How were the crowd chanting effects produced in the Pink Floyd album The Wall?

May 10, 2009 6:28 AM

How were the crowd chanting effects produced in the Pink Floyd album The Wall?

On Pink Floyd's 1979 album The Wall, at the beginning and ending of the songs "Run Like Hell" and "Waiting for the Worms", there is the sound of a large crowd chanting.

How was this effect created using 1979 technology?

At the beginning of "Run Like Hell", the crowd can be heard chanting "Pink! Floyd! Pink! Floyd!"

At the end of "Run Like Hell", which segues into the beginning of "Waiting for the Worms", the chanting becomes "Hammer! Hammer!", which is repeated again at the end of that song.

Since the concept for The Wall wasn't developed until after the Animals tour, it's not like Pink Floyd had a stadium full of people they could get to chant these words for their next album.

I assume the producers of the album would have had access to recordings of crowd cheering, chanting and ambience. But how were they able to transform this into the sound of specific words being chanted?

posted by paleyellowwithorange to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

I don't know the specifics of this one but multitracking recording was used much, much earlier than 1979 - think about the amazing stuff the Beatles got up to on just four tracks - so it would not have been a problem to record seven or eight people at once on one track, then record a second track with the same people shouting again but in a slightly different voice, and again and so on.

Even once they used up their allocation of available tracks they could "bounce down" onto the final remaining track, meaning that they could effectively start the process all over again (albeit every time you bounce down on analogue, you lose a generation's worth of audio fidelity...but for a crowd chanting sound it's probably fine.)
posted by skylar at 6:46 AM on May 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

I don't know the specifics of this one but multitracking recording was used much, much earlier than 1979 - think about the amazing stuff the Beatles got up to on just four tracks - so it would not have been a problem to record seven or eight people at once on one track, then record a second track with the same people shouting again but in a slightly different voice, and again and so on. Even once they used up their allocation of available tracks they could "bounce down" onto the final remaining track.

Having bounced many a track before, this is highly unlikely. It would take forever and cost a lot in studio time.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:56 AM on May 10, 2009

And Floyd would never do anything in the studio that would waste time and take forever.
posted by dersins at 7:04 AM on May 10, 2009 [9 favorites]

"For 'Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)', Pink Floyd needed to record a school choir, so they approached music teacher Alun Renshaw of Islington Green School, around the corner from their Britannia Row Studios. The chorus was overdubbed twelve times to give the impression that the choir was larger."

If they overdubbed for the choir, would they not have done the same for the crowd?
posted by Houstonian at 7:06 AM on May 10, 2009

Best answer: Although I can't find the info on that specific bit of audio, the excellent book Saucerful of Secrets says that engineer Nick Griffiths was given the talk of recording all the sound effects. He says, "I was given a list of various bits and pieces to record..." He also did the recording of the school children singing Another Brick in the Wall. There were 23 children, and he "tracked the voices about a dozen times."

So, it's no stretch to think that he did something similar for the crowd chants.
posted by The Deej at 7:09 AM on May 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Best answer: More info: Nick Mason's book Inside Out says, "...in Britannia Row [Pink Floyd's studio], Nick Griffiths was getting on with a long list of sound effects he had been asked to gather together, ranging from the Brit Row staff chanting 'Tear down the wall!' to the sound of trolley-loads of crockery being smashed."

So it seems most likely that the Britannia Row staff, multi-tracked, provided the other crowd chants as well.
posted by The Deej at 7:15 AM on May 10, 2009

I just came back to post Houstonian's link. I'd bet they got a couple hundred people to chant the same thing 25 or 30 times.

Note also that "bouncing" and "overdubbing" are two different things. "Bouncing" is a technique for getting more tracks available to use by combining several tracks already recorded into one track. "Overdubbing" is when one re-records the same sequence multiple times on different tracks to give a fuller sound.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:18 AM on May 10, 2009

Have you seen this? It's "The Wall recording and mastering sessions in detail".
posted by Houstonian at 7:21 AM on May 10, 2009

[link above is a PDF]
posted by intermod at 7:53 AM on May 10, 2009

Here are my uninformed but undoubtedly correct guesses:

• The crowd chanting "Pink! Floyd! Pink! Floyd!" came from an issued Floyd concert recording. I'm sure the group had already been recording all their performances for years by this point.
• "Hammer! Hammer!" is probably a British football chant, like the Liverpool crowd singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" at the end of "Fearless" on Floyd's "Meddle" album from eight years before.

No need for it to be anything more complicated than that.
posted by timeistight at 8:34 AM on May 10, 2009

I have no chance of finding the citation, but I recall reading in Rolling Stone at around the time the album of The Wall was released (or perhaps as it was being recorded) that the producer went to a straight-ahead rock concert in L.A. and got the crowd there to do some chants either before the concert or, more likely, during intermission. Want to say that it was, like, Ted Nugent (back when he was popular and was playing straight ahead rock and roll, and audiences at concerts were decidedly unpolitical/apolitical). Anyway, if the memory is correct, the crowd chants are real. (I also recall that one of the chants was undermined by the crowd, and quickly morphed from "Pink Floyd!" into "Fuck You!")
posted by mosk at 8:48 AM on May 10, 2009

"Bouncing" is a technique for getting more tracks available to use by combining several tracks already recorded into one track. "Overdubbing" is when one re-records the same sequence multiple times on different tracks to give a fuller sounda.

To clarify, overdubbing means recording something in synch with a pre-recorded track. It doesn't specifically mean recording the same thing more than once.
posted by ludwig_van at 9:54 AM on May 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

Indeed, Ironmouth seems to have confused Overdubbing with Doubling.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:48 PM on May 10, 2009

Response by poster: Ah, yes, I forgot about the "Tear down the wall!" chant at the end of "The Trial".

Thanks, everyone, for your answers. Amazing how long you can be a fan and still learn new details.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:02 PM on May 10, 2009

it's a funny one the "You'll never walk alone" because it sounds to me like it was a studio recreation of a crowd... it just doesn't quite sound right somehow...

But I've found that layering sounds can work, with the correct addition of reverb etc to try adn recreate a stadium setting.
But it's no match for a real staduim shouting at you
posted by keeno at 7:24 AM on May 12, 2009