It might be regarded as one of the best-sounding songs in rock history - it won the Record of the Year Grammy in 1983, in fact - but the technical limitations of the time meant that the recording of Toto’s Rosanna (possibly named after Rosanna Arquette, Porcaro's girlfriend at the time) wasn’t quite as smooth as the end result.
Speaking to MusicRadar, Steve Porcaro - the band’s keyboard player and resident synth boffin - says: “What you"ve got remember is that, back in the early-’80s, nobody had heard of Pro Tools and nobody had a professional studio on their laptop. We were recording live to tape on 24-track machines.”
Recorded in Hollywood in the era of excess, this wasn’t just one tape machine, of course - Porcaro says that he and his Toto bandmates linked four of them together “to give ourselves more room” - but he remembers that, in this analogue era, “there was still a point at which the buck had to stop.”
Recalling those make or break moments, Porcaro says: "There were times recording Rosanna – and Africa, too – where we literally had one spare track. Just the one! And we were debating whether we needed to do another guitar take. ‘Are you really sure we need another take? That last one was pretty good. If we punch in, we’re going to lose that one.’”
Recording without a safety net, then, which meant there were consequences if you fluffed your lines.
“There was no Command-Z!” Porcaro says, reminding us that the Undo function didn’t exist. “Get it wrong and you were in the doghouse for the next couple of days. Or weeks, depending on how much you messed up."
Porcaro has just released The Very Day, his new solo album, and, given how long he’s been in the business, it may surprise you to learn that this is only his second. He puts this down, at least in part, to an inability to see songs through from idea to completion.
"Starting a song is easy," he says. "You hit the wrong button on a drum machine or play the wrong chord. ‘Hey, that sounds great. What have we got here?’ Finishing that song... well, that’s something else. I"ve never been much good at that.
Fortunately, he doesn’t need to worry about running out of tracks these days; instead of using multiple tape machines, he switches between two DAWs.
"Everything ended up in Pro Tools for the final mastering, but I still use a lot of MIDI, so I prefer to put the songs together in Logic,” he confirms. “Pro Tools sounds great but MIDI isn’t its thing... the designers don’t want it crashing. Maybe one day, the companies will all get together and put their best bits into one super-platform that we can all use. No swapping from one to the other. No hiccups."
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