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

[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.