Tracks

[mdlbear]

I finally decided to do something about my track for Guilty Pleasures, which had a lot of problems. There was clipping on the guitar, and swallowed initial consonants on the vocals. It was awful, and being the title cut for the new album that of course wouldn't do. I finally started doing what I should have done in the first place: recording separate guitar and vocal tracks.

The trick, as I learned rather late in the game, is to start with a single timing-correct scratch track, and use that as a guide. I started with a new vocal track. It fell apart on the next-to-last verse, but that's ok when you can just stop, back up, and restart. Why didn't I do that earlier? (Dumb bear!)

At that point the old guitar track became unuseable, because of the leakage from the old vocals. The new guitar track still has problems; there's a little trouble with synching to the new vocals, and the ending was totally blown. Again, fixable

The harder problem will be the intro. It was a little short to begin with, but the real problem is that I cut off all the initial fumbling and silence, so there's no way to start cleanly -- there's no time between the start of the track and the point where I have to start playing. Next time I'll follow the advice I read recently, and do a count-down or something at the beginning (which will complicate exports, but those happen less often). I'll probably be able to splice one in after the fact, but I may end up re-doing the whole thing.

Of course, I won't have the "redo-from-scratch" option on Demon Lover; I have to work with what I have. But in many ways that's a simpler problem -- it's already multitracked.

Now that I have a little momentum going, I'm pretty sure I can have all the basic recording done before Baycon. Then it will be time for the other 90% -- I'm just hoping it won't take the cannonical other 90% of the time.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

The one thing you have to remember, when working from, ahh, scratch, is to take *out* the scratch track when you're done with the recording stage. Might be obvious, but cflute has had that happen to her at least once...

WRT the 90/90 rule: you have my sympathies. Like anything else, the temptation to keep fiddling with it is very strong...

[mdlbear]

I've done it, too. I was chagrinned to discover that when you "mute" a track in Audacity, it isn't removed from the final mix -- apparently "mute" and "solo" are just for convenience in the mixing process.

Fortunately you can silence a track without actually deleting it, just by forcing its volume all the way to zero. (It's probably some small number rather than zero, but since Audacity does its arithmetic in floating point and rounds to an integer on export, the effect is the same.)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tidbit! jenkitty's begun using audacity for her dance mixes, and I will likely get her to show me once I begin recording stuff....

So, how are you going from mike/pickup to Linux box? One is curious...

[mdlbear]

A couple of cheap but decent tube preamps (ART and PreSonus) feeding into an M-Audio Delta 66 PCI interface card. The '66 has has had good Linux for years under ALSA, which is why I bought it. 4 channels, up to 96KHz/24bits. I only bother with 44.1KHz, but I like working at 24 bits because of the extra headroom. I can get away without a compressor, if I'm a little bit careful about levels and don't move around too much.

[mdlbear]

I really need to write up my "studio", don't I?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Audacity is a pain, lot of ways, and not the least of those is the lack of quality documentation. I've used it for two masquerade recordings, now, and I was twice left feeling the job would have been easier with a mixing board and reel-to-reel tape (only neither of those would have come with me to the con).

Going for the dinosaur of the year award, here.

[mdlbear]

There've been a couple of tutorials on the web. Recently it's gotten popular with podcasters, so the documentation holes are gradually getting filled in. Some of the implementation holes, too. Version 1.3 looks like it will be a winner once it's out of beta.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

If they teach it what a tape loop is, and let me drag the cursor through sounds, I'd be happy. Somewhere, I'd really like the the docs to say "a three-button mouse is strongly recommended."

[mdlbear]

Drag-select works fine, if that's what you mean. There are undoubtedly better tools for working with loops.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with Audacity's handling of loops is that there's no way to have a snippet of sound that isn't assigned a location somewhere in the finished track. When I'm mixing from bits and pieces, this is a big nuisance; these have to placed at the beginning of the track, carefully adjusted in solo, and then moved to their final location. It's possible--I've done it--but it's a big nuisance.

[mdlbear]

1.3 has a notion of "clips" that are parts of tracks, but if you want to do repeats or handle hundreds of mostly-independent clips you're probably using the wrong tool.

You *can* adjust a partial track in its proper place in the time sequence rather than at the beginning -- I do it all the time, starting to record a little before I need the new section to start.

[callibr8]

Why don't you have the redo-from-scratch option with Demon Lover? Since your guest vocalist will be in the area later this month, a re-record *could* be arranged, ya know. :)

Count-ins are indeed a boon and should be used whenever practical.
Perhaps to avoid getting them in the mix you could record them on a separate track, or copy them to a separate track once you've gotten a good vocal line for the song?

Mike positioning is indeed tricky - if you move even a few inches it'll change the timbre of what the mic picks up, and it'll sound like a "splice" when you don't want it to. Tape on the floor (for foot positioning) can help minimize that.

Just because you start the vocals for Guilty Pleasures "on the bounce", doesn't mean that you couldn't insert a guitar fill before them, y'know. You might have to physically slide the tracks around a bit, to fit, but I know it's not tough to do that in ProTools, so I'd think it would be reasonably do-able in Audacity as well.

[mdlbear]

Hi! On Demon Lover, I was thinking (incorrectly, as it turns out) that I'd have the recording done before Baycon. But it looks like we'll have time after all.

I'm definitely going to start using count-ins, on the assumption that all my initial tracks will be scratch tracks from now on.

Mic positioning and levels are a serious problem; fortunately Audacity has a tool that lets you adjust levels in the middle of a track, which helps a lot.

By the way, did you notice this post? See you at Baycon!!

I'm going to try inserting a guitar intro on "Guilty Pleasures" tonight; as you say it shouldn't be hard. I'm just hoping I don't have to time-shift all the other tracks by hand, but even if I do it won't be too bad.

[mdlbear]

(I hate tiny little text boxes!)