Well, that was useless

[solarbird]

Damn that was tiring. And ineffective! "Thought You Knew" (a bouzouki-led song) is going to need a completely different approach to building a bed track; it just changes tempo too much and frankly doesn't work as a constant tempo song. It just sounds and feels all wrong. There's about five different tempo things going on in it (intro, outro, bridge, chorus/verse, linking material) and I thought I could take the linking elements to the chorus/verse tempo and record most of the song on one beat, with the bridge/intro/outro added in later, but I was WRONG with bold and small caps.

So now I need to figure out whether I just try to do a perfect(ish) nontempoed recording (or close enough that I can patch it cleanly) or do a bunch of tempoed fragments and assemble them into something at least tempo-correct. If you've done this before, suggestions will be happily taken.

Comments

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Stop/start songs with tempo changes:

Usually I just abandon the notion of keeping exact time at all and don't bother with a click track. I might set file's tempo to be approximately what the main bulk of the song is played at, but I won't use a click track when recording or anything.

This happens a lot with pieces that involves the various parts timing off of each other. An example would be a song with a pause in the music, then the vocals doing something, and then the guitar coming back in based on the downbeat of the vocals.

For that sort of piece, what you want is a bed track that's got the multiple timing-critical parts on it already, performed as if it were a live "full band" recording. For example, on "Wreck of the Crash of the Easthill Mining Disaster", we did Brooke performing the banjola and the vocal simultaneously onto a set of bed tracks. Then we re-recorded just the banjola super-clean, then the guitar super-clean, then the final vocal. Each player listened to the bed track instead of a click track when playing the clean separated parts.

Even when you do that, don't be surprised if you still have to go in and edit the timing of things. Don't be afraid to do this if you need to. Nothing makes a recording more unlistenable than ragged timing.

[solarbird]

Mmm. This sounds easier than the nasty bullshittery I was thinking about doing, so I'll try this first. (So lazy ^_^ )