How to start recording today (Part 2)

Last week, I talked about the technical setup you need to record and I promised a followup talking about the process.

The first professional recording I ever did was in 2000. I want to tell you the quick story. I was the pianist in the church we attended and the pastor decided that the church should fund an album of my music and an album of our worship leader singing with me playing. So, after a few months of practice, the song leader, Jason Prisk and I got into a car one Thursday night and drove to Nashville. We got there late and were up early in the studio because we had two albums to record in just one day. We in fact worked for something like 20 hours straight.

Let’s just say that was a disaster and leave it at that. If you happen to have a copy of my album from that day (which is doubtful because it was never really finished), I will pay you to destroy it. The other album turned out OK but mostly because I was only on a few songs.

The reason the album was so bad was partly because of the time crunch (trying to record two full projects in one day is a loser) but also because I simply did not know what I was doing. I had no concept of what kind of preparation was needed to record and what the psychological pressure would be.

Suffice it to say that recording is different from playing in church. You can get away with murder in church. You can even get away with murder in a concert. But when you get into the studio and realize that every mistake is going to be noticed on a album, you start to feel a lot of pressure. All of a sudden, that fancy lick you nail 80% of the time in church becomes a liability rather than an asset.

There is no doubt that the hardest thing about recording is the psychological pressure you deal with. Not only do you obsess about mistakes but you second guess yourself about what sounds good. You agonize over whether you should try again because you know you can do better but also have a deadline to meet and know you can’t spend forever on one song. Your ears play tricks on you: what sounds good in the studio one day sounds horrible to you the next.

Here is how real the tricks your mind play on you are. I will make a confession to you: during the time between recording and the final master, on almost every project, I have had a day where I just felt like the project could not possibly be released because it was garbage. That includes Reflections on a Journey which is my best seller.

I am going to be even more honest. I have produced nine albums of myself (not including that first one) and have recorded tracks for or produced countless others. And truthfully, I am not sure that I handle the pressure much better now than when I first started. When the recording light is on, you just feel it.

So, in my opinion, the most important thing you can do when recording is find ways to manage the pressure and eliminate it as much as possible. That is a great reason that home recording suddenly becomes a good idea. At home, you are not paying a studio $100/hour. And if you can record yourself at home, you are not paying an engineer by the hour either. You can relax a bit more and take your time.

The other thing that helps greatly is the ability to “punch” which simply means record songs in parts. On a recent vocal project I worked on, virtually every single phrase was punched. That is fairly easy to do for vocalists because there are pauses between phrases. However, technology allows us to punch piano as well. We can seamlessly join together two pieces of a song so that no one can tell. In other words, you can play a song until you mess up and then start again right before you mess up. The software keeps the first take and then splices the second take to it right before your mistake.

While punching is not necessarily easy and will take some time to learn how to do well, it is perhaps the biggest factor I know to reducing stress in the studio. No longer do you have to worry about recording a song perfectly. You simply have to record pieces of the song perfectly and then join them together.

Here is another confession. On an average song on my album, there are probably two punches on it, meaning I had to record the song in three parts. I might get one “one take” song on a album but another is likely to be really chopped up. For the songs I record for YouTube, I typically force myself to do one-take recordings because the stakes are lower and I feel that putting that kind of pressure on myself is good discipline.

The drawback to punching is that you can lose some intangible aspects of the song. At some point, it starts to get mechanical because you are not playing the entire song through and you can lose the big picture. For that reason, I try to do as few punches as possible.

That brings me to the point of this post: what process do I use to record? Assuming the setup is place (that I described in that last post and also after I have tested levels and everything else), here are my steps.

1. I go into every song optimistic that I can do a punchless version and I try for a while. If I fail, I just consider it practice. Typically, my expressiveness gets better when I play the same song over and over anyway. So, I just hit record in Logic Pro and start recording.
2. Eventually, if I am not getting close, I decide to punt and start punching. Typically, I still want to get at least half way through a song before a first punch though. I punch without an engineer using Logic’s auto-punch. I am not sure if ProTools has an equivalent but I expect it does. Basically, with auto-punch, I mark a spot in the song right before a mistake. Then I back up 5 seconds and hit record. Logic plays back my original take (which I hear in my headphones) and I play along with it to get the same feel/timing. At the spot I mark, Logic stops the playback and starts recording. I record as far as I can without making a mistake but if I do, I move the punch point to right in front of the mistake, back up 5 seconds and do the same thing.
3. After the song is done, I listen through looking for problems but also for the big picture (expressiveness, story telling). If I like it, I stop. If I am on the fence, I keep that version but record another. And if I don’t like it, I scrap it and start again.
4. If there are punches, they normally have to be cleaned up because there may be a pop or other problem right on the splice. For that, you can do two things: use crossfades and if necessary move the punch point forward or backward a few milliseconds.
5. If there are minor technical problems such as perhaps a double-hit note, I sometimes edit the audio file using Melodyne. I have written about that before here.
6. I let it sit a day or two and listen again. As I mentioned before, the psychology of recording really messes with you and something can sound very different a few days later. In some cases, I have scrapped a song and redone it later.

You might be wondering how long this process takes per song. On a piano-only album, I have 2-3 hours of recording per song. Maybe half of that is listening but that still means I am doing a LOT of takes. Probably 20-30 attempts would be common though I don’t get through all of them.

I think I will leave it at that. If you have questions or further things I need to cover, let me know.