EXCLUSIVE Interview: Dave Grohl on Cutting the New Foo Fighters Album's Master Tape to Pieces--and Giving Them Away to the Fans

By Gustavo Turner Mon., Apr. 11 2011 at 12:56 PM

Continued from page 1

It robs the musicians of their personalities, and their fingerprints, their signature sound. I think the idea to have more of a human sound to this record than just a sterile cold version.

So anyway, everyone was so precious about tapes, so afraid they're gonna shed or break or something will happen to them, weather, "you have to be really careful with them." And that just made me want to destroy it. To prove a point to everybody to show how intangible a real tape can be. I thought, let's chop it up into a million pieces, and give it to the people who buy the album so they can hold it in their hands and see it. A lot of the records you buy, there's nothing you can hold in your hand, it's all 1's and 0's, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.

There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that "Everlong" is on it, or "Best of You" is on it, and it's really special.

I say that to say you can touch it and know it's real, so we decided to chop it up and put it in the album.

Behold a piece of the Foo Fighters' master tape (penny provided for comparisons--and for your thoughts)

So the master version of this album is a harddrive?

No, we backed it all up to tapes. We did backup reels, we have 25-30 backup reels and tapes, also hard drives. It's second generation analog in our closets, but then we also did hard drives, because now when you do something like Guitar Hero, they have to use that.

So if someone were to grab the little piece of tape and splice it on a longer piece of tape and then played it, would they get like one drumbeat or is it too short to hear anything?

They'd probably get one note, or one drumbeat. I mean, the pieces of tape are like an inch by an inch piece of tape. We chop it up into a million fucking pieces ... if a million people got together and put it back together, they'd get a whole album.

Maybe somebody can sample it.

Yeah, give it to Gaga, maybe she can sample the snare drum beat!

Tags:

Dave Grohl, Gimmix!, Master Tapes, Things We Like, Wasting Light

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OKay

Did 2" analog in Mpls. he's not wrong about the drums (and vocals). The only bad part is it showed my digital piano to be a POS.

Dave Carroll

The important part is to record everything through the tape. Some people stupidly like to record a few things like the drums through tape and then for some reason they'll do the vocals straight to Pro Tools. People do a lot of stupid stuff nowadays, then they wonder why it isn't as good as it used to be.

Rp-cerney

i just got the album home, pumped to see on the package tehre was that piece of tape included., but it was not in my album. dissapointed

jamal

Should be stuck to the inside (front) cover of the booklet.

death by analog

its so hard to find a decent producer who still records to tape... damned computers have taken a majority of the fun out of "cutting" original music to "tape"computers give you a highly processed sounding sterile copy of the music but a tape gives you some meat and rawness-and a finished product to grasp in your mits... make you feel a greater sense of accomplishment...

Nope

actually its not hard to find anyone who wants to record to tape. its a fad.

Dave Carroll

It's a fad that started around a century ago

Johhny

Absolutely. And Digital recording doesn't create a cold sterile sound. I get so tired of hearing that BS. It's not the medium, it's the artist and producer that are responsible for the sound. There is absolutely nothing cold and sterile about a digital recording...nothing, get over it.

Dave Carroll

Thou dost protest too much. Actually the artist and producer are the ones that have nothing to do with it, it can be the best artist and producer ever and if they're doing it to Pro Tools without any tape and without even any analog emulation plug-ins that recording is gonna fucking suck. Whether you like it or not.

Dave Carroll

No dumbass, the cd doesn't sound cold and sterile because it's a transfer from tape. Not the same as doing it straight to digital with Pro Tools. That's why cds were great for the first decade they were out because they were all just tape transfers and sounded great, the digital format actually made the analog master sound even better. Whereas music recorded totally digitally sounds like shit, 'cold and sterile' is an accurate description of it. Sorry you were born in the era when everything started sucking but that's just the way it goes.