How to make the perfect track?

  • Thread starter Thread starter FZmontanaDF
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FZmontanaDF

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I am using sonar, and whenever I record something a little tiny piece or something to that extent is wrong and everything else is great. How can get the perfect track editing with Sonar? Do I copy and paste? Punch in? (This is kinda difficult cause it is an acoustic guitar and the sound varies so much)
What do I do?
Thanks,
Daniel


P.S. My guitar teacher told me to make 3-4 tracks and then pull from each of those. I tried that but I can't get it to sound uniform, as in one track.
 
Needs more information than that. What exactly is it that you don't like in your recordings? Distortion, noise, soundlevels lack uniformity? Please describe, otherwise it could be anything from a multitude of sins.

On the other hand, a perfect recording is a holy grail for all of us......:D
 
It helps me when I play to a click/metronome, and work to stay right on the beat. Also, I try to play as consistently as possible, both from an attack volume standpoint and fingerings. Both of these things will make it easier for you to punch in/out and clean up mistakes. Also record your tracks as dry as possible.
 
Say I make a mistake at 0:40. It is a really obvious and bad sounding mistake...but the rest of the song is great. How do I fill in there?

Add a compressor? WTF? How would that help?
 
I've been through this. My acoustic playing is not going in the Rock N Roll Hall of fame, but I got off a few pretty good tracks by doing what your guitar teacher suggested. I did the part as well as I could. Did another track coming in a few bars before my mistake on the first one and cut & paste on silence. I did this on my hard disk recorder so I didn't have the luxury of SEEING the waveform. I had to use my ears, but I found I had good results. I also had other tracks going on in the song so slight differences weren't as pronounced as a solo piece would be. I am not an expert with compressors, but one unpleasant by-product is a thing called phase distortion. Put simply, you can take dynamics out and get a muddier sound. If your problem is about levels, you are better off riding and automating your faders. Just my .02. Good luck.
 
Hey FZ if it was me (about your mistake at 0:40) I'd setup an Auto punch just before things go wrong and just after at a logical point (i.e just slightly before the downbeat of the next measure). Then, record again in auto-punch mode and play along with the part up to and past the punch-in range. If you set this up right it should be seamless if your recording setup is identical to the previous take.
 
Yep, I agree with Heinz. I often balls up lead guitar which is sooooooo obvious so I then use Autopunch as Heinz describes. But try to do it immediately, as re-recording often changes the sound, the settings aren't quite right, they don't exactly match the previous settings etc. You stand a greater chance of having the same sound doing the punch recording if it is in the same session of recording. As I know to my cost!

Compression ain't gonna help such glitches. If only.......:)
 
Punch-ins can be clumsy for guitar solos sometimes..

If it is a long and difficult solo, you can try recording 3 guitars on separate tracks and then mixing and matching the different tracks.. And because you did 3 complete takes, the switch from one take to another will most likely be more smooth.

Or you can do multiple takes on one track and it will keep them as virtual tracks instead of combining them to one take.

There are many options.
 
One of the main things that I have found when doing punch-ins is that you need to zoom in on your wave view and find the dead spaces. If you can punch in on a flat area of the wave you can get a lot cleaner edit. Sometimes you have to redo a larger section but it will end up being a cleaner break. One of the other options is to record the fix on a second track making sure to record longer then the area you need to edit (you need more recorded sound before and after the soon to be deleted edit). Delete the bad section and then move the new/good recording into the original using the cross fade feature. It kind of depends on what instrument you are tracking. Different instruments will require different types of editing to sound smooth.
 
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