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  #31  
Old 02-12-2021, 11:31 AM
pjd3 pjd3 is offline
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Default many takes

There are two ways I'm going with this since my dive into Celtic acoustic, which at this point I find very very challenging on the right hand consistency. Even if I am playing this song well as a whole, the little misses, drags or slips eat away at me obsessively (I know that friends who are great guitarists are going to hear it someday upon recording and posting the song).

So in Reaper, if i'm using a metronome for songs that don't waver in tempo, I will record the song from beginning to end many times on separate tracks, maybe even 10 or 12 times. The chances of finding a section that meets my criteria are pretty good at that point and can be edited together with some efficiency from the bar snap feature.

If I'm not using a metronome, which is most of the time, I will just continually play the song from beginning to end over and over again, until my hands are over used or someone needs me for something (or I'm really hungry).
Then, I may comment between performances on good and/or bad features of that particular performance. Then, and only if the tempo and cadence make an imperceptible match I will edit those different portions of the performances together. Some times, I may find a full performance that's "good enough" and won't embarrass me to post or add to a Soundcloud list. Those "good enough" takes tend to occur somewhere around 20-40 minutes of constant playing where I've reached a stage of being warmed up, have an immediacy in the familiarity of the tune, and when the hands and brain have not worn or burned out, yet.
It at first felt like cheating but then read an article with Michael Hedges saying that he does something similar to that if necessary. Ha, I bet he didn't require nearly as many takes as I do!

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Last edited by pjd3; 02-12-2021 at 11:41 AM.
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  #32  
Old 02-12-2021, 11:32 AM
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I hear you Glenn and I had the same thought that it is kind of like a cheat. I do enjoy the challenge of getting it all in one take.
Fortunately I don't consider myself a musician or a performer, I'm just an old guy with a guitar so I have none of those feelings,

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And I can sometimes have the same issues if my wife is at home. I can get a quiet environment after she goes to bed which is usually 9ish PM so I have to have the energy to stay up.
Story of my life Bob,
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  #33  
Old 02-12-2021, 12:21 PM
Glennwillow Glennwillow is offline
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To my thinking, recording and playing live are entirely different animals. I don't concern myself with little mistakes when playing live because those mistakes are simply mistakes in the moment. The people at the show are going to forget they heard them before I even finish the song. Mistakes on a recording are there for the long run. Those mistakes will hit people's ears over and over and over again so they're more critical than mistakes on stage.

I think of myself primarily as a songwriter and when I put something out there, I want it to be the best possible representation of that song I wrote. Outside of my own thoughts, no one is going to know if I did a piece in one take, no one is going to care if I did a piece in one take. They're going to assess whether the song is worth listening to again. So for me, composite tracking has always been the preferred method.

Lastly, the word "cheating" implies some rule was broken. This is music. By now we all know there are no rules. There's nothing illegitimate about comping. It's simply a way to get to the best possible end point.

Anyway... this is just my alternative viewpoint. I appreciate your work, Glenn, do please don't take this as anything more as a different way of looking at it.
Hi Jim,

I bolded the paragraph above that I wanted to respond to. I do appreciate your thoughts, Jim, and I also appreciate your last paragraph.

I hesitated in writing my own comments -- that patching together a performance feels like cheating -- because I sensed that others might be offended by this comment. What I intended to write was that "it feels like cheating to me. And that's why I added the paragraph that I did not care or mind what others did.

I recognize that this is just my own internal challenge. That when I record, most of the time I think of it as a performance because I am also video recording the performance for a YouTube video. So what I am doing these days is not making a studio recording, though, in fact, I am making the recording and video in my studio and I am using equipment and software that absolutely allows me to make composite recordings and to do all the cutting and pasting I might want to do. If I were making a CD, I would treat my recordings differently, and would certainly use cutting and pasting and punch-ins.

