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Old 12-06-2008, 03:28 PM   #46
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
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Larry Gates touched on a very important topic that I plan to get into more detail later. When someone like him says something is important, it's good to listen.

But for myself, I still have some very un-glamorous ground to cover before we get into the juicy details of actual recording and processing techniques.

Recording, like any process that is both technical and creative, is a state-of-mind thing. Any single aspect of the process has the capability of being either a launching pad or a stumbling block to better records. Experience brings a sense of proportion and circumspect "big picture" awareness that is hard to get from reading web forums and eq recipes.

It is important to work fast. Finished is always better than perfect. Always. In more ways than one.

For one thing, you will change your mind about things as the recording develops. There are a thousand steps along the way, and if you get too stuck on one, you lose your inspiration and sense of proportion, you'll get frustrated and your ears will start to burn out, and you will start to hate the song and the sound. Recording it will start to feel like a chore and a burden and that state of mind will show in the finished product, if it ever gets to that state. More likely, the project will become a half-forgotten waste of hard disk space that never gets completed.

The best way to work fast is to take as much time as you need to *get ready* for recording, before you actually start the creative process.

This is actually a big problem with new clients in professional studios-- they show up late, with worn-out strings and drum heads, out-of-tune instruments in need of a setup, they're hungover (or already intoxicated), they only got four hours sleep and haven't rehearsed or even finished writing the material, and so on. This is frustrating but manageable for the engineer to deal it with, it simply means that the client is paying for a lot of wasted hours to restring their guitars and so on. The engineer can take care of the setup for the first day or two and then get on with the business of recording.

In a self-produced home studio setting, this approach is fatal. If you're trying to write the song, learn the part, demo plugins, set up your instruments, figure out your arrangements, and mix each part as you go, you will spend two years just tracking the first measure.*

So the next couple of posts are going to deal with methods and techniques designed to get you moving fast and making constant progress, and also with figuring out when you've stalled out. The whole idea is to keep the actual recording process a primarily creative and inspiration-driven one, and to separate, as much as possible, the technical aspects that a dedicated engineer would normally perform.

*Please note that are certain kinds of loop-based and sequenced/automated electronic music where sound design and stuff normally thought of as "production" is an integral part of the compositional/performance process. The same principles of efficiency apply to any kind of production, but they may apply a little differently if your core creative endeavor is built around selecting, mixing, and processing existing sounds, as distinguished from music that is created and performed from whole cloth on more conventional instruments.
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