When you record, do you go for "feel" or "no mistakes"?

[arbiterusa]

Ummm, both? Both is good.

I don't understand why this is being presented as a binary option, because it isn't. Great feel and no mistakes.

If you can't do that you shouldn't be in a studio.

 

[NOVAX]

An amalgam of the two.

 

[kesslari]

'sideways dog head'

My next band name...

 

[kesslari]

Time=$$$ for the engineers/producers. Of course they want to spend as much time as possible to perfect their product to the detriment (possibly) of your music. I wonder how time they'd take if the producer/engineer was on a flat fee.

As to my desires in recording my music, I will fix obviously bad stuff, but I want my music to breath and have a real life to it.

Interestingly, in that case the producer/engineer WAS on a flat fee. He was also OCD. Also really talented. But... IMO sucked the life out of some of the songs.

 

[kesslari]

Ummm, both? Both is good.

I don't understand why this is being presented as a binary option, because it isn't. Great feel and no mistakes.

If you can't do that you shouldn't be in a studio.

It's not a binary option, it's varying shades on a continuum. I'm simply curious how other people view this.
I'm recording with a guitarist who is a perfectionist. He's also extremely technically proficient, and drives himself hard.
In his case that will mean practicing his parts very, very extensively, and probably recording multiple takes rather than cutting and pasting.
That will carry over (since about half of the tunes are his, the others are mine) to the rest of the CD.
It's a different approach than mine (I like recording everything live - the Neal Young approach - get a good recording of a great performance).

As I said - I'm not looking for "an answer". Just checking out how others do it.

 

[Ian McLaughlin]

Strive for clean, punch in if necessary, preferably in the same session.

 

[sotua]

What's your approach to recording (for release)? Does the finished song need to be mistake-free? Do you quantize and move notes to get "perfection"? Do you record a take that sounds and feels good and say "yep, that's it"? Or somewhere in between?

I ask because I'm typically a "somewhere in between" leaning toward "if it's a good take with good energy and groove, don't mess with it". But I've worked with producers who would go through each beat and nudge the kick drum (or other parts) measure by measure if it wasn't exactly where they wanted it (and this was for a drummer with good groove). And I thought the final product sounded kind of sterile.

So I'm curious about others' practices and leanings.

If you're going to nudge every single drum hit into the grid, might as well just sequence it with a midi editor then run it through EZDrummer and skip the hassle of recording the drummer.

/OTOH, terrible drummers like myself need a ton of nudging on the vdrums-recorded track to get stuff to a usable state :-D

 

[40Hz]

If it works and sounds good I call it a day.

The mark of the real artist is knowing when to put the brush down and say "it's finished."

 

[grimjim]

I do both. Feel to write the song and practice it until I can play it in my sleep to record. Studio time is expensive.

 

[Moose22]

Mistakes and quantizing are totally different things. I had some serious fights with someone I was working with regarding that a while back. I posted some tracks here too (will again if I can find them)... funk stuff that got DESTROYED by this maniac quantizing all kicks, snares and bass lines.

Wait -- how do you quantize Funk? Seriously, half of the edge of funk is how it is on the beat but on the edge of what counts as on the beat. James brown once told his players he wanted them to be as late as possible without being the next beat to get a feel he wanted, for instance.

The push-pull of the tempo, where you're tripping into the backbeat, is what gets people's butts shaking. That's the funk in funk.

I want to do my best when recording rhythm stuff. But I find that being perfect (quantized perfect), even for rock and indy stuff, just makes it hard to lay a good guitar part. There's no pocket, everything is flat and square and that just doesn't work as well as when there's feel. And the feel is often a subtle accent or maybe leading a beat slightly to get more energy, or trailing slightly to give a laid back feel and a little more room for the guitar to land. Subtle stuff, stuff I wish I had the skills to actually do better in fact.

You can't quantize that. If you could, why bother with live musicians?

 

[And I]

Depends on the song / genre. If I was doing a pop record, sure, quantize it all. If not, then never quantize anything, manually fix only the timing errors that make you cringe and other things that are fixable imperceptibly.

 

[DanGroove]

Both. I don't quantize or time shift things (anymore, did when I first discovered I could at first). I play it again until it is mistake free AND has good groove and feel. I once recorded a project where I was playing other instruments and the bass players just couldn't nail the feel / groove. He asked if I could just fix the time in post processing. Told him "sure I can". And after he went his way I fixed the time by picking up my bass and playing it right.

Jerk move maybe, but that's what it took to make the track come out good.

 

[byrdzeye]

Feel first, then fix any mistakes that are glaring if possible (or even needed). You can't "add feel" in the mix (no such plugin yet).

 

[HolmeBass]

Best recording I've had the pleasure of working on was very much just record. We did a few punches and that was it. The guy mixed using just volume and panning - no EQ, frequency slotting, or even additional compression! ( A number of things were mildly compressed on recording.) Some mistakes, minor ones, made it through. Still the best thing I've been part of by far.

 

[Danny O Danny]

Nick Lowe, who produced (among others) Elvis Costello's first five albums, had the nickname "basher" because he would tell his bands in the studio, "just bash it out, we'll tart it up later". He was interested in capturing the energy (and staying in budget) rather than achieving perfection. Worked for him.

 

[GretschWretch]

The "feel" of a song is what draws me to it in many cases. So to me that's number one for me. As many have said minor/small mistakes can be easily fixed in this day and age. But that doesn't mean not being prepared.
Now on the other hand if you pee down your leg on the take...

you've just begun a thread on Talkbass and are the "Oh! pee!"

 

[TNCreature]

Both. Or go home and practice some more until you feel comfortable at both.

 

[Charlzm]

The album my band is prepping for release is a combination of some demos and some additional recording. The demos are thew backbone for the new recordings and we have been replacing the parts as we go.

We have played these songs live from time to time, both recently and many years ago, and we nailed them live due to incessant rehearsing and practice.

I replaced all the bass on the demos with parts I recorded at home. As our songs are technically demanding and somewhat long, I didn't have a single hero take of most of the tunes but instead comped together sections from one to three minutes long, usually.

Since I was the engineer and performer, I was able to keep scrapping takes until I got one I thought was "the best". I then went in and looked at the waveform and tweaked and edited if an otherwise good take was marred by being slightly off time with the drums or some such error. It's the kind of thing the ears may not hear but the eyes can see it.

In this genre of music, pristine recordings are desirable. In my mind, this is the best version of the song that will ever exist.

 

[guts]

When you're recording you should be prepared enough to not even be thinking about making mistakes.

But the emotion of the performance is by far the most important thing in a take.

If I had to choose between one technically perfect take with inferior emotive force and a take that has a minor imperfection that does not distract from the music, but which has a powerful emotive force. I would choose the imperfect take with emotive force every time.

 

[DanGroove]

Backtracking on having said that it has to be both earlier, I will never fix the time/feel in the mix. I will accept a few minor flaws and fix them in punch edits. I might even let a minor mistake pass if it adds a pleasant character to the sound rather than sticking out like a sore thumb. The groove absolutely has to be there in the recording though. Time aligning takes all the human element out of recordings and makes them uninspiring (IMO).