What to record first?

[Rokket]

Ok, I can help you a lot here because I am a drummer and, as luck would have it we encountered the same problem this evening when doing an album song. Here it is, it's a difficult to really get into the music when you have boundaries like a metronome, if the drummer wants to speed up, the way I see it is that's how the song should be. If that's what naturally happens, let it happen...so how do you record other stuff with this? Well we went ahead and just did bass vocals and drums all at once, and every thing fell into place after that. Because we laid down not only the foundation but also the vocals, the guitar player can still "feel" the music with headphones when recording his part. I'll give you a link to the track we did sometime, it's a got some REALLY heavy bass drum.

That can work out great if you can get good isolation and don't have to worry about the drums bleeding onto your vocals, or guitar bleeding onto your drum tracks, etc.

 

[Toki987]

My preferred approach is to track the whole band in one shot - with or without click (depending on what the band wants) - with the intent of only capturing solid drumtracks, and possibly bass (if the bassist is comfortable). All other tracks are considered scratches (unless they rock, in which case they become keepers...)

Obviously, this requires the ability to provide some level of isolation, otherwise overdubbed tracks will not match what may have bled thru on the drums.

If the band is not comfortable with that approach, then straight overdubs to a guide track and the next way... but always drums before anything else - very few drummers I've seen can produce effective drum tracks on top of the rest of the band's tracks.

I`ve done way more picking in a studio than engineering and this was always the prefered norm i was familiar with. At least part of the rythym section layed the core tracks at once and the spices were added later. Economics of time, equipment, ae brain & ears, and $.

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

Personally I think it is insanity to do anything but lay down the drums first. How the heck are you going to keep time or expect a good performance out of the guitars, bass or vocals without drums? I just can't see it.

Myself I record a band as a unit playing together and focus on only keeping the drums (and sometimes bass). I record *everything* but the other stuff is just "guide" tracks to measure how good the drum take actually is.

After that I do any drum edits that need to be done, like adjusting timing, sound replacer, whatever it needs and whatever the client wants to pay for. Personally, I prefer getting a single inspired, good take as opposed to editing but the truth is there are a lot of crummy drummers (and bands) out there that can't nail a good take if their life depended on it. So you work with what you got.

Then I'll lay down the bass guitar, focus on getting a good tone happening and getting a tight performance. Then guitars (which usually take awhile). For guitars I'll get all the distorted parts first, move on to clean electric guitar takes (on another track) and acoustic guitar parts. Then I'll have the leads laid down if there are any. Lastly, we'll put in any inserted guitar noises or effects like pick slides or ambient noodling.

After the song is 100% musically solid I'll do vocals, often starting with backing vocals (at least something rough to 'inspire' the singer). After doing a bunch of vocal takes I start comping them together until we have everything how we want it. Then we'll go back and fix any background vocals that need fixing, if necessary.

That's my way. It is a slower process than I would like, but the results are generally good.

 

[Love & Light]

Some great ideas on this topic. Think I'll print it off for reference. Thanks guys!

 

[Cult_Status02]

Here we go This is one we did with Bass, Main Vocals, and Drums, at the same time. Let me know what you think please. And yes, I already know you can hear someone touching the mic, I just now noticed it when posting the link, but I can fix it, so please don't comment on that...Well for some reason this site won't let me send useable mp3 link anymore, so I'll give you a link to the page. This is not my band's page, just one I use to host some music I use for webpages and stuff, but here it is: http://www.audiostreet.net/artists/012/150/song_sweet_november.html