point there lol As someone who knows about this very well, and I agree it’s nice to do this for yourself, but you STILL are going to wish and need the “perfect” this that or the other I mean yea you could technically do it all yourself, and then what? You gotta tour it with somebody, once again you COULD do it all yourself LIVE, with a buncha pedals and loop stations, but it defeats the purpose of the end goal
I used this method as a kid in the 90’s. Every time you swap the tapes to record another track the sound degenerates further, so it’s important to nail your take and have a quiet place to record. 😂
@@benbushnall5623 lol... believe me, back then NO ONE wanted to be lofi. you would do everything you possibly could to keep fidelity. lofi is a modern phenomenon brought about from sterile digital recordings.
I wish more people knew and understood how much effort and energy are put into a musicians songs. Obviously not ALL are Great BUT, music today bares no value to many. Musicians are by far some of the most under paid and under appreciated human beings. The likes of YT, Soundcloud and other platforms diminished the value of music by over saturating the masses with mediocre bands. Which is too bad because there are some really fantastic artists who have been lost in the sauce. Dave Grohl is educating people right here in a BIG way. Many bands go through the DIY trials by fire many times before getting their music captured in a worthy and true way. I used to love recording analog on a Tascam 4 track and even graduated to an 8 track. Still have some fun demos from way back.
Well said! I did much of this myself, recording in the basement on a 4-track. Now I have my own studio and record with youth. I still often operate with a "stick a mic in front of it and go" approach. I've been doing it 35 years and I still love it.
It's easier today to be creative and record yourself with a laptop and analogue to digital interface. You do t even need a pedal board and if you want a pedal board you can buy a board full of effect for under $200. When I was a teen you took ages to save for a single effect pedal let alone a guitar and amp. A lot if music from the last decade might be same same but the level of mixing and layering is next level.
Dave is one of kind and the rest of the FF's are equally amazing individuals. They are genuine and have mastered the art of live life to its fullest and without regret. Bravo.
My dad gave me an old Sony reel to reel tape machine when I was about 8 and it had this weird source/tape switch system where you could do this on the same tape. First, record a guitar take on the left track, rewind, flip the switches, recording the left track to the right track while simultaneously recording some tambourine or whatever, rewind, flip the switches, record the track with guitar and tambourine to the left track while adding vocals and then repeat this until it was all noise. Glorious noise. :)
It's so funny because way before Napster there was this thing called the cassette recorder..I had a dual cassette recorder just like Dave is talking about. All you had to do to "steal" a song without paying for it back then was call a local radio station and have them play a song on the radio that you were interested in. Yeah, you probably had to wait 20 mins or so but bam..hit that record button and with a blank cassette you could form your own playlist.
We did this in the early 90’s with every single queen song! My brother would sleep with the radio on and wake up at the first sound of a song we needed.
Yeah, totally did all that with the cassette amd the radio station, circa: about 1978-80, but the only thing was recording without line-in was just shit recording, lol. But yeah, you’re like 16, and your ears don’t really have the experience to know quality recording, so your just happy that the DJ played your song!
This brings back such fond memories! I started off with an 8-track player, then moved on to multiple cassettes like this. Then Tascam changed my life with a multi-track recorder on a single tape
This kind of DIY approach, especially when it's done out of necessity brings such a real and raw vibe to recordings. I use audacity to record my tracks which is a lot easier of course, but still requires a lot more thought, and encourages more experimentation with hooking up instruments than the auto DAWS of modern studios and most indy artists. Saying that, I have used 4-track recorders in the past and they are so much fun!
just bought a tascam recorder last night so I can record on the fly and it has overdubbing features that creates a new track. Can't wait for it to arrive. was thinking of buying a midi for drums but i'll attempt either dave's method, get a electronic drum kit, or just finger typing and layering the beats in garageband. songwriting is about being efficient at fleshing out parts.
Restrictions and limitations like that are what strengthens creative muscle. I feel like sometimes getting back to the basics brings out the best in songwriters, the best songs are so simple. They make you go, "How did I not think of that!"
