Is one take a thing of the past?
"One take meaning - one track per pass"?
It's arguable that it was always a thing
in the past.
I'm of the opinion that if you can't play it all the way through, you're not ready to record it yet.
If we're talking about home recorders recording for fun and never ever going to play those songs live and those songs never going beyond their initial life, I can't see what difference it makes as long as you know all the parts you need to play in the sections you need to play them.
That said, I don't think I've ever written a song that I couldn't play all the way through. I play them all the way through when I'm writing them and running through them for whoever is going to play on it with me.
Back in the day when they kinda had to do a lot of stuff as-it-falls, and "editing" was just a dream into the future....they would rehearse until it was tight, and then go for it. If it didn't work, they *had to* start the whole thing from the beginning, when multi-tracking was yet to be invented or become very common.
It's worth remembering that the days where there was no multitracking and no kind of editing were over before the overwhelming majority of users on this board were even born. And I don't mean those born in the 80s ! Lester Polfus {
ok, Les Paul !} recorded a number of guitars on the inside and outside bands of acetate discs in 1930 {thereby beginning the process of both layering and multitracking} and the next year,Laurence Tibbet, an opera singer, superimposed his voice on top of his existing vocal on a recording of "The Cuban love song". Granted, the nascent recording industry saw this and Les Paul's multitracking ideas as a novelty at best and it was years before it caught on big time. But it did catch on eventually
and there were 8 track recorders in America in the 1950s. The history of recording is fascinating and full of surprizes. By the early 60s, lots of editing was happening. A number of Beatle songs are edits of two separate recordings....and the whole punching in phenomena led to the idea of recording certain bits in sections.
I can see gating toms sometimes, but does anyone actually remove the space between snare or kick hits? That's insanity....
It's certainly a pain in the patootie. Back in 2010 or thereabouts, I was experimenting with various mic set ups on the drums and in a few cases, there was so much bleed on the bass drum mic that in order to get a decent bass drum, I had to cut out anything in between that wasn't a bass drum. It was no fun on a 2 minute song, much less a 13 minute one !
In the end it worked well. But I couldn't keep doing that as a standard thing because much of the fun and joy would go out of recording for me. I remember Dogbreath saying that he spends time cleaning up his snare tracks by cutting out the in between bleed.
What's funny to me is how insanely precise and anal Hard Rock/Metal music has become!
Precision has it's place, Zeppelin, Purple, Sabbath, Quo and the heavy bands 'back then' used precision timing but most importantly, they wrote songs and weren't above being raggy when the need arose. Heavy and hard rock {I define hard rock as heavy metal with the amps set at 9
} were the vehicles through which the songs were expressed. They played songs via a style rather than a style via songs {a subtle difference}.
Comping isn't just about fixing mistakes...it's also about matching the right intensity, feel, emotion...etc.
I guess I don't really comp then. Back in the 90s my mate that played drums and I tried it, two or three takes, but it rarely worked with us. What I'd do would be to make an experimental track of the bass and drums out of our takes....that is if we didn't get seized by the moment and improvise in another direction ! I stopped comping after a while and came up with the recording in sections method, if a song wasn't played all the way through in one go. The way I view it, in the relatively short time I'd have to lay down the song and teach it, I'd have to decide if it was feasible to do it in one go. I got tired of those 15~20 minute songs that had
some great parts and some duff parts. Far better to concentrate on a section and get it
un parfait. Sometimes, that would be one take, sometimes 10. But if the take isn't
it, I don't keep it, I just wipe it and go again until it is
it.
Comping isn't just about fixing mistakes...
That said, if I or the vocalist have muffed up part of a vocal but the rest of it was what I want, then I'll do an on the spot comp, but only with a second track. I'm pretty good at knowing what I want as soon as I have it.
I think sometimes our views of the old days are a little skewed.
Alot of that is the fault of writers that tend to push particular angles and agendas rather than the bare facts, almost as though the reader is incapable of reaching conclusions based on what they read.
The important thing was to realize when something was worth it and when it was dumb...and over time refine my SOP.
I'd say that applies or will apply in time to every one of us. But I'd add the caveat that one person's dumb and unnecessary is someone else's preferred and comfort zone. And someone else's straightforward and sensible is someone
else's straitjacket of uncreativity.
My joy has long been reading everyone's different ways of in effect reaching the same goal. I find it unwaveringly interesting.
Hey...when I first started messing with DAWs...I did a LOT of dumb things, just because I could with a DAW and I couldn't with tape.
It was reading about the things that could be done digitally that really sold me back in 2004. It was my tape menopause, I was going through the changes......
I still feel that pretty much what can be done digitally was being done with tape in the late 50s and especially the 60s & 70s. But digital has made it quicker and safer which for me = ideal.
Last week, I listened to the original, unedited version of a great song called "All you've got is money" by Grand Funk Railroad on their "Survival" album {it's a bonus track}. That song and I have been bedfellows for 33 years. I love it to bits. The original recording is a few minutes longer and has some great bits not in the album version but in hearing it, I realize what a grand job Terry Knight and the engineer did on the album version. The album version flows beautifully but in hearing the original, it's like two completely different songs. The album version is completely edited together and this, from 1971 and the 'days of tape'. "I me mine", "Bohemian rhapsody" and "Blinded by the light" are further examples of the kind of thing that was happening before digital. They just took a heck of alot longer, that's all.
That's funny, I was kind of the same way, but more in an experimental sense. I've tried lots of silly tricks and procedures, but none of them stick.
For me it depends. For example, I get the most satisfactory acoustic guitar I've ever managed with two mics, a crummy bottletop contact mike stuck a few inches from the soundhole and one DI lead straight in, the latter two for some electrified grit and dirt but not so they sound like it. The mics could be in any weird configuration {uptop, behind, at the soundhole, away from it etc}. But it's stuck. Same with getting a mad electric 12 string sound by playing an electro acoustic through two amps simultaneously, using a 58 and condenser. Nice experimental accident. But again, it's stuck. Although I'll use other methods too.
It depends on the way you play it and actual piece you play and where the notes fall.
Seriously !