When recording a YouTube video my own goal is to do it as a one-time-through kind of event, not a composite. And again, someone else doing exactly the same kind of YouTube video might feel that there is no reason it can't be pasted together from a bunch of recordings and videos. Maybe I will change my mind, especially if I can't do a one-time-through performance anymore. Who knows...

If I work out on my 30-year-old Nordic Track machine in three, ten-minute segments with a little rest in between, is that the same thing as me completing a continuous 30-minute workout? In terms of calorie burn it is. If I'm trying to control weight and stay in some reasonable shape, does it make any difference? Probably not much. But I still like to get on that old machine and do 30 minutes all at once and do it at a reasonable rate, maybe to remind myself I can still do it. Still, it's getting harder to do that day after day as I get older.

And that's similar to how I feel about recording. I like to do it the old fashioned way for my own personal challenge. Still, doing repeated punch-ins to get an acceptable vocal track recorded has been pretty much de rigueur since the advent of multi-track recording machines around the time of the Sergeant Pepper Beatles' album. So I guess when I think of "old-fashioned," I am thinking before the days of Sergeant Pepper, about what? 1967?. That's pretty far back!

It's a cool thing that digital recording makes cutting and pasting so easy. I still have the tools for cutting and splicing audio recording tape. Just putting an album together and stringing together all the songs for an album involved cutting and pasting audio tape.

This is an interesting discussion.

- Glenn
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  #34  
Old 02-12-2021, 12:55 PM
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I hesitated in writing my own comments -- that patching together a performance feels like cheating -- because I sensed that others might be offended by this comment.
Glenn, I understood where you were going and I wasn't at all offended. No worries there. We all are going to develop our own work flows over time and as I said, there are no rules. We do what works for us.
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  #35  
Old 02-12-2021, 02:05 PM
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Back in the days of analog there was razor blades and tape...
Yup, and they had no compunctions about duplicating and "flying in" a chorus or something from another part of the song. You've heard countless songs on the radio like that, for years.
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  #36  
Old 02-12-2021, 02:49 PM
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I've almost always ended up editing things together and then re-learning it from myself after I'm happy with the results.
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  #37  
Old 02-12-2021, 05:30 PM
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Originally Posted by Glennwillow View Post

I hesitated in writing my own comments -- that patching together a performance feels like cheating -- because I sensed that others might be offended by this comment. What I intended to write was that "it feels like cheating to me. And that's why I added the paragraph that I did not care or mind what others did.


- Glenn
No offense taken here Glenn.

My mind works in funny ways. 2 pages playing straight through, with feeling and no mistakes (or just small variations ) is not a problem. 4 pages all of a sudden seems insurmountable with the red light on. With the red light off, no problem. Maybe if the light on my recorder was a different color....
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  #38  
Old 02-12-2021, 06:55 PM
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Somehow this post got duplicated...

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  #39  
Old 02-12-2021, 08:49 PM
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Originally Posted by jim1960 View Post
To my thinking, recording and playing live are entirely different animals.
This seems to have drifted from the specific "do you glue sections together" into the general topic of editing, which comes up often. I completely agree with Jim's comment here, with the caveat that it depends on your goals. In general, I think of making a recording, audio or video as creating a "product", and you expect the product to be as good as possible. Imagine a book, full of typos and run-on sentences, where the author says "well, it wouldn't have been honest to go back and edit it, so I just published it the way I typed it". Or software that's just written straight thru with no bug fixes!

Even "live" recordings these days often have "post-production", which can even include the performers coming in and fixing parts.

So if your goal in recording is to document your progress, give you feedback on how you would sound live, or as a personal achievement measure, then "1-take, no edits" is a good goal. If you're trying to create a good product, you do what you need to do. For me, there's a balance - often it's just easier to be able to play all the way thru and not need to edit, and there's a question of where I want to spend my time - should I spend a few more hours practicing to where I can record in one take, or spend a few hours editing? Of course, doing video, where editing options are much more limited tilts things toward the "practice until you can play it" side of things.
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  #40  
Old 02-12-2021, 10:42 PM
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On my Different Kind Of Blue album, the last track, Flamenco Sketches, was five sections stitched together. So the original was a really a Bill Evans tune, though copy-written as Miles Davis, that was about the group just improvising over five basically unrelated modes he had jotted down, for as long as they chose before moving onto next soloist. So my 18 minute track was put together five sections of jamming in each mode, that was from one forty-five minute take of improv that included stopping and changing tunings and capo locations a few times, that I later put together as one piece by just finding a break between chords, or maybe a slide down.. I'm pretty sure I remember having a click track for that..