@@miameramusic right totally agree. Was playing my airdrums again after dinner. it feels better by waving your hands/wrist than just tapping on a surface or keyboard. i'm certain i'll get a cheap electronic drumkit. don't get me wrong, DAWs are great ways for production, but it seems like the end product, not prototyping or piecing elements together. It's certain pretty cool to watch videos on how old school producers produce albums by rock bands too. I would say leave the producing to the producers n focus on your demo!
@@taytyty7444 This. It's all about the song. Artists get way too caught up in the minutia of producing, when a good song sounds good even on your voice mail. But I'm a huge Guided By Voices fan, so I'm biased.
I don't think Grohl is humble at all I think he's pretty out there and very American in that way. I'm not hating on that I fact quite the opposite because I think his charisma/ego is driven by a desire to be artistically and financially successful. He's the son of migrants only two generations ago that probably arrived with a suitcase and a dream. You have to be self confidence sometimes a bit hard but also kind which I think Dave is.
I don’t think I really know anyone hate or rag on Grohl himself…. Except maybe that Buzz Osborne video but that’s just bitter old Buzz as usual. People usually hate on Foo Fighters for being samey and I can get that but not on Dave himself.
Those who hate Dave Grohl are all they have going for them. They have all the time in the world and they choose to hate a person for being fucking amazing at their craft. Go figure.
Oh man I remember recording riffs on cassettes and then playing over them to create the leads and such. Then years later I bought a line 6 spider jam and the built in looper and drum tracks changed everything for me.
We recorded a whole album in '96 on a kareeokee machine, you only got one chance at a take but gave us infinite tracks, not that we used more than four, however it just goes to show as we sent the tape to John Peel who played three tracks from 'FUCK HATE' by The Jesus Foetus, if you want to hear it its on soundcloud under 'The Man they couldnt hang'.
@ghost mall Not at all i think it had one input, possibly two and two cassette decks. The premis is to put a tape into deck 1 with just the music on you press play and sing along using a mic and if you want to you put a tape into deck 2 and this records both mic and the pre recorded music so here goes.. Record on tape 1 say drums, put it in the other tape deck, press play and record onto tape 2 say bass, then put tape 2 back in that now has bass and drums, press play and record guitar bass and drums onto tape 1, i think that makes sense, you record over the last thing you did so get one take, if the levels are fuct it stays that way, got a lot of happy accidents.
I agree. It's important for the kids today to know where the music of the past came from, what the creative process was when we had to many fewer tools and technology available. This lesson will help any songwriter no matter what genre.
We did this in the early-mid nineties and it hooked me so bad I went to school for recording and got my degree in audio electronics. Ironically, later in life I have the bankroll for the gear that would bring a tear to teenage me, but life has conspired to rob me of inspiration. It’s hard to think about deeper meanings and loss and growth when you have to drop everything to clean up a blowout. It happens, still, and now I can whip out a phone as a quick and dirty 4 track to jot down ideas.
*Yep. I have 6 cell phones, 2 Ipads, 2 laptops, One Power Mac, and 3 2 TB HDs full of crap like this but as a little kid realizing everyone had tape players they werent using THATS exactly what I did. I think I had like 12 tape players at one point. The noise floor got so bad but as a little kid man. It was incredible.*
Your comment hit hard for me. I'm on the tail end of building a home studio and jam space in my basement, a year long project, but I'm struggling to finish despite being so close. When I was a kid the knowledge that I would one day have something like this in my home would've blown my mind, but then you get older and life, responsibility, the grind it all gets in your way, and how relentlessly too. What I wouldn't give to go back and tell myself to waste less time on useless BS in my teens and twenties and spend more time making music.
That's how our generation did it. I did the same thing in the mid 80's & still have the tapes. I can't remember how I got the idea to do it but then I found out later that others did it too.
