ShortScale.org

There's a fairly common generic studio joke that has the same implications...

Drummer: "Can you make me sound like Bonham?"
Engineer: "Yeah sure... if you play like Bonham"

I've used things like beat detective, and heavily edited stuff that felt like it would be better with the editing. But having it in your mindset that it's standard practice and part of the mixing stage is fucked. Get it right in the first place.

It's a true story MEIK.
Even your favourite low-fi shit has usually been sliced the fuck up or tempo mapped for your listening pleasure.

Don't even start on metal shit. It's all fucking mapped out if they didn't replace all the sounds anyway.


Personally, I fucking hate slicing up drums and shit so I don't really do it. I plan on making myself get good at it though so i can track more turdseses.

My philosophy with recording is that if the performance isn't good enough, you're not good enough to have that part on your record.

Either redo it until you get it right, or fuck off.

I am 100% anti Auto Tune, Editing of Drums/Guitars/Whatever.

Sloan wrote:It's a true story MEIK.
Even your favourite low-fi shit has usually been sliced the fuck up or tempo mapped for your listening pleasure.

Bollocks.

I agree, I don't like it either. It's good to know how to do it though for more experimental stuff or whatever.

I don't mean upgrading it in the sense of 7.5 or what ever, though it does anger me that they charge you for the updates.

Manually editing blows, I had to do it for school and it was horrible.

Mike wrote:I am 100% anti Auto Tune, Editing of Drums/Guitars/Whatever.

mine has always been LoFi or bust
but that has never ment don't play your part well

sigh...

Ian wrote:sigh...

Cheer up.

But Mike is always right about everything!

Yea, but, you're almost famous, Mr. ClosetFuck...

bah! humbug.

Well, how do you feel about all the beat fixing you've done on your record? Do you think it was really necessary?

How do you feel in your heart about any studio trickery you've been using?

It just feels like Cheating to me, but if you don't care and you're delighted with the outcome, then who cares what I say? I don't have an album on iTunes, so I'm hardly the authority.

It was more of a personal taste thing really. I wanted a certain kind of sound where the small nuance of drums-just-that-much-more-in-time made a difference. Where as I let the natural vibe slip through in other areas to give a song more feel. Not a holy-shit-none-of-us-can-play-our-instruments-good-thing-beat-detective-is-around kind of thing. But for instance... one of my songs was supposed to have a fully swung kind of feel, but I played my scratch piano parts kind of half swung and then the drummer played somewhere in between the two... So I chopped the drums up to add some extra swing later when I realized what had happened. I also put some drums a little off time during fills just because they felt better/sounded more natural that way.

I can see where you would hate beat detective/chopping up drums. It was a shitty feeling when that shittier local band had an amazingly perfect sounding CD because of sampling, beat detective, and autotuning. Especially when you knew they couldn't play like that in real life. But I advocate the use of these things to add subtle vibe where needed.

but...

Sampling drums is terrible and I will never do it. And if you want to put your album on iTunes it is very simple and I can show you how.

When you say sampling drums are you talking about sound replacer or what rappers want?

Sound replacer just doesn't do it for me.

Mike wrote:My philosophy with recording is that if the performance isn't good enough, you're not good enough to have that part on your record.

Either redo it until you get it right, or fuck off.

I am 100% anti Auto Tune, Editing of Drums/Guitars/Whatever.

I'd agree with that if you have the time and money to spend in a studio doing numerous takes...

However, If you havn't, and the drummer has nailed the track except one or two out of time kicks, whats the harm in canning the track and then spending literaly a couple of minutes editing the beats back into time?
It'll save you time and money, and also stops you from driving the performance out of artist by making them redo the track over and over...
Same with vocals, I always comp the vocal track, no one is good enough to get a take exactly right for the entire song...

By comp do you mean compile from multiple takes? I have no problem with that personally, because you're still capturing a performance, not electronically hacking it.

All the singers in my band generally do all our parts in the same take though after an initial 2-3 runs through to warm up. Once my voice is warmed up I can pretty much nail my takes all in one pass.

Yeah I normally record 4 takes and then compare each section of the vocals for the best take...

Altho I wouldn't use it to save a truly crap preformance, I don't have problem using a bit of auto tune here and there for tweaking...
It's not ideal, but there's nothing worse than letting studio session run over time and budget if someone can't nail it on the day...

Mike wrote:My philosophy with recording is that if the performance isn't good enough, you're not good enough to have that part on your record.

Either redo it until you get it right, or fuck off.

I am 100% anti Auto Tune, Editing of Drums/Guitars/Whatever.

I agree using tools like that to make you sound super slick and radio ready is way lame but, I am 100% use all the tools available to let loose your creativity. My Bloody Valentine for example. dude tweaked that album for over two years. it's amazing. a fucking masterpiece. I don't think there is a drum/guitar/whatever sound that isn't heavily edited.

radiohead would be another obvious example of editing as creativity. they're not editing cause johnny greenwood can't play guitar, it's part of their creative process.

and btw james, that marantz is fucking amazing. I've been looking all over ebay recently at 4 tracks and I haven't seen one like that.