Foo Fighters have slipped snippets of the original master tape into physical copies of their new album.
LA Weekly found a sticker on the front of their copy of the new Foo Fighters album Wasting Light that read: “A piece of the original master tape is included in this package”.
Amazed that this could happen, they gave Foo svengali Dave Grohl a call and he confirmed that it’s true – they sliced “20-30 reels” into “inch by inch” pieces and put them inside copies of the album.
Grohl said, “At the end of the session I thought it would be an extraordinary move to destroy all the masters and give the pieces of the tapes to the fans.
“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.”
He spoke about the decision to go fully analog, “When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.
“When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine- it kinda sucks the life out of music.”
Thankfully, he reassures everyone that the masters are backed up on other tapes, and hard drives for repurposing to “something like Guitar Hero”.
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