Then a few years later I made an album with mandolinist Tim Connell, June Apple, that was all recorded in one day (to two-inch tape, then dumped to ProTools) but recorded each tune three times. I ended up using the first half of one take with second of another, etc, for many of them. Or maybe just a chorus of one if there was clam. The problem with editing a album that is mostly improv is you're not just no going to find that one phrase anywhere else, and even if you did, for sure the other person if playing something very different too.. so you really have to just replace a whole section, in that case minimal 8 bar section.

Lastly, the same year as June Apple, and I recorded the Artifact I did with Mark Goldenberg in Los Angeles. That whole album was just one continuous take (minus one potty break) of 90% improvised music. But we went extra long on each tune, so even though there was no other take to borrow from, on a few tunes we just cut out an entire chorus, or two, and I think it worked great.
I’d say it did...I simply adore “Artifact”! Isn’t time that you and Mark get together for another session?
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  #41  
Old 02-13-2021, 12:29 AM
Glennwillow Glennwillow is offline
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No offense taken here Glenn.

My mind works in funny ways. 2 pages playing straight through, with feeling and no mistakes (or just small variations ) is not a problem. 4 pages all of a sudden seems insurmountable with the red light on. With the red light off, no problem. Maybe if the light on my recorder was a different color....
Hi Barry!

Yes, I wonder if the record light should be some color other than red. Of course then we'd be writing up the mistakes we made when the blue light came on!

The truth is, I really enjoy recording. I make my share of mistakes, just like anyone else. But it's such a privilege to be able to record music and go through that creative process. And to have a product when I am done. Performed music just goes off into space somewhere. Not that it doesn't have value; it does. But recorded music is a record. It's like writing a thought down down verses thinking something.

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  #42  
Old 02-13-2021, 03:11 AM
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Default Do you ever record a long song in sections?

Hi Bob, I just saw this so wanted to chime in. In the last 6 months or so I have started putting pieces together from multiple takes. Previously, including my recording of Bill Coulters Si Bheag Si Mhor, I always worked up to one full take but recently I have found I get a better end result if I play multiple takes and pick the best.

I tend to try and segment a piece and play it well so that there less tension and worry - when I get to the end of the section I always carry on and try to play the rest of the piece but usually there will be an error so I’ll stop. If there’s a really challenging section I will just play that alone until I get a decent recording.

Ultimately it’s a balance between the best end result and the satisfaction of a one take recording..
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  #43  
Old 02-13-2021, 07:35 AM
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This seems to have drifted from the specific "do you glue sections together" into the general topic of editing,
Exactly, It appeared if the specific question in the OP was asking about
Recording a verse >stopping ,,,recording a chorus > stopping ,,, recording another verse > stopping etc. etc.
Which is a different technique and subject than using pieces from multiple takes. Just noting
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  #44  
Old 02-13-2021, 10:43 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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Exactly, It appeared if the specific question in the OP was asking about
Recording a verse >stopping ,,,recording a chorus > stopping ,,, recording another verse > stopping etc. etc.
Which is a different technique and subject than using pieces from multiple takes. Just noting
I just see that as a different way of organizing the process. All good input being shared here, nobody's off topic. Thanks, everyone.
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Old 02-13-2021, 10:51 AM
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I just see that as a different way of organizing the process. All good input being shared here, nobody's off topic. Thanks, everyone.
I was not meaning to imply off topic, if it came across that way , just that there are different methods . sall good
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