Nearly 50 years later and that song (and album) still totally stands the test of time. Great songs regardless of being disco or whatever you want to call it. And the technology and innovation behind it is absolutely astounding. Plus, those three brothers sang like a unit that to this day is unrivaled in many ways. Brilliant.
Back in the days things were really difficult to conceive, improvise, juggle etc with limited technology. The sheer mettle in the intelligent forethought brought out such immeasurable classics. Hatsoff. My deep respects to the time & the innovators. Beegees, no words. Timeless.
Making a perfect drum loop is difficult enough on Audacity, let alone physically cutting an actual tape and splicing it and then doing what those guys did ! Amazing !
I started out doing drum loops on Audacity and it took me ages get them right as they were too short or long. These guys must have spent hours spicing the tape and putting it together.
You wanna know about splicing tape? Look at what the Radiophonic Workshop did. They made songs by splicing every single note of a beat together, and then splicing those blocks together in a specific sequence to make up the song, in multiple layers done on seperate quarter inch tapes.
I’m not a historian but there’s a possibility that Tom Scholz of Boston was doing this even earlier. In a way, I feel bad for the current generation that’s blindly unaware of what it took to make music back then. Tom played ALL the parts, didn’t like the timing and track by track spliced the tapes to make it work. Next time you listed to Foreplay/Longtime try to think about that and what an MIT grad and Polaroid employee was able to pull off all on his own.
Even for us in Indonesia, the song was legendary one, impossible to simply forget...these great men were behind this song, big salute to them, big salute to the Gibb brothers!
I just saw the Bee Gees documentary in CNN and I was mesmerized about this improvised invention. I heard the song in 1977 and I never could imagine the trick of the drum. I remember the movie and the songs as part of my young years.
How you imagined it would be as a kid back then and the realisation of how it was actually implemented in the studio using a improvised tape looping method... Truly fantastic.
It's brilliant as an idea! The wonderful things that can be created and developed in the studio, all the magic takes place from this place. Thank you for this very beautiful discovery!
As a huge fan I think that great part of the magic of the second half of the 70's Bee Gees albums is due to the genius of Alby Galuthen and Karl Richardson
Fantastic! Dennis and I did this in Nashville in 2012. We recorded a new Dennis' drum part with a middle '70's MCI on two inch tape/16 Track. We used a super heavy mic stand (freestanding) with sandbags over the base on the floor. Worked great. The inventive spirit of you guys back in the day is still astounding! Iconic track and even a better story. Bravo!
Considering what Is considered music these days, This is Genius and it's easy on the ears doable, I can accept this easily, Today's music? Not all There's alot to question when talent is the key factor,
Whoa! This was all analog and physically splicing the audio tape! Now, you just digitally edit. I'm very impressed. Yup, necessity is indeed the mother of invention, no matter how far-fetched it may sound!
Whoa! That's SO cool! I never would've guessed that the beat for “Stayin' Alive” came from the beat for “Night Fever”! They did what they had to do and it worked amazingly well!
We use to also do this also back then... Some loops where so long we had to use a mic stand far from the machine to give the right tension for the tape to roll..hehe We where all praying until the transfer of the loop 2 track was print on the 16 track tape..hehe With good old Ampex mm1000..
Brings back fond memories of bedroom cassette splicing sessions lol. It was very rewarding to create or restore things you wanted to hear by using your brain, hands and lady luck. Interesting having lived long enough to experience rapid technical (r)evolution. Feel like a damn vampire sometimes.
The cool thing about staying alive was it was never sang or recorded by any other group except for the Bee gees....like most songs stayin alive was a masterpiece of a song credit to blue weaver and the other guy's 👍
this is an excerpt from the first official documentation Bee Gees How can you mend a broken Heart published in 2020. You have to go all together then you know how it was created. A must see for Bee Gees fans.👍👍👍🙋♀️
Because it's not new. Most of the fans have always known this. And it was never a secret. Even in those days when times were desperate you need some desperate measures to get things done on time.
