Hey, grim. Haven't seen ya 'round here in a hot minute.
Whatchu' been up to?
Every so often I take a little break from HR. Sometimes life demands it, sometimes it'll be because of an intensive period of recording. Recently there's been a few books that I downloaded and I want to print them and get them bound but first I had to punctuate and knock them into shape. You'd be amazed how long that can take ! Plus some DIY and playing nursemaid to my son who has just had an op. It's all go, here !
Very short attention span me, I'm not even sure I have the capability to work on more than one thing at a time. This is probably the crux of my problems, come to think of it!
Over the years I've just developed working that way. Because of the availability of certain friends, I get a load of songs started at the same time. I remember last summer my mate and I {he was drumming, I was on bass} tracked 13 songs in one session {We did about 25 over about 5 or 6 sessions}. Most of those songs have been worked on subsequently, sometimes those that are singing will do backing vocals to 7 or 8 songs at a go or I might play electric guitar on moreorless the same settings on 5 of them or whatever. It really depends.
Am I foolish to try and do everything in one take? I always thought it was cheating to cut and paste.
To the purist, it's cheating but I think that's daft. Multitracking is, in itself, cheating, so that one's out of the window. A DAW and all that goes with it is like an automatic car. You can drive for thousands of miles without the interplay of clutch, brake and gearstick ~ is that cheating or is that still driving ?
Oh yeh, most of my tunes have averaged about 1:30 so I guess rerecording is probably quicker than mucking around cutting and pasting.
Thing is, even if the song is only a couple of minutes long and cutting and pasting takes a couple of days, what you pick up in the cutting and pasting and other bits of editing will stand you in good stead for the future. I don't think it does any harm in finding out what things do. That has always been the way in recording.
I guess it's a bit idiotic to have a DAW and not use this excellent functionality. Be interesting to see if anyone is adamant about NOT using it though...
I can understand why some people would be totally against all the bells and whistles. I used to be. But to me, it's like having a gas cooker with electric hob and fan assissted oven.....and a place to store the pots and pans. At some point, I'm gonna use it all, even if only once. A DAW gives you great scope but it shouldn't militate against efficiency, discipline and speed.
I do a lot of it with vocals... not being a great singer.
Armistice says that alot. Don't listen to him. He's got a brilliant voice and he's also a really creative guitarist. I was listening to some of his instrumental guitar stuff over the weekend. Making instrumentals isn't easy but he made them really listenable. I just love "Transit to Venus".
