What is your recording mindset?

[DCCougar]

Originally Posted by TBman

I'm curious about the recording approach of others here (non-professionals) that just record for their own entertainment and for sharing with friends, family and various online sites.

I haven't really been doing any serious recording lately, but most of my recording in the distant past was multitracking numerous instrument voices from my synth, which is quite a bit different than recording acoustic guitar. In general, I'll lay down a rhythm track. (Later I'll "play" another rhythm track to use as the final with "fill 1" or "fill 2" inserted in spots depending on what else is going on with the piece.)

Then add a "continuo" track that sets the chord changes/structure. I'll play it all the way through, maybe do a few takes and pick the best, maybe do some cutting and pasting if one section is better...

Then do several takes of a lead voice. I've played keys for a LONG time, and I'm mostly improvising, so there will be a lot of cutting and pasting of the better phrases of the lead voice. But I rarely make more than 3 or 4 takes.

Here's a short minute-and-a-half piece, atypical for me, sort of abstract, fully improvised, with some decent dynamics of orchestral voices (french horns come in at about 1:00)....

[RodB]

Originally Posted by TBman

……..I'm curious about the recording approach of others here (non-professionals) that just record for their own entertainment and for sharing with friends, family and various online sites.

I only play solo acoustic guitar now. When I first got some decent guitars and started recording I was eager to share my recordings with friends and family and recorded as soon as I had learned a new tune well enough to not trip up.

Some tunes stayed with me and I recorded them again after playing them over and over - not to practice, but just enjoy them. This way I got to ‘know’ the pieces better and found recording both less stressful and more successful.

I still get the ‘red light’ syndrome and the means I can miss a section or repeat of a section. I find it helpful to separate the technical part of recording from the actual performance so use a stand alone recorder and do some test recordings to get the mics set then just think about the tune. I leave the recording running and make several consecutive takes commenting after each one. At some point - after about 4 or 5 takes it becomes clear that I either have something useful or I need to abort the session for another day, things otherwise just get worse.

[Aspiring]

I am also an amateur and mostly record solo guitar occasionally guitar and flute with my girlfriend.

A past coworker of mine trained and worked as a recording engineer before moving into tech. He gave me a great piece of advice that stuck. His question is what are you recording for? And the answer comes down to

A) making a great recording
B) something else (in my case listening to my playing to improve , recording my playing so I can compare previous years, learning how to improve my recording / producing skills, working on improving my ability to perform under pressure ) etc

For a) it's a different mindset and my friend shared that what you are trying to do is get every note and every portion to sound exactly how you want it. This can involve overdubbing and splicing a single note played exactly the way you want it etc.

For b) I always try to play through whole takes after I developed the piece and when I find sections consistently tripping me up I focus in on just that section to improve it.

This year I was able to compare my latest version of recordings of a few holiday songs vs last year's and it was great to see the improvement I had made on the same songs both in playing and recording capability.