Such a fun song… Love it!
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I enjoy learning from Rick Beato but he speaks of Tom Scholz in the past tense, he’s still living. Brad Delp, may he rest in peace
Thanks for that! Great way to start the day. Gonna have to look up stuff like that instead of reading the news every morning ; ). Tomorrow…Peter Gabriel!
One of the best pop-rock tunes EVER. The definition of the sound of an era. Huge influence on recordings afterward.
There have been very few people who could write, play, record and put together good records nearly single-handedly - Stevie Wonder, Steve Winwood, and (sorta) Peter Gabriel come to mind - but Scholz is certainly one of them. They were always my heroes for some reason - I guess because it seemed like an ultimate thing to be a triple threat like that. They make it look easy. It ain’t : )
Some of the first good demos I did back then - on “real” studio gear to 1/2" 8-track R to R (vs. the home cassette 4-track I had at the time), I recorded the guitars through a Walkman. He just sorta engineered those sounds into a box. It was awesome. A lot of very “thin” sounding stuff when taken in isolation, but as this demonstrates, he was a genius at layering sounds that are bandwidth-limited so that it all hangs together beautifully and doesn’t get the typical congested, obscuring buildup of overlapping “full”-sounding instruments. A more orchestral approach.
That’s a really easy trap to fall into - constantly listening to each of the tracks in isolation and trying to make every one sound as big and full and amazing as possible. They can’t all fit in a mix.
Brett - buddy, I think Tom Schulz may in fact be dead (whoever he is) ; ). But yeah, Tom Scholz is still alive AFAIK. Seemed to me Beato was just talking in the past tense about “when he did this”, not about him personally.
My brother has a plexiglass sculpture Tom made in college that was given to him by a friend of a friend. Not sure why he gave it away - he must’ve had other better stuff.
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Yes, thank you, please forgive my typo.
I do - just giving you a hard time ; )
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Does anyone know where Rick gets the multi-track recordings he dissects with what is seemingly complete and total knowledge of every component of a track?
I enjoy hearing the drum track, then the bass track and then the two together
I enjoyed hearing Rick tell this story about how he got himself to look beyond just jazz
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My guess is that he got it through connections with other producers and labels. There are Multitracks to buy on the open market, but none of what I found was classic rock etc’, the kind Rick makes videos of…
I watched another of his videos from about a year ago, he gets them direct from the record companies…special connections for sure.
Get yourself Internet Famous, and you could get the same treatment ; )
I watched an interview video Tom Scholz did, I believe, for the Japanese audience. He came across as brilliant, something that was highly reinforced in Rick’s video. Tom also came across as if he and he alone was responsible for pretty much everything. I don’t recall him even mentioning others in the band even once. I don’t know if he simply distanced himself from any controversy (there was plenty of bad blood with Brad Delp), but the utter disregard he displayed about his band-mates was striking, and kind of sad.
He really did everything on that first record… maybe the others but I am not familiar with them. Tom was an MIT-educated engineer at Polaroid and he wrote and produced that first record almost 100% of just him in his home after hours. His co-workers had no idea. He was not sure he could even take time off from his job to tour. He played almost all the parts himself… the sound, the tech… everything. He is the real deal.
Peace
Bruce in Philly
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