I Am absolute GARBAGE when recording.

[Lobster11]

Thank you all for your replies so far.

Indeed, I have been practicing the passages from the song that spanked my booteeh at half speed and even doing the 4 bars with click on and 4 bars with click off excercise and trying to relax more.

I think part of my issue is that, if I'm not mistaken, playing on time with a click/drums means I "shouldn't" hear the click because my note should be directly on top of it. But that kind of leaves me lost. I believe that's kind of why I'm rushing. I play a note before the beat and when my brain hears the click I think that's when I feel "on time".

Glad to hear you're slowing it down. It can seem boring at times, but keep in mind why it is important: Every time you play something incorrectly, you've just practiced playing incorrectly. It's not "practice makes perfect"; it's "perfect practice makes perfect"! Speed will come, but you have to be patient.

As for hearing the clicks, try turning down your bass/amp or turning up the volume on the metronome (or move it closer to your ear). Then you'll be able to hear both the note and the click simultaneously and you'll know when you're nailing it.

Good luck!

 

[Derek Kay]

Lots of fine suggestions to follow.
Cetainly metronome on the backbeat makes you swing, or not!

A concept that helped me was to practice fast tunes deliberately faster. Harder still, play slow tunes slower.

But then you've recognised the problem, and that's halfway to solving it already. So record your live performances and listen back.

I got so tired of a drummer once, I phoned his messages during his solo. I'm guessing he would have been surprised to listen back to himself after the gig. Hope he took notice.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

Recording is a mirror of truth that is usually required for most musicians to acquire better skills.

"If you don't care enough to listen to yourself, nobody else will care to listen to you either. ." Jamey Aebersold

I continually review recorded rehearsals, practices, and studio and live performances. When I first started to do so I was shocked at how much work was needed for my improvement. Back to the woodshed I went.

Me too.

 

[Jim Nazium]

...
3. Learn to hear the metronome on every other beat (2 and 4 for jazz and some other styles), i.e., if you're practing a tempo marked quarter note = 88, set the metronome to 44. Once you can do that, hear it JUST on "4" or any other beat you wish (if quarter note = 208, set metronome to 52).

This is a really helpful exercise and I encourage you to incorporate it into your daily practice. There's no more valuable asset as a bass player than good time.

And don't beat yourself up. Mastering music is a long journey, and that's part of what makes it interesting, right?

 

[GreyBeard]

Early in my career I had the same problem and then I did a 5 year supper club gig with a organ and a rhythm machine. Made my timing rock solid. Practice with a metronome or rhythm machine. They will not let you rush or drag

 

[Topkat13]

What if you’re wrong?

 

[gmarcus]

Make sure you don't have any weird delays creeping into your recording chain. I had this problem when I first started recording. I'd listen back and think Damn I suck, but not this bad. Make sure your interface is set for direct monitoring and your don't have the pre-recorded tracks loaded up with pluggin's.

If that is all straightened out....well the good news is you know what you need to work on. I also used to rush a lot and it came out in the recordings. Really listen to the drums and practice staying with or a little behind their beat. The next step is you becoming the time keeper and keeping the drummer honest if they rush or drag the beat which is exhausting but often a necessary part of the job.

 

[makanudo]

Have you checked that you don't have latency issues?

I had the same problem as you, and turns out a lot of them were due to incorrect latency offset/correction in my DAW (I had changed interfaces but had forgotten to reset those settings). When I fixed that I found I was mostly in time. Still problems with rushing and sloppy timing, but never as bad as it used to where every single take was off and I had to resort to nudging them manually.

Make sure you don't have any weird delays creeping into your recording chain. I had this problem when I first started recording. I'd listen back and think Damn I suck, but not this bad. Make sure your interface is set for direct monitoring and your don't have the pre-recorded tracks loaded up with pluggin's.