I believe the guy with the long hair is producer Alby Galutrn. Certainly a legendary music producer! I first heard of him when he worked with Jellyfish and Agnes Stone. Again LEGENDARY! I would love Mr. Galuten to do a video talking about his experiences with Jellyfish and Agnes Stone🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽 Great work !
@@denniseudela411 YUP! CORRECT-O-MUNDO DENISE!!! That was the trademarked named of the said 'double-headed monster' production company that the three Gibb brothers used from 1976 to about 1981. That seems like an incredible SHORT amount of time, the 'monster' had to wag his big ol' Godzilla, Hit-Making Machine Tail around, but Barry also used Rich & Al for recordings with brother Andrew (Flowing Rivers, Shadow Dancing, After Dark), Dionne Warwick (Heartbreaker), Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton (Islands in the Stream), Frankie Valli (Grease), etc, etc, etc... BolsaChicaRadio
This was so cool...i'm more interested in the weight that was used on the tape loop to keep the tension on the tape...bloody innovators...any more on this story...I could watch this kind of stuff for hours.
This was because they were pressed for time because there was a hard deadline for the soundtrack of the movie Saturday Night Fever that was soon to be released in theaters
I never realized that the beat of Staying Alive was made with a loop. Yet it is not the first track in History that has been recorded that way. The Beatles did it a decade before with the song Tomorrow Never Knows.
I agree that this is insane engineering vision but i disagree with the statement on todays world. Today, you have to be insanely precise with everything you do and you have to master and combine multiple genres in order to be innovative with less studio personal and money. It's simply a different approach than it was but both require talent and much, much hard work.
People pushed to the limits can do special things, something it's never been done before. Let me rephrase it, awesome ppl can do amazing things when they're pushed t0 their limits
The drum of this song are played by steve gadd. Include of words, how deep is your love, night fever and i started a joke. But he'd still love tony williams, i dont know why even he's a level
I'm a keyboard player who just learned Africa to perform it. Since we don't have two keyboardists, I am covering roughly six different sounds myself. I had to do some clever layering and detuning to get it all to where my two hands can play it. When you really listen close to that song, and break it down in order to program the sounds and play them, you can hear how intricate it is.
Other songs that took drums from another song and made something else out of it: Graceland - Paul Simon (All those songs were a patchwork of long jam sessions with South African musicians and there was one he didn't like but he kept the drums) I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For - U2 (Larry still played drums but the drums were taken from a throwaway track called "The Weather Girls") Trouble - Lindsey Buckingham (Mick Fleetwood did play that part but the animosity was so tense that only 4 bars got recorded)
ok, but the lyrics were recorded in the main staircase of the Chateau d'Hérouville France. the sound of this castle is exceptional ok, mais les paroles ont été enregistré dans l'escalier principal du chateau d'Hérouville France. la sonorité de ce chateau est exceptionnelle.
Pro musicians and orchestras are still recorded every single day all around the world. You hear them in your music, movies, TV shows... They aren't going anywhere
@@dugroz if they hadn't done this, they would never have finished the songs that relied on that tape. Then Saturday Night Fever would have never sounded the way it did and perhaps never would be as big as what it became.
These people should at the background should get royalty fee from Barry because they play impt role in their music. Mr Barry should give millions to his music assistants.
Nonsense. It's nothing to do with Barry to pay them 'millions', it's the record company that does that. And by the way, Barry himself was already involved in the process of choosing the right beat to tape together. And you won't get millions unless you actually write the song. They have made enough to retire on anyway.
Albhy Galuthen AND Karl Richardson were Karlbhy production ,the producers AND engineers of the BeeGees albums, Andy Gibb's albums, Bárbra Streisand's Guilty álbum, Dionne Warwick's Heartbreaker AND many more, their name Is duly AND prominentely credited in the Vinyl, cassettes, cds, and I'm sure they were well paid by the récord company RSO/Polydor, those albums sold hundreds of millions
