Record slow for accuracy, speed up in post processing? Ethical?
 

Was wondering about this after reading about advice to record composite tracks to put together a recording. Say you are working on a pretty difficult instrumental fingerstyle song that you have to play & record slower than you would like to get through a couple of challenging sections. You do a good recording but in post processing in your DAW, in addition to possibly tweaking with compression and reverb, you speed it up 10-15 percent for the final recording you want to present to your audience.

It seems like "cheating" to me but I wonder in the professional world if it's done at times. As long as your listening audience is happy, who really cares is one viewpoint. It can't be any worse than lip syncing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEr8AY7nA44

I don't think the ethical issue is an issue. That bar has descended drastically since the Milli Vanilli days. Almost nothing on "SNL" these days is entirely "L."

But that sort of "cheat" has been around for a while. In the Beatles' "In My Life," the thing that sounds like a harpsichordist on crack is actually George Martin on piano. They slowed the tape down to half speed, he played the solo, then they jacked it back up. The ringout at the end kind of disappears abruptly, but I guess they didn't think it was worth fixing.

And you'd probably enjoy Les Paul's "Goofus."

As for actually doing it, figuring out how to manage tuning and sync on a DAW will the biggest challenge. But you'll find that out.

Once they went to multi-track recording the bar was taken down and thrown in the fire. What ever works, have fun.

Brent beat me to the Les Paul citation. And Les also innovated with over-dubbing, which is "cheating" of another kind.

You can look at this different ways. One is as the musician as athlete. If I try to win the urban marathon by taking the subway, I'm clearly cheating. If there was a worlds fastest guitarist competition and I somehow gamed it with a sped up recording disguised in a pickup system that would be the required outlook.

Now what if I think of myself, artistically, as a composer? Did Bach have to play the cello to compose for it? If I write the section as presto and can't play it, should I be true to the composition or to my musical skills? If I had the means or opportunity to hire a session player would it be OK while using a technological method to achieve something closer to my conception would be, what? (yes, I realize that even the composers here are musicians, and we have a prejudice to hiring the musician vs. the technological fix.)


Now, what if I think of myself as producer/engineer/bandleader. That's sort of a middle case. Milli Vanilli? Outrageous fraud! Steely Dan? Maybe a bit eccentric, but undoubted artists. And is speed up fraudulent because speed is considered something that must be "honest" while timbral choices like EQ, modulation and time-based effects are just open game. IMHO, comping (composite tracks slicing in bits of serval passes) or even just "one more take, I think I can get it this time" is at least as big a question as speed up. Disclosure time: I do multiple takes all the time just to get something less embarrassing. I'll comp tracks when I think it improves things. I sped up a recording once (actually twice, as I wanted more than one tempo change in the piece) and I was surprised at how natural a 10-15% change was, just by selecting a few measures and putting a choice in a requestor box.

Live performance is another thing altogether, and I'm answering this based on it being in RECORD. Backing tracks etc in live performance sort of bug me in my old-fashioned way, but I get the impression that modern audiences are less concerned about this. Whole 'nother topic there.

You probably don't want to be caught out like Milli Vanilli and the Monkeys, unable to play your own material as people remember it.


However, just for reference, If you ever try to play along to the second section of the original Eric Clapton/Duane Allman recording of "Layla" you'll think your guitar is progressively going out of tune. The truth is that it was cut and incrementally sped up five times during the mix process because producer Tom Dowd felt like the pace lagged.


And remember the lyrics from Billy Joel's "The Entertainer:"

I am the entertainer
I come to do my show
You've heard my latest record
It's been on the radio
Ah, it took me years to write it
They were the best years of my life
It was a beautiful song
But it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit
You gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.

Joel makes reference to his song, "Piano Man," which was cut down from 5:38 to the perfect radio length, 3:05 by loosing the middle verse. There were lots of cases where the record companies not only cut down hit songs to make their radio versions but sped them up to hit on or near that golden 3:05 target.


I don't do it.



Bob

And I guess what got my brain whirring is that for one song I want to record, I can play +98% of it at the tempo I want but there is this one section/riff that combined with a few 1/16th notes and a pretty good stretch on the fretboard I'm just probably not going to pull off.

Better approach may be to record the song in full at the desired speed and if I miff that section, record it slow and then speed up and splice back in. It's literally like 5-7 seconds of 4 minute song.

Whatever it takes. You might also try just recording that one challenging spot over and over in "open space," without the band, or with a drum loop if your time is iffy. When you get a good one, drop it in.

I think one thing that changed my outlook on all this was when I went to an art museum that had a big long room full of Medieval paintings right next to another big long room full of Renaissance paintings. I overheard a guy saying to his friend, "It's pretty easy to see when they all stopped just eyeballing it and started using drafting tools."

Whatever it takes.

Problem comes when you have to duplicate it live. We used to joke about Stevie Nicks hitting all these high notes on records but sounded like Froggy live.

you may want to try punch in and outs for particular sections: intro, verse, chorus, etc. that way you don't have to do any slowing down or speeding up.

play music!

If you have a handheld mic, that's when you take it and point it out at the crowd.

If Milli and Vanilli had done that, their arms would have gotten really tired from mic-pointing for the whole song, but they'd both be alive today.

I think you'll find that for a solo instrumental guitar piece, the speed-up process introduces nasty artifacts that will really stick out. You can do a few tricks with things like increasing the sample rate (similar to switching the speed on the tape recorder, as in "in my life"), but if you use some of the speed-changing stuff that's out there, you likely won't like the result. You can get away with it in multi-tracked recordings where all the other instruments mask the sound - or in some cases, the artifacts become a desirable part of the sound.

Aside from practice :-), a better approach in the vein of what you're asking about, might be to isolate various sections. Maybe you can play 1 measure up to speed at a time. Then you can edit together multiple sections until you have something. Just hope no one asks you to play it live :-) What I generally do in these cases is either wait to record it until I can handle it, or convince myself it really sounds better slowed down!

Bob, are you saying he progressively sped up just Duane, or the whole track? I've never been able to stand listening to that section, because Duane is so out of tune with the rest of the band - it's like nails on a blackboard.

You could do that....... OR simply take a what you are viewing as a negative and make it a positive and feature it.

There is no law that says "Thou shall not change tempo" for a given section of a song.
Play everything up to that section at the tempo your comfortable with then purposefully and intentionally walk the tempo down to what you need for the problem section than walk it back up for the finish

A far as I know it's like Doug said. Speed it up and the pitch goes up. Raising the speed without changing the pitch creates an artifact laden unpleasant sound (at least with software I am aware of). If you need to play it slower than the tempo in mind then take advantage of the extra space a slower tempo gives you to emote more.:) Down the line over time you probably will be able to play it at a faster tempo anyway.