If that is all straightened out....well the good news is you know what you need to work on. I also used to rush a lot and it came out in the recordings. Really listen to the drums and practice staying with or a little behind their beat. The next step is you becoming the time keeper and keeping the drummer honest if they rush or drag the beat which is exhausting but often a necessary part of the job.

Yeah, I don't think I have any major latency issues. I have my drivers and reaper set to 32 buffer size and latency is at like 2 ms or 5 ms for the entire trip. And I'd think I'd be dragging instead of rushing if I had latency issues, no?

I have some Fab filter compressors and saturation plugins but that's about it. A Ryzen 5 7600x and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM so Harware wise I'm ok.

 

[MDBass]

Yeah, I don't think I have any major latency issues. I have my drivers and reaper set to 32 buffer size and latency is at like 2 ms or 5 ms for the entire trip. And I'd think I'd be dragging instead of rushing if I had latency issues, no?

I have some Fab filter compressors and saturation plugins but that's about it. A Ryzen 5 7600x and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM so Harware wise I'm ok.

The “latency issue” suggestions are honestly pretty strange.

If the monitoring latency is bad enough it feels absolutely TERRIBLE while attempting to record for whoever is playing: there’s quite literally a palpable delay between playing a note and the note coming out of the monitors.

It’s not possible for a musician to record at all if the round trip latency is that much of an issue: fortunately, with your settings it obviously isn’t.

What helped me the most early on in my recording career was really focusing on locking in with the drummers right hand…assuming they are right handed of course

If you’re recording without a drummer or pre-recorded drum track, I’d recommend turning the click up in volume significantly: it’s much harder to lock in solidly if the click isn’t almost obnoxiously loud.

Carol Kaye’s trick of setting the click to backbeats only, essentially half time with the click landing on beats 2 and 4, is also a great way to really feel the groove while only playing to a click track.

 

[brianrost]

Start taking some deep breaths before you start. Relax, grasshopper. As soon as you tense up, it’s all over.

Start paying more attention to the drums, especially if it’s to recorded or sequenced drums. Unlike a real drummer, they are never going to readjust to your rushing.

As far as latency, there’s no excuse…use hardware monitoring and forget about listening through all your plugins when recording.

 

[hieronymous]

Thank you all for your replies so far.

Indeed, I have been practicing the passages from the song that spanked my booteeh at half speed and even doing the 4 bars with click on and 4 bars with click off excercise and trying to relax more.

I think part of my issue is that, if I'm not mistaken, playing on time with a click/drums means I "shouldn't" hear the click because my note should be directly on top of it. But that kind of leaves me lost. I believe that's kind of why I'm rushing. I play a note before the beat and when my brain hears the click I think that's when I feel "on time".

Do you play along with music? That's how I learned to play. It's good if you can hear both yourself and the music well - though that isn't always the case in real life!

I think it helped me because:

a) I was really listening, trying to figure out what was being played
b) I got to play along with some of the greatest bands in music history
c) I got to learn cool bass parts
d) I learned a lot about songs and arranging by learning the forms of songs

and so on. I was also fortunate to play with people better than me over the years, and also to play in front of people. I also learned about the conviction it takes - at home, you can stop when you feel like it, etc., but in front of an audience, you have to PLAY! The click is a tool to help you learn solid time, but you shouldn't be playing to match up with the click - you should be playing the line because you mean it! Then when you realize you are off, you will push harder to hit it! But it takes time. Like others have said, just realizing there is something you need to work on is huge!

 

[thehindteet]

the best advice I ever read about playing in time was from Wayne Krantz, who described how he had a little portable tape recorder that he used to record everything he was practicing that had to do with time and feel. He would record himself for a few minutes, then go back and listen to it to see if it sounded bad or not.

When your time sounds bad, you may not know what you need to do to make it not sound bad, but you'll try something and if you record it you'll be able to hear whether it sucked more or less than the previous take. Once you do this a lot, you'll be able to sense when your time is sucking while you're playing rather than when you go back and listen to it, and you will start to develop a sort of spidey-sense about when your time is sucking based on how your hand feels.

