by Serguey Shinder
We had two days in a studio in 2016 and we spent most of them on one song. Six minutes long, the best thing we had written, and by the end of the second afternoon we had thirty one takes of the band playing it.
Then I spent three evenings assembling it. The first verse came from take nine because the vocal was steady. The chorus came from take twenty two. The bridge was take four, with the guitar from take seventeen laid under it, and the drums were stitched from at least five different passes and nudged into line. Every decision was defensible. The result was the most accomplished recording we ever made. Nothing was out of tune, nothing rushed, every entry clean.
We sent it round and everyone said it was good. Nobody played it twice. Two friends who had been at rehearsals asked whether we had another version.
We did. Take six was a single continuous performance with an obvious flam in the second chorus and a guitar that drifts sharp in the last minute. We put that one out instead, six months later, and it is the one people ask about, and for a long while I told myself that was a story about charm and imperfection, which I now think is the wrong lesson and a comfortable one.
Here is what is actually in take six. Our drummer comes up by about two beats a minute going into the final chorus, and he does it because of something the singer did in the bar before, and the bass follows him a beat later. None of that was written and none of it happened twice. It is three people responding to each other inside one continuous stretch of time. When I cut the best chorus from one take and the best bridge from another, every fragment kept its quality and every relationship between them was quietly thrown away. The comp was not worse in any part. It was worse only in a property that does not live in any part.
I have watched the same thing happen to a product reviewed one screen at a time, to a document written in sections by six people who each wrote well, and to a codebase where every single pull request was approved on its own merits and the whole became something none of us would have designed.
So the question I ask now, of a record or a release or a report, is who has sat with the entire thing in one sitting. Not reviewed it. Sat with it, start to finish, at its own speed, and asked whether it holds together. That job is nobody's part, which is why it usually belongs to nobody, and it is the only place where the thing a listener actually experiences can be judged at all.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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