Topic: How do you record your tracks?

How do you record your tracks an what are the dis/advantages?

1 - With all gear hooked up at once pre arranged
2 - With all gear hooked up at once liveset/jam style
3 - Instrument for instrument
4 - At once multitracking

etc etc...

Also Tips&tricks are welcome smile

edit: Please dont just post 'live' or something because I would like to know why u do it the way u do it.
edit: Deleted a way to long post about my being a noob.

2 (edited by Forax 2008-09-12 04:33:16)

Re: How do you record your tracks?

i do it live/jam style.  the advantage is its fun and you can often capture a certain magic and energy.

there are disadvantages.. i find after spending some time creating a pattern/loop it can be difficult to transform that into a fully fledged track.  its just a sketch or a jam.. you've got to give it some legs and let it walk.  sometimes the mix sucks because you're more in a fast/creative mode going straight to two tracks instead of multi tracking and then getting analytical in a mixdown phase.

Re: How do you record your tracks?

mostly record 8 tracks (drums, bass and a theme) at the time, and figure out the arrangement in the first recording. Then i should have the fundament of the track. Then usually ad handplayed strings and mabe vox

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Re: How do you record your tracks?

option 1; record the arrangement with added slight tinkering the volumes/eqs/fx on the mixer.
any jamming/tweaking is pre-recorded as midi where possible.

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5 (edited by TinFoilHats 2008-09-12 10:41:33)

Re: How do you record your tracks?

A combination of jamming and instrument for instrument.

I work in Ableton 7 with hardware synths. First I create a simple beat, bassline and some chords that fit the bassline. Then I go jamming with them (stop/starting loops, chord progression, try out several fx), when I create something that I like, I record it. Then I let that play, and jam along it with a new sound/melody and record it. I then mostly will wait a day. I return to the arrangement and I will examine the mix and arrangement in detail. Add fx, etc. and work from that to an end mix. When I'm sattisfied with the end mix, I render the track. Open a new set in Ableton, take the rendered track and do some mastering.

Re: How do you record your tracks?

presequenced, performed jam style (with solos!) and then Resampled in Bableton or recorded to wav with Tapeit vst but also full jams from scratch with friends - if it's at my apt then i just use tapeit vst - why? because we can press stop and not cut the resampling option in bableton, that way you just have an audio dump to .wav no matter what jams or crazy stop and starts you do.

Re: How do you record your tracks?

usually all gear at once, from mixer to stereo input of the laptop. sometimes pre-arranged in my mpc, sometimes "live" sometimes a mix of both.
because this is the fastest and easiest way, and if i start arranging little blocks inside the laptop the chance increases that i'll never finish the track.

but sometimes i record instrument for instrument, if i want to do something more "advanced" or if i want to make a track using only one synthesizer (multitracking).

Re: How do you record your tracks?

I don't do much recording i realize....

... mostly small loops and one-shots which i then sequence and arrange in the ol' computer....
(that may be why i don't have much that i finish LOL)


In the future I'd like to get a better recording set up for multi-tracking but right now thats on the back burner.

Re: How do you record your tracks?

I tend to pre-record the beats and percussion and occassionaly a small bassline, and then start jamming with both analogue and digital synths. I am in the process of switching from Cubase, which sucks ass, to Ableton 7, which is a great tool for jamming.

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Re: How do you record your tracks?

i'm not really sure what i'm doing but i record my synth going through my mbox2 to the macbook i just love playin with the synth!

Re: How do you record your tracks?

If it's only a sketch - then all at once, but if it is a finished track definitely channel by channel, dry, centered (maybe i should multitrack, but i always fuck up the levels or forget something and then have to record again).
This way i get tracks ready for mixdown. It's a bit boring, but you get every sound on a separate track with good levels.

If you record all at once, what can you do with it? You guys don't mix straight from your hardware and then record the final mixdown, do you? That would be a cool process, but it would require lots of gear and fx. A proper studio.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get a decent sound with live recording, but recording separate tracks will definitely give you more control and more options, especially with eq and compression of individual channels (unless you have a bunch of compressors lying around).

And you can apply different techniques of recording do different sounds using preamps, tapes, harmonic exciters, different microphones, recording in different rooms, whatever you think of..