Doing the same thing for Waterfall/Don't Stop wasn't quite as straightforward. It turned out that lining them up was a bit trickier than I had expected– the beats aren't very clear, so getting the timing right was tricky. Both versions of the track start out with a fade in, so you can't just snap the beginning of the recording – and the fade is slightly different on each of them as well.

Once I had got them both lined up at the point where the lyrics come in (with the line "Don't stop…"), I thought I'd cracked it… until I listened through from the beginning. The guitars (both backwards, remember) were out of sync – not just by a fraction of a beat, but a whole bar. This clearly wasn't working properly.

What I'd forgotten over the fourteen years or so since I was messing around with pieces of tape was that Don't Stop isn't just Waterfall backwards. The mix of the song has been shuffled around as well; it starts out with a fade into what sounds like an instrumental version of the first verse, with the lyrics coming in with the chorus line "She'll carry on through it all/She's a waterfall".

What I hadn't realised until I tried to line up the two different versions is that quite a lot more has been shuffled around; once I'd lined up a particular section of the lyrics, another part would be out by a beat or two, while another section of the song would be out by an entire bar. So, figuring it was probably going to be easier lining up tracks that were playing forwards instead of backwards, I tried flipping the whole thing – so at one point, I was trying to line up Waterfall with a backwards version of Don't Stop (ie. a backwards version of a backwards version of Waterfall.)

Two things I discovered in my investigation; firstly, "Don't Stop" played backwards noticeably speeds up at the end – which means that the actual song slows down as it gets going. This is something I hadn't noticed before – but listening back to the original, you can definitely hear it happening. Forwards, it slows down and feels like it is settling into a groove. Backwards, it feels like it is somehow losing control; its an interesting effect that I don't think you hear very often — but I think it's an effect that you can feel more than hear.

Secondly – and less usefully – Don't Stop has been slowed down. So unless I find the time to work out exactly how much slower it is, timestretch it by exactly the same amount and line it up with Waterfall, there isn't a forwards/backwards version to accompany the Made of Stone version.

(Again – educational purposes, don't download unless you already own etc. etc. But if you do manage to figure a way to match Waterfall and Don't Stop, I'd love to hear about it.)

Music recording technology and the impact on music

So, other than an insight into what people can do with a bit of time on their hands and perhaps an idea of what sort of things the Stone Roses might have spent 5 years messing around with while they were supposed to be recording their second album, why is this interesting?

Well, there is a debate about whether modern recording styles and technology are stripping certain human elements from modern recordings; drum machines, metronomes and MIDI meant that the easiest way to record is in perfect timing, making it impossible for the slight variations in tempo that come naturally – sometimes deliberately, but sometimes not – to human musicians.

For example, if you record in GarageBand, for example, you'll know that it's quite hard to deal with a recording that doesn't fit with where the software thinks the beats should be. It just makes any editing, overdubs, automating effects etc. much more complicated than it needs to be. After a few times, you start to see that it's easier to just fit your performance to GarageBand's timing than to deal with the hassles down the line of trying to make GarageBand fit to your own timing.

If you're recording a repetitive instrument part that lasts for 4 minutes and make a mistake, you can easily re-record it again (and spend another 5 minutes playing through, along with a bit of time to get ready again.) But, most likely with the rest of the band, the producers and anyone else in the studio sitting around with nothing else to do but watch you until you're finished – the pressure is going to build up, rather than go away. And – assuming your recording is already lined up with metronomic timing – you can always just grab a single 'clean' run through and loop it through the track. How many people would notice?

A couple of recording producers have told me about the painful recording process of pop acts just a few years ago, and how the process of recording vocals usually involves recording a line at a time until the delivery is just right. Now, every studio has Auto-Tune. There's nobody forcing anyone to use it – but for the sake of something that not many people will notice (or at least, not be aware of noticing), it must save a lot of time…

Plenty has been written about how technology is changing the music industry the internet has changed the way it is distributed and sold (and copied.) MP3s and iPods have changed the way we listen, letting us carry our entire collections in our pockets, and it saddens me that the art of the mix tape seems to have died out, being replaced by randomised selections from our music libraries, compiled on the fly by a computer. All of this changes the context of how we listen to music in a way that is quite apparent to anyone old enough to remember tapes, and the days before CDs. (If you're old enough to remember vinyl being the main format of music will be even more acutely aware of this.) But I'm not sure if as many people are paying attention to how technology is changing the actual music; the way it is written, performed, recorded and produced. When its used creatively, it opens up new possibilities. But it can just as easily be used in a way that closes things off, and makes the finished result — even of music that is performed live, without electronic instruments or sequencers — just a little bit less human.