Studio Tips - Playing With Yourself

RAJ

Well, I have purged a fraction of my raers and have gotten back into playing music again. Right now I am rocking a 5 piece DW PDP with Aquarian heads, Geddy Lee signature Fender Jazz Bass, Ampeg combo, Les Paul fed into a Fender tube amp along with a Fostex digital 8 tracks w/ various mics I have collected over the years.My wife and kid are out of town for a week so I have had a lot of time to start recording and did not realize how hard it is to keep everything in time. I have a Korg metronome but even that is hard to keep steady with. The Fostex has a click track that I have yet to experiment with..Anyways, I am curious to where you start when you record. Drums first? Guitar? anbd any tips to keep your shit solid.Thanks in advance.

funky16corners

Geddy Lee signature Fender Jazz Bass

Does this come with the Canadian standard testicle clamp?

Jonny_Paycheck

Oh, you have a drum kit... duh... yeah, drums first... hate playing against a metronome

Skip Drinkwater

drums first is definately the way to go in my experience. gotta have that backbeat before anything else. after you have that down and decide you don't want drums throughout the whole track, just mute it where you want it to drop.

bonzaisk8

make sure that you first have a solid sound card with a breakout box. a huge world opens from there. then look into a decent pre-amp for mic'ing your drums, guitars and other mic'd instruments. keyboards and turntables won't need the preamp. then, get some sm-57's and start experimenting with mic placement. the rest will follow.





oh, and for time, buying a drum machine or just using a drum machine application on your computer is the best way to go for matching the beats proper.



hollur.

RAJ

Geddy Lee signature Fender Jazz Bass

Does this come with the Canadian standard testicle clamp?

Damn... The wizard rock graemlin would have come in real handy at this moment.

Supergood

Anyways, I am curious to where you start when you record. Drums first? Guitar? anbd any tips to keep your shit solid.

Thanks in advance.

Back before I got into composing/recording exclusively with VST instruments, samplers, software "STUDIOS" (Reason) etc... I used to record my drums first into my Yamaha 4-track quarter-inch machine. The bass, then keys, usually followed the drum track.

SG

Dubious

ableton live you dont need to play to a click or nothign and you can quantise the sloppiest shit to your hearts content

Dubious

typically i play drums last ..ill play the porignal stuff to a click or dru mmachine.. build up the song annd then lay down the drums later... its easier for me to play in time to a full track than to an empty click.

Gamble

What ive been thinkign about lately is programmign your basic bassline in a sequencer, and playign your drusm to that. Then erase the sequenced bass, re-record real bass over the drums, then keep adding on top of this. I figure it would give a nice in-between of the groove of doing it all on feel, and the strict perfection of sequencing. It would really be handy in avoiding the drumming from speeding up bit by bit as the song goes on.

Dubious

I like to use a prgrammed beat first to build up a basic groove.. play everything to that and then i get behind the kit and figure out what elements of the prgrammed beat i want to recreate o nthe drums or do a new beat from scratch... by programming the beat it gives you the option to record the drums individually ie hats first, then just snare, just kick.. to build up more complicated grooves morodor stylee... or to simply get around limited micing settups.. 9 time out of 10 i find myself leaving in bits from the programmed beat under the finished drums.. usually the kick..