Pompeii studio footage, fake or not?

[Alanko]

The On the Run footage shows nothing, really. Roger messing around with a short ascending phrase while manipulating a cutoff filter on a VCS-3. This isn't heard anywhere on Darkside.

Then they tune the synth to a piano (Abbey Road didn't have a Conn or Peterson strobe tuner and instead referenced everything to an available piano?). Roger does not too badly for a guy who couldn't tune his bass.

Then we hear On the Run, and Roger playing a single slowly ascending note on the synth that rises unevenly and ends on a high E that is sharper than the backing track. Again, nothing heard on the final studio album. The synth has a bit of room ambience, whereas On the Run sounds like the album cut, overlaid. There could legitimately be no relation or overlap between the two tracks we are hearing.

Roger's "can I put this down, it is just on the first note" also seems contrived.

[A Prick Like You]

It also sounds like, to me at least, that the parts were recorded directly to Maben's tape recorder, as they're much louder than the actual album audio, which sounds like it was overlaid later.

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that most of you ‘experts’ don’t actually know how basic recording and mixing works.

[Alanko]

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that most of you ‘experts’ don’t actually know how basic recording and mixing works.

I've done quite a lot of recording with various bands. At no time have we had a rough mix of an album track blaring out of studio monitors while one of us plays formless lead guitar lines or out of tune synth parts over the top of them. Headphones and separation spring to mind. I doubt, given the anally retentive approach to recording Dark Side, that they risked random bleed through mics on cabinets, etc. Maben possibly got a feed from the desk and used a room mic to capture whatever the band were messing about with, but I'm not convinced. I don't think the footage captures any key milestone moment in the composition or recording of Dark Side. I doubt an average day for Pink Floyd consisted of three members working on random parts for multiple songs.

Another piece of the Pompeii footage I'm not buying; Rick "recording" piano embellishments for Us and Them. We hear the studio track, complete with sax parts (most likely to be sundry parts added late in the recording process), vocals, backing vocals, rhythm track, guitars etc. Virtually a complete mix, but still waiting for some piano parts to be added? The whole song was probably built up from a scratch piano track, bass and drums. At best we see Rick working out some additional piano parts, but I would be surprised if they were added after all the sax and backing vocals had been laid down and assembled into a mix resembling the album cut.

[umma gumma]

Alanko, you are hilarious. And wrong. Studio log says sax parts were recorded on "us & them" that day, too, which is probably why we hear some of them.

[Edufloyd]

The footage is of the Floyd recording additional tracks at Abbey Road Studios for the quad mix after the album was released. The On The Run sequence was created specifically for the film and never meant to be released. IIRC.

I think rontoon's comment made it more than clear.

[rontoon]

I think rontoon's comment made it more than clear.

Apparently I don't know what I'm talking about.

[umma gumma]

with all due respect, it appears so

FYI here's the quad master, it was done a year later on Oct 9, 1973

[JerryIsBored]

It’s stuff like this that makes me think that most of you ‘experts’ don’t actually know how basic recording and mixing works.

I apologize if I came off that way, I have never claimed to be an expert on recording and probably will never claim to be. Heck, my current experience with recording has only come from my college classes. What I should have said was that in my experience, I've never heard parts being recorded over something so loudly compared to the existing tracks. Cue mix, maybe?

At any rate, with the release of the full Chit Chat with Oysters recently, I've noticed that that footage and the Abbey Road footage are structurally, very similar. Both films feature footage of the band eating in a studio canteen, working in a studio, and individual interviews. Some of the interview questions are even the same. I have a theory that Adrian's original idea was to include the Chit Chat footage as the documentary feature, but decided to reshoot it in a more professional setting when the opportunity arose. It seems the band also picked up on this, as they aren't quite as rambunctious in the Abbey Road footage as compared to Chit Chat. Just some interesting observations.

[Son of Nothing]

with all due respect, it appears so

FYI here's the quad master, it was done a year later on Oct 9, 1973

I'm not buying into this debate about whether or not the footage is faked, but I am XKCD 386 enough to observe that date of mastering is very, very different to date of recording extra tracks. Recording, mixing and mastering does not all happen on the same day. So I'm not clear on what this specific item is meant to prove.

[umma gumma]

rontoon claims the fake footage was shot during the quad dsotm mix/master sessions.That quad mix & mastering was done after the stereo was completed.

I checked the studio logs, and Pink Floyd were in the studio a year later in Oct '73, but it was all "Household Objects" material they were recording. No notes about any film crews.

Just "papa was a rolling Floyd" and such

[umma gumma]

I also don't see anything about Pink Floyd recording new parts for the quad mix. They were on tour most of '73, and didn't get back to Abbey Road until Oct 1st, 1973.

Does anyone hear anything on the quad mix, that isn't on the stereo mix?

Keep in mind there IS a full recording out there, of DSOTM side 2 multitracks with all the faders up. So it includes parts that weren't mixed into the stereo master.

We don't have that for side 1, AFAIK

[rontoon]

I still insist that the clip from Pompeii of Roger creating On the Run was done for the benefit of film and nothing more. If the other performances captured for the film weren't for the quad mix then they could have simply been for overdubs.

[Alanko]

Alanko, you are hilarious. And wrong. Studio log says sax parts were recorded on "us & them" that day, too, which is probably why we hear some of them.

I genuinely don't care about your opinion any more. Reading comprehension is clearly something you haven't been gifted with in any meaningful capacity.

[umma gumma]

Why don't you fellows have a read through this:

https://www.loudersound.com/features...ive-at-pompeii

"“In the summer of 1972, I began to suspect that something was missing in the first version of the film. The band played like frozen statues in the amphitheatre, but we knew nothing about their character or how they create and produce their extraordinary sounds. I went fishing with Roger on the River Teme near the Welsh border and asked him if it might be possible to film them recording their next album. Roger replied that he would think about it and ask the other members of the band. A few months later, he rang me in Paris and told me, ‘OK, we’ll do it. Come to London next week with a minimal crew and please, no interference with our work.’”

Maben arrived with a small crew at Abbey Road on October 16 and remained around Studio 2 for a couple of days before getting “politely thrown out”. “He came to Abbey Road where he filmed us finishing off the recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon,” Gilmour said in 2017. “It captured a moment in time.”

It was this footage that extended the film to 80 minutes, and became the version that gained a general release in the summer of 1974."

[rontoon]

I keep hearing people say the Pompeii footage was faked, as the album was already done. Where are they getting this from? Wiki?

Perhaps by "faked" they were referring to the fact that the band was miming the performance of Echoes to the playback of a recording? On the first day of the shoot, the long truck-ins at the start and finish of the song were filmed. Filming was limited to 10 minutes at a time (limited by the size off the film rolls) and was shot in bits and pieces to the playback. The other songs may have been filmed in a similar manner.

[daemonspudguy]

No, by "faked" the OP is referring to the footage shot at Abbey Road and added to the 1974 theatrical print of the film.

[rontoon]

Yes, I realize that he was referring to the Abbey Road footage but was offering the possibility that the person could have been confusing it with this since there's no conext to that conversation.