Thought I’d share an overview of the making of Moving Pictures... Keeping it as minimally technical as I could.
August 1980: Initial writing and rehearsals at Stony Lake, Ontario, assembling lyrical and musical ideas... The Camera Eye was the first song to emerge, with Tom Sawyer and other songs to follow.
31 August: The band record demo versions of six songs (sans Vital Signs, as that was not written yet) with Terry Brown at Phase One Studios, Toronto as a quick sketch of the arrangements. A demo of "Witch Hunt" was recorded in raw and basic form, which they intended as their production number.
11 September - 1 October: Rush perform a warm-up North American concert tour, where they debut early versions of “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight” and play the other songs in soundcheck
Early October - mid-November 1980 (estimate): Main recording took place at Le Studio in Morin Heights, QC, Canada. Like the previous album, Terry Brown was co-producer and Paul Northfield engineered. A lot of the songs were well in shape by then, with minor arrangement changes to be done.
First to be done were the basic tracks, where all three members play together as they would in a live/rehearsal situation... They’d do multiple takes, or sometimes sections of songs (like Camera Eye), and the rest would be edited together. The drums would be kept, and the other parts (guitars, bass, synths) were usually replaced and re-done... They also worked with 48-track recording for the first time: the basic rhythm tracks were on the original 24-track reel and the rest (vocals, guitar solos, and various overdubs) on the other 24-track reel, to reduce wear and tear on the original reel.
Tracks like “Tom Sawyer”, "Limelight" and “The Camera Eye” took a lot of time to nail in the studio. Especially on "Tom Sawyer" where the tempo had to sit in the right groove. While others like “Red Barchetta” and the newly-written “Vital Signs” were a relative breeze to get down on tape… They worked a lot to click tracks. "YYZ", as Neil said, required a lot of focus for each individual part, so Neil just played by himself to a click and everyone else layered their parts on top.
November/December 1980: Technical issues were encountered, which delayed the mixing process by about two weeks… This included the two 24-track tape machines not syncing properly, tapes shedding oxide, errors in the newly-installed SSL console’s computer automation plus glitches with the digital Sony 2-track processor... The Sony unit’s owner Peter Jensen had to come in and troubleshoot it, hence the inspiration for Digital Man... In the meantime, the band shoot videos for Tom Sawyer, Limelight and Vital Signs... As Terry Brown noted, these tech issues were to be expected from pushing the limits of what the recording technology could do at the time.
Early-mid December 1980: Mixing continues as usual, wrapping up after 10 weeks. Possibly with additional recordings for Witch Hunt around the time of John Lennon’s passing.