I remember figuring this same thing out, I don't really remember how, I just had an idea of what if I try this? Apparently John Lennon would work out his songs in the same way.
back in 1975 when i was about 10, my mom and my grandma accidently bought me Radio Shack cassette recorders for christmas. I used to hit "record" on both of them at the same time, and sing into them. Then I would play them back together, but I would start them at slightly different times, and it would give me a echo (delay) effect. Then I would do the same with the guitar. Then I started using my home stereo cassette along with the two cassette players. I was multitracking before It was a thing
My brother and I did this as kids in the 90’s. We thought we were the only ones. And now we make music for a living all these years later. Never would’ve reached this point without all those early years of childhood play.
Ha that brings back happy memories of doing this back in the 80s/90s. It always gave a raw mix sound which today would be hard to emulate. Even though everything was treble and muddy it was great fun.
Thank you, Dave, for sharing our collective pain. As an 80s teen this was my life until I got a decent job at 19 and bought a 4-track. I even experimented with tape splicing for backwards effects. Now I use Ableton Live. Bit of a step up.
I've got a load of mine too. Just full of youthful energy and creativeness. And when I say "youthful energy and creativeness", I actually mean "noisy, badly played stuff with too much gain on a guitar that wasn't even in tune".
Funny. I had two different types of cassette players one was flat desk top style for voice memos and the other more of a transistor type radio that had a recorder. His home stereo set up there was high tech in comparison. That was 1985 for me. Fun times.
I still use ghetto techniques like this to record. I remember filming my own action videos using a wide lens on film and miniature cars with race tracks. Filming it. Doing the same thing popping it in, setting up a camera to film the tv and playing live music for the soundtrack over it. Mastering DIY editing of film, cutting it. etc. All at the age of 11 back in the early 90's.
I feel like we all started like that before computers. At one point I was doing this using VCRs and VHS tapes, in my mind the fatter tape allowed more bandwidth to layer without the sound from the original layer being completely stepped on
We ALL did that in the 70s. In fact, I used to lay my guitar pickup on the cassette recorder speaker to amplify through my amp so that I could play real drums to it.
Sounds just as crazy as me. I had a RadioShack mixer, that I believe was six or eight channels. And a few cassette decks and I would do the exact same thing. Bounce back-and-forth between cassettes and add whatever I wanted. I even had a effects unit and a little box that I ordered through some electronics catalog that took vocals out of songs. It worked for some, others it didn’t. But for a box like that in the 1980s, it was pretty amazing. I already had guitars, my mom had bought me a keyboard for one Christmas, so I wrote and recorded quite a bit of stuff. I will have to go through my huge box of cassettes and see if I can find any of them. I haven’t listen to them since probably the 1980s. So it’ll be interesting to see and hear what I was thinking and writing at the time. This video brought back those memories, which is awesome. Glad I wasn’t the only one tinkering in my own makeshift studio.
A friend of mine didn't had two cassette recorders, so he put the first cassette in his parents car, quite loud and then did the overdubs on the cassette recorder with the second cassette.
These day it seems like sounding "real" and not over produced or contrived is an artform unto itself. I guess that's why perfectionists like Adele take 6 year breaks between records.
That’s how I started in 1986. I’d plug the speaker jacks into the microphone inputs of my dual cassette ghetto blaster and bounce the tracks back n forth until it was a wall of sound!
My mom had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and did the same trick as Dave. Advantage to the old tech was that you could slow down or speed up the recording speed and layer impossibly fast or high vocals or guitar. Or fake a bass sound
My stereo was a dual-deck cassette player so I was all set with my little radio shack mic. Thankfully, I eventually got a 4-track and then went digital in 1998. Now it's all on PC and I'd never go back.
Man when I was 14 I was so creative. I had no mic to record my guitar. I used my korg tuner and split the guitar cable and regular cable together and that’s how I recorded my guitar tracks. Good times.
I was never good at getting things on the first take so would have to record, and rerecord, and rerecord. By the time I got the guitars finished, the drums had pretty much disappeared into a void of hiss and mushiness.
