Recording Rehearsals?

[basseux]

I record with a zoom h6 but don't want to listen most of time as I feel i heard what was wrong already.

But recently I got a pleasant surprise where we did a rehearsal at 4 instead of 7 and it was sounding great.

We had to skip a gig because horns were absent, and some band mates didn't want to play it even though it was sounding fine without horns.

I am not even sure they listened to the record, i doubt it.

 

[vvvmmm]

Yeah, but its existence gives you back-up if you wanna go that way.

Me, I like to document stuff - I like the whole process of getting the live recording and working with it to sound as good as I can get it - where the performance is worthy.

Or the song ... I write a lot from that stuff.

 

[Eilif]

Only do this if your band is open to the concept of ‘brutal reality’ - super valuable exercise though!

Heck yeah,
Been rehearsing on Pedal Steel (relative newbie) with a couple guys playing originals and we record most of what we play. It's been HUGE in helping me improve my parts, intonation, choices, etc. Not to mention that with PSG, you HAVE to have tracks to practice with.

Tonight we're going to run a 13 song set as though it were live and record the whole thing. I have a feeling it will be both incredibly encouraging and incredibly brutal.

 

[richntiff]

Heck yeah,
Been rehearsing on Pedal Steel (relative newbie) with a couple guys playing originals and we record most of what we play. It's been HUGE in helping me improve my parts, intonation, choices, etc. Not to mention that with PSG, you HAVE to have tracks to practice with.

Tonight we're going to run a 13 song set as though it were live and record the whole thing. I have a feeling it will be both incredibly encouraging and incredibly brutal.

good luck and have fun!

 

[mstillman]

Tonight we're going to run a 13 song set as though it were live and record the whole thing.

Therein lies another great strategy that should be its own thread, and probably was.

One of my pet peeves is dead air between songs. When preparing for a gig, a recording under "battlefield conditions" is often an eye opener. Few realize after a song's normal run through at rehearsal how much time is spent noodling that song (or the next, or whichever), discussing whatever, setting pedals/patches, etc.

I once learned enough Excel to make a spreadsheet in which one could enter a song's start and stop times on the set's recording, and it would calculate the durations of both a song and the surrounding dead air. I think at one point I learned how to display the dead air values in various colors depending on the duration.

Can't recall where that ended up and it's been a few years. Might be a good use of an hour searching online and various backup drives for it.

 

[FrenchBassQC]

I recently joined a band that does original material. There's no source recordings, which makes it difficult to learn the tunes. On the advice of @LBS-bass (I think), I've started recording rehearsals. It's helped tremendously in keeping tabs on the material.

Record your rehearsals. It absolutely helps.

We're doing the same thing here; we're recording rehearsals for when we get a very near to final version of an arrangement for our songs so we have a blueprint.

 

[Eilif]

good luck and have fun!

Therein lies another great strategy that should be its own thread, and probably was.

One of my pet peeves is dead air between songs. When preparing for a gig, a recording under "battlefield conditions" is often an eye opener. Few realize after a song's normal run through at rehearsal how much time is spent noodling that song (or the next, or whichever), discussing whatever, setting pedals/patches, etc.

I once learned enough Excel to make a spreadsheet in which one could enter a song's start and stop times on the set's recording, and it would calculate the durations of both a song and the surrounding dead air. I think at one point I learned how to display the dead air values in various colors depending on the duration.

Can't recall where that ended up and it's been a few years. Might be a good use of an hour searching online and various backup drives for it.

Went well.
I had to prod the BL a bit to keep things moving as he persisted in recording each song separately. However, he was a good sport and afterwards we all agreed that some of our songs felt better than ever and it brutally exposed some of our weakness in others.

We've decided to run the set each practice from now and then concentrating on the songs that are weakest after that.