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Old 09-23-2013, 10:06 AM   #1
Vinicius Marques
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Default (Just wondering) when it's time to make things simpler

Hi there! A year ago my band and I bought a fairly good gear in order to record ourselves. My initial goal was to record instrument per instrument, including acoustic drums (Glynn John's method - 4 mics). Since we only get together at saturdays, I thought we'd complete tracking 9 songs in 2-3 months, and mixing and mastering would take me another month. To make things easier, I set a deadline of 6 months to the final release. It woud be a piece of cake, since we got the gear, got the songs all arranged and been playing them for about a year, got a good amount of time to get it done... but then reality cast its shadows over us.

Tracking each instrument separately would demand only the musician involved to get to the studio. The others would (and in fact they did and liked it) be dismissed. It went well for 2 weeks, when the drummer got tired of playing alone and started not to show. Trying to bring the bassist, the guitarrist, someone to the sessions showed to be an ingrateful task. Only the singer would show, so we started a side project

So I made a conclusion out of it: no one was even bothering about recording, for it was no fun to them. They liked to do rehearsals, but recording was apparently to much of a pain to my mates. Then I finally faced it and decided I was going to make things simpler.

First of all, we would now be tracking everyone together. This implied a lot of "downsizing", since I only got a Tascam US-800 and a Fast Track Pro. The US-800 has only 6 inputs, and using it along with the FTP for 2 additional inputs would cut my sampling rate down to 48 khz (instead of 96 as I was planning to do). Then, since we are 6 (and given I wanted to use 4 mics on the drums), playing together would require at least 9 inputs - so I decided to track the drums with only 3 mics (overhead, bass drum and snare), and leave the backing vocals to the overdub sessions.

Then it got interesting - to make things work like that, we would have to spend some money. We got some from the gigs we've been doing, so I bought 6 headphones, a phone amp, some drills, wire, P10 jacks and plastic little boxes. This way I can open a hole in the wall, stick the wires through it and build something to plug the instruments from the outside of the room to the interfaces there inside without having to open the doors - the drummer will play inside the room, and the rest of us will play outside, so there will be almost no bleed in the drum mics. All instruments will be recorded direct and dry, and simulation will be used then (maybe reamping too). The vocals can be re-done in overdub sessions, so as any part that don't fit.

Last saturday I called the guys and invited them to jam using the headphones. It was fun enough to make them say "let's record these dammed songs" and get motivated again. Even though I haven't opened that hole in the wall yet, they realised what I was planning to do and contributed with ideas. Now we're finally on our way.

P.S.: I do know there are better ways of doing what I described, but remember the main goal here is to bring back FUN to our sessions. Knowing my mates I know they will record faster together than separately (look at the year we spent on nothing). The thing here is, sometimes you have to give up on your rules to make things happen, you know?
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Old 09-23-2013, 01:47 PM   #2
Vinicius Marques
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Too much of a long post, but all I want is to start a discussion over when it's better to do things in a way that's not what you pictured at first, not what you know it's the best way, but a way you know will come to an end. Sometimes you have to let go on certain "rules" to get the job done, like "I know it's better to track drums in stereo, but if I track'em mono I'll be able to track someone else at the same time", or "it's better to record in 96 khz but 48 will do fine"... it's better to finish a project than to not even start it!
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Old 09-26-2013, 05:13 PM   #3
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Hi.
Yes this is what Sherlock Holmes would call a three pipe problem. My own experience is that people differ in their excitement for the process of recording per se. I love it as much as any creative activity but for some it's boring, tedious and de-motivating. And we are not alone - I blame The Beatles for all of this stuff. Ringo famously said all he remembers about Sgt Peppers was having so much free time that he learnt to play chess and the "Let it Be" fiasco was John's attempt to simplify the recording process in which he had little interest.
And it is a little galling to have cajoled a band into a "live" recording and then deliver a mix that they then all individually had issues with many of which really needed overdubs or retakes. Add to that band "politics" and such and it gets even worse.

I have no answer but am very tempted by Mike Oldfield's approach (only I have only a hundredth of his talent.)
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Old 09-26-2013, 06:39 PM   #4
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My band wanted to create some demo tracks that we could send out to potential employers. We needed to record drums, bass, two guitars, keyboards, and from one to four vocal parts, depending on the song. I have an eight-input Zoom R16, which isn't nearly enough to capture everything at once and do it justice. Our plan was to start out with just the rhythm tracks (bass, drums, and the predominant rhythm part - usually guitar or keyboard), and then to layer things from that.