Omg I did the same thing but I had 1 friend ... so we had 2 guitars then I added the drums with my mouth against the mic (Way before the rappers did it )This was the summer of 1977 or 78 ..so after drums I sang lead and then one layer of harmonies. Crazy thing was the harmonics or something created a third harmony on this one spot of the chorus part of the song and there was only 2 vocal parts! Freaky.... then my friend also gets the tascam 244 and we would swap THOSE tapes have 4 tracks on each pass lmao. And then in the early eighties for shits and giggles I sent songs to three local radio stations, and all three stations wanted me to come in and do a one hour show for their Sunday night local band showcase. They played the songs I wrote and recorded on those tascam four tracks. Bounced to 6 or 8. Had the big 80's synths by then. Lol. Thanks for letting me ramble down memory lane. It was so much simpler then. When you could write and record an entire song in one night. Thanks to all the coke everyone had 🤪
I used to do the same thing when I was a teenager before I got my first 4 track cassette recorder. I however did not grow up to be as badass as Dave Grohl.
This is what i used to do with the keyboard at the age of 6, i would just keep switching the tapes and overlaying another recording until the song was complete
Greatness. I’ve tried the laptop and software approach and I’m rubbish at it and found myself fiddling around with the laptop more than the music itself, but I’ve seen some awesome stuff being made this way, I mean some of the best songs in the world are made that way too, but I can’t do it, yeah I can learn , but until then I got a multitrack thing (boss-br600) and I make alllllll my music on there, i lost my original one on a bus when I was drunk, now I have a newish one (tbh it’s about 5 years old now) it says I’m on my 488th song? Or somewhere close. Mostly random jams and weird sounds but, this technique is where the magic comes from, the juice. Anyways . Have a nice day
Yep, that was me...1982, 11 years old with a shitty keyboard, a shitty guitar, one semi-decent tape recorder (my dad's newer one) and one really shitty one (my dad's old one) knocking out 4 or 5 overdubs before the quality got so screwy you couldn't hear wtf was going on! Now I've just finished a song in my studio that has 86 simultaneous tracks of midi and audio in the mix, not to mention a whole slew of effects and inserts. The principles are exactly the same though. I still find it mindblowing.
This takes me back to my handheld recorder, playing bits and pieces of ideas onto the mini-cassette. Then, like a month later, listening to the whole thing through to find the golden nuggets of a possible song.
@@miameramusic I still do that actually. The difference is now, I forget that I’ve recorded anything. Fast forward a year and it’s like Christmas morning.
@@TheJont118 I should start that again, I use my phone too much. I hope Best Buy still sells those little things. It reminds me of those old Norm MacDonald bits where he was like, "Note to self..."😆
And the moral of the story is … have friends, be in a band and make your records in a proper studio that is being driven by a proper engineer. With multi tracking facilities! Agreed you don’t actually need 48 tracks, or 67 tracks, or however many tracks you can create before everything starts getting in the way of itself. But used judiciously, especially if you do have friends and you are in a band, it sure comes in handy if you won’t the record of your song to sound like a record rather than a jam session.
I really love that first Foo Fighters record. The beauty of it is in his singular vision, he wrote it, he recorded it, he performed it. It's the purest form of expression I think we have from Dave. It's literally just him. (And Greg Dulli, on one song)
Porta Studio Tascam!!!! Dave your first solo effort was the thing of simple genius. Lester Paul would be proud of you. Ping ponging, over dubs… yea man … the simple shit.. that works every time… as long as the material is good.
I used to do this in the nineties before i had a very simple DAW. Each time you record from one cassette to the other the general quality reduces slightly.
I know a lot of us did that back in the days before computers made things so much better. I still use my phones recorder when I'm out somewhere and an idea hits me and I'll si g the words or tey to sing the guitar riff and record o lyrics to listen back hours later and wonder what the he'll was I thinking? Lol. I know I ain't alone!!!
@ghost mall I had a dual cassette recorder I plugged my guitar in the Aux and by chance it would let me play the last recording and allowed both play back and guitar to record to the recording side cassette.then later own In the years I bought a fostex 4 channel cassette recorder. It did good for the day.
How I did it in the 80s exactly! And if someone gave me a pre-recorded riff even better! I would go back and forth until it was barely recognizable, especially after you added a vocal idea!
