What is the biggest recorded band ever?
A musician friend of mine once told me, “You can never have too many harmonies”. He proudly said it, as a member of a band that exemplifies one of modern music’s rare examples of a three-piece harmony: CVC.
When I watch them play, I understand the passionate place from which he makes that point, for their sound is undoubtedly an unbridled celebration of the musical trope. But as a fan, I can’t help but disagree with him. The very reason this band sounds so good is because of the almost alchemic reaction that exists within the blending of those three individual voices. Simply put, if I added an extra layer to the harmonies, then it would quite quickly fall apart.
The same goes for any of the harmonic greats in years gone by. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were the epitome of how three voices alone were destined to sing with one another. The same goes for Fleetwood Mac, who actively ignored their own intra-band tension in the name of music, for they simply knew that their harmonies were fundamentally unique.
Thus, bigger or more doesn’t always mean better. It’s a production decision that has likely come up in studio sessions, across all instruments, as well as the voice. Guitar lines, for example, sometimes benefit from doubled recordings, but equally, an oversaturation of that idea can ruin the tone of an entire melody.
Then there are of course drums, which are the most high-risk option of them all. A double drum performance done well àla Thee Oh Sees can elevate the rhythmic pulse of something to a point where it becomes almost hypnotic. But any slight inaccuracy, any drum beat played out of time, can quickly muddle the arrangement of a song and make it seem as though the wheels are falling off.
All of these factors, along with money for those of a cynical inclination, are largely why most bands sit somewhere between four and six people. It’s a sweet spot in terms of personality dynamics as well as musical, and so rarely do we see that formula broken. But in the spirit of true record-breaking, there is bound to be a band who have truly stretched the limits of possibility.
What is the biggest recorded band?
Well there are supposedly around 1500 different musical instruments in the world and so if each instrument was occupied by one member, that would be quite the sizable band. So it would have seemed like a fine idea for the Italian project, Rockin’1000 to occupy two thirds of that instrument base with its 1000 members.
But instead, they doubled down on the pure rock band soundscape, performing a string of classics, including ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ with over 1000 members on no more than six instruments. They played 18 songs at Frankfurt’s Commerzbank Arena, and given the extensive content that came from the event, are largely credited as the biggest band recording of all time.
Surprisingly, it doesn’t even come close. The Guinness World Record books have an unnamed project as the winner, by another 19,000 people, where 20,100 from the Norges Musikkorps Forbund bands joined together at the Ullevaal Stadium, Oslo, Norway, on June 28th, 1964, to create a history, in an assembly of what remains as the biggest band ever recorded.
Other notable events in the Guinness World Record include the largest brass band assembly, which was set in Germany in 2008 by a gathering of 15,761 musicians, while the record book’s largest recorded orchestra was the El Sistema project, which brought together 8,573 instrumentalists and singers to perform Tchaikovsky’s ‘Slavonic March’ in Venezuela.