Before that, we had been recording our practice sessions. It was definitely non-optimal, since we were all playing in sort of a circle, crowded into a too-small space. Everything bled into everything else, and we only had one track for all the vocals and three tracks for the drums But it was good enough to listen to our practices and fine-tune our parts.

One day, the drummer had a suggestion. Why not start with a rehearsal recording and, one by one, lay down new tracks to replace the original ones? It was an interesting idea, and we gave it a go. We started by muting the previous drum tracks and letting the drummer play along with "the band". Yeah, there was still some bleed from the previous drums into other tracks, but that was easy enough to ignore at the time. After he'd laid down the drums, I did the same with the bass part. That was easy enough to do, since the original bass part was recorded with a DI. Little by little, we replaced each original track with a newer, cleaner version with no bleed. Each vocal part got its own track instead of all of them being squished together, and the end result was actually pretty decent.

Best of all, we got a "live" feel, since it was all based on the original recording, which had everybody on it. Every track that was laid down was done while listening to some combination of the original and whatever replaced each part. It was interesting enough that people didn't get weighed down with blindly playing, and everybody had a good time in the process. And, while we were laying down drums, we did all six of our demo songs in one night. Then I did the same with the other parts on separate nights, so nobody had to hang around listening while others were recording. Well, that's a bit of a lie - we did sometimes do multiple vocal parts simultaneously to provide a more gelled sound, especially for backing and harmony vocals. But it was still a pretty layered approach.

You may want to try a similar method. It allows you to exploit more input channels than you could for a true live performance, while still preserving a live vibe and giving you plenty of tracks to get everything laid down nice and clean.
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Old 09-26-2013, 07:02 PM   #5
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My band was trying to go the route of tracking everything to a metronome and separately for isolation and so on. But what we got was the feel was not like how we play, and the drums sounded terrible when in the final mix. It ended up sounding awful compared to the demos we were doing for ourselves to study the songs in progress.

Our plan is just to get a space where the drums sound better and record everything live.

It's not because I think it's a better way to record, but that we get better results this way.

I am not good enough to make the recording decisions ahead of time to fit the final mix. But when we spend a few minutes moving mics around to get a good balance and hearing what is basically the final mix in the tests before actually playing, we get stuff that sounds like how we want to sound.
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Old 09-27-2013, 06:02 AM   #6
Vinicius Marques
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Quote:
Originally Posted by martifingers View Post
I have no answer but am very tempted by Mike Oldfield's approach (only I have only a hundredth of his talent.)
Thanks for posting. Oldfield uses to record all by himself, right? It really helps when you don't have to deal with others, since "people are complicated machines", but in a band you have to try and make everyone get inspired, not to fall into that Beatles' kinda feeling like you pointed so well.


Quote:
Originally Posted by tls11823 View Post
One day, the drummer had a suggestion. Why not start with a rehearsal recording and, one by one, lay down new tracks to replace the original ones?(...) It was interesting enough that people didn't get weighed down with blindly playing, and everybody had a good time in the process. (...) so nobody had to hang around listening while others were recording.
That's an interesting approach! I thought of something similar, but in my case I think it would push us back to the “non-fun” environment, since there would still be one musician listening to a recorded performance, playing alone in the studio... only that the performance was a live band, not one or two scratch parts... We might in the end do it a little, since recording like I described we'll end up with no bleed in most of the parts and eventually we'll have to overdub something. As for the “nobody had to hang around” part, this wasn't an issue for us, since I used to call only the musician who would record that day, and so on... but again, you approach is a good solution and we may indeed end up doing some of it, as overdub sessions might take place.


Quote:
Originally Posted by jacobestes View Post
(...)what we got was the feel was not like how we play, and the drums sounded terrible when in the final mix. It ended up sounding awful compared to the demos we were doing for ourselves to study the songs in progress. (...) It's not because I think it's a better way to record, but that we get better results this way.
I do get a good sounding record when I track us separately, and in fact we have recorded one song this way, but due to errors in tempo I discarded it (might solve them with some editing, but I'd rather spend my time recording again). Even the drums are good, and the feel is good too. But the process showed a little too awful for my mates, so to us it's not about technical issues, but psychological issues instead! A little harder to overcome, but keeping things simpler I think we can do it. In the end it's like you said, “not because it's a better way of doing it, but that the results are better”!

------

Thanks for the replies, guys! Let's keep it up as we're getting good stuff here!
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