WCSX Classic Cuts : Time
WCSX Classic Cuts
Pink Floyd: “Time”
The Hook: The process of recording the song’s instrumental break, which was mainly played on a new drum called a roto-tom, was painstaking.
Album: The Dark Side of the Moon
Year: 1974
Writers: David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Rick Wright
Stats: Didn’t chart as a single.
Background: Pink Floyd’s engineer on The Dark Side of the Moon was Alan Parsons — who would go on to form The Alan Parsons Project. He tells how the unique percussion sound on “Time” was created.
Alan Parsons, who engineered The Dark Side of the Moon, on recording “Time.” OC:…each chord. :24
“The main instrument that you hear in the instrumental section of ‘Time’ is Nick Mason’s roto-toms, which were quite new at the time. They’re tune-able by twisting the drum itself. What we were doing was when each chord changed in the tune, we would stop the tape and he would re-tune for that chord and he would record all the sections which had that chord. Then we’d stop the tape again and drop in and punch in and punch out for all the different chords, ‘cause there weren’t enough drums to go around to cover all the notes required for each chord.”