I used to get the red-light fever a lot back in the old days before I had studio at home, but once I had a simple recording rig and I could take as much time as I wanted to record and comp my takes, I don't really take the anxiety seriously anymore. It never goes away completely but if you're expecting it to happen then it's easy to compensate for it.

The best thing for you to do is to record yourself a lot in situations where there is absolutely nothing on the line. Get something like Mike Clark's Funky Drum Loops and record yourself making up lines, then go back and critique what you played, then do it again. Once you understand the common modes of failure, it's pretty easy to recognize and avoid them.

 

[BlueTalon]

I woke up at like 5 AM determined to record a song I've been practicing and wishing to record and upload a video cover but after spending HOURS recording it, fixing the parts I noticed I was rushing at, rendering and listening back to it, it became obvious I just wasted my entire morning.

Believe it or not, it was not a wasted morning. You learned something about yourself. That's valuable knowledge. Sadly, the most effective lessons in life are usually accompanied by pain, frustration, or some other negative feeling. The best thing to do is learn the lesson the first time, and hopefully you won't have to re-learn the lesson later.

 

[Nightsprinter]

I feel this. I played bass on an EP and and LP with a band and a producer. I did a fair amount of rushing, but I remember it being pretty fun and banged it out okay. Now that I'm in the process of self-recording, I am absolute trash and can't barely get a riff done. lol

 

[bobalu]

Move your body.

Bonus exercise:
- If you have access to a DAW or a drum machine, make a 4 bar drum pattern.
- Come up with a simple bassline to play to the pattern.
- Then loop the pattern, but have the drums drop out every once in a while.
- You keep playing the bassline through the space, and when the drums come back in, it should be in time with the bassline. If it's off, you're rushing or slowing down.
- As you get better, have the drums drop out for longer periods of time. So maybe in the beginning it mutes for the last quarter note every 4 bars. Then the last half measure every 4 bars. Then the full 4th bar. Then alternate 2 bars on/2 bars off.

^^^^^ An excellent suggestion and exercise!

 

[drumvsbass]

Practice EVERYTHING with a metronome.

 

[SunByrne]

I think you're paranoid

You, sir, have officially won this thread. A+, would laugh again.

 

[FullumMusic]

I Am a rusher. Such a bad rusher that Terence Fletcher would slap me across the face until I passed out.

This is a half vent half plead for salvation thread. I woke up at like 5 AM determined to record a song I've been practicing and wishing to record and upload a video cover but after spending HOURS recording it, fixing the parts I noticed I was rushing at, rendering and listening back to it, it became obvious I just wasted my entire morning. I am way ahead of the drums in arguably the easiest parts of the song. Bummer.

I've tried watching video instruction and practicing with a metronome. But when there's an actual band playing.

I beg you noble folk of talkbass to help a brother out. Any tips, pointers, help is greatly appreciated and needed.

One more thought aside from my "Body Movement" comment...

Rushing can also be a listening issue.

One of the things we do when playing is listen to what we're playing & think ahead.
This is obviously a good thing because it's important to know where you're going, not just the note you're playing. But that can lead to a lot of anticipation and early notes. Instead of listening to what you're playing, focus your listening on the drums, and the song as a whole, not what you're playing or what's coming next.

Obviously, listen to what you're playing and think ahead enough to play properly, but have the focus of your attention on listening to the song & where the drum hits are, not as a bassist focused on the bassline.

Listen to the whole of the song, and hear yourself (the bass) within it, and just put the notes where they belong inside that.

 

[FirewalZ]

 

[kln_bc]

The more you record, the more relaxed you'll get about it. Just keep at it.

Back in my early days of guitar I had this teacher...I used to play well at home and then screw up constantly when I was in his studio. He would always say "you're only as good as what you play here."

Maybe you need more practice as well?

I'm sure it'll come to you. Chin up!