"Good enough for the studio"

A lot of us might not be as much of "performers" as we are "sound guys". I know for myself, I prefer to do a million takes on lead trombone and splice them together to create a perfect track, then the same on 2, 3, and bass, and on to the next instrument. I also know I CAN'T play a single perfect take, so I'm more open to doing smaller bits rather than trying to run songs down entirely at once.
 
Back when I first started doing this - most of the guys here were around then, maybe 6 or so years ago - I did EVERYTHING so that I could sound *just* good enough to sound okay for what I was doing at the time. That goes particularly for piano and guitar in my case - I learned JUST what I needed to be able to accomplish what I wanted to back then.
 
Now my thoughts are a bit split - how much better could I have been had I instead sat down and properly put in the time to learn ALL the chords and inversions I needed on piano? To learn ALL the bar chords and some funk stylings on guitar? To spend REAL time learning how to read in Bb so that when a part is in front of me I'm not half-struggling to get the key in my fingers on trumpet? How much MORE useful would I be for myself and my fellow musicians then?
 
On the flip side, I find that after all, it's helped me build a good general music foundation, and understand some quirks of individual instruments that I wouldn't have otherwise spent much time investigating. It's also helped me keep a burning interest in music because as soon as one instrument got tiring (or I maxed myself out), I could move onto another - one on which I maybe possessed a completely different set of skills/styles/chords. That doesn't stop that I feel like I limited myself severely, but I also kept myself interested in what I wanted/needed. Sometimes I DO feel inadequate, a LOT of times I KNOW my "real" playing isn't up-to-snuff, and when i DO hear people who are highly skilled I often think about how good I "could have been" (I probably still could, tbh).
 
What are you guys' thoughts on getting "good enough for the studio"? Do you feel like a studio recordist ought to have one or two instruments that they've really got under their thumb? Or would you rather have 5+ instruments that you're mediocre or decent at, but can make sound good enough for the studio with enough chopping and splicing?
 
 
Mostly just musing... looking for opinions and interesting thoughts and experiences. :)

Similar to Batsbrew; guitar is the only instrument I really play, so I feel duty bound to try and record a 'performance' with as little comping as possible. Depends whether I'm using a variety of guitar parts throughout the tune though.
 
As far as other instruments go, I can put together some keyboards if I keep it simple and don't draw attention to it 
 
Bass and drums - collaboration whenever possible, I leave those to the guys that know what they're doing.

bitflipper
There are people in this world who can walk in and nail a take with little or no preparation. I am not one of them. Nor do I know any of them personally. 

you know one now.
 

Interesting thoughts thus far. Bitflipper seems to have nailed it pretty good.
 
I do also have a strong tendency of late to not actually WRITE songs - often times I'm gumming around in the studio trying to create a full song but without any lyrics, a barely-functional melody, trying to use very few instruments and create a rudimentary mix.
 
Other times though, in a more big-picture kinda way, I HAVE a full song and just struggle to create it the way I HEAR it in my head - even HAVING good performances (or well-edited to the point of sound great). Where the mixes just don't quite fit together as they ought to. That's a whole separate issue, though.
 
We do all have limitations... Admittedly, "poor" performance isn't really one of mine, it is definitely an issue when trying to play mad technical passages where my fingers just aren't practiced to move. My big block though is that I love to experiment but I very rarely, if ever, come up with song ideas that I find worthwhile to expand.
 
Takes practice I guess... and probably learning to let go of hoping on creating a masterpiece right out the box, and just create THINGS - eventually, with enough time invested and skills acquired, the masterpiece WILL crop up

Translating what I hear in my head is another talent I lack. I manage it maybe 10% of the time.
 
The good news is that much of the other 90% turns out better than what I'd imagined. Some of it's serendipity, but mostly it's because you simply can't hear a full mix in your head or imagine how the parts will fit together. Most last-minute improvements are epiphanies that could only happen in context.
 
That said, historically I've always done better with compositions that were mostly complete before I started recording anything. It's related to my previous point about rehearsing a part to near-perfection before attempting to record it. To quote (or at least paraphrase) Dwight D. Eisenhower: plans are useless, but planning is essential.

And you metal heads can take that to the bank. LT's pretty good at this stuff. Both the blistering and the editing parts.

Actually I tend to think quite a bit more "music" is being made without a performance at all.  The copy/paste crowd, the sample crowd, the loop crowd.  ...and if you can only play 2 beats without a mistake, that can easily be enough to complete a "take".... with judicious assembly.  Then there are the guitar 101 ability crowd, that with their D and G chords performed nicely, with good sound and a pleasing vocal over it...  well... YouTube will show the zillions of examples.  Oh...and all the "dudes" thinking they're the next Randy Travis.

I posted...then edited it to fix the the Youtube URL and now it's gone...

Voda La Void
Anyways, not really disagreeing with you as much as just pointing out an exception in the metal crowd.  Especially when you get into progressive this and that, the fans don't appreciate it much.  If it came out that Animals As Leaders quantized, corrected and step recorded guitar tracks there would be a meltdown, ha ha!  
  

HA! Glenn's a character isn't he? Some good advice sometimes, however!
 
I do agree with you though - if you went out live and you're clearly not able to play this stuff, you should probably go find somewhere safe to run off to. Metal fans are... shall we say vocal about something they don't think is on the level. 
 
I think it's all down to your ultimate vision. For what we do, we walk the line between being able to play it (which is important to us - we do tour and we have to stand by what we do), but also not compromising the vision of the final product too. No one cares about a slightly sloppy run or a bit of a flat note at a live show, so long as you're obviously doing the job but that one missed note or bad run will come back to haunt you every time you listen to your album. Do 99% of people care about that? Probably not. Do you? If this is your art that you know you want it to sound a certain way and it doesn't, but you actually have the means to fix you, would you live with that? You could do 9000 takes and kill yourself or reach for Melodyne and get on with the job of being creative. That's kind of what I was getting at. 
 
 
 
 

mettelus
Live performance skill is a massive time-saver for editing, so developing those is never a bad thing 

this.
 

John T
Pragmatically, here's my experience: an hour's rehearsal is worth ten hours of back end repair.

I'd say that estimate is pretty accurate. Even more so if we're talking about a band - multiply those 10 hours by the number of band members.
 
I'd also offer a corollary: an hour on stage is equal to ten hours of rehearsal. So if you want your band's recording session to go smoothly, play your tunes in front of an audience first. Multiple times. When Pink Floyd recorded DSotM, they'd been playing much of that material live for a couple years.
 
Another benefit: playing live forces you to face your limitations. If you're stretching yourself (like you should) then you are invariably going to hit walls with parts that you just can't perform with consistency. In the studio, you could keep on recording multiple takes until you got it right, or stitch together a fake "performance" from multiple takes. But I've largely given up on that approach, because a simpler part is probably going to better for the song anyway. So with few exceptions, if I can't play it in real time it's not going in.
 

Really amazing tips and insight here!!
 
If anything, I'm definitely inspired to push my limits and get GOOD at recording.
I've got a unpcoming year-long project with my church where we'll be writing and recording a number of songs in upbeat styles, mostly rock. But the folks we've got to work with are far, far below professionals - most of us just picked up our "rock" instruments within the past 2 years (Me on bass, plus keys, guitar and drums)
I'm definitely going to push to have everyone able to come in a play a well as possible... it'll save me a lot of time!
 
Working with other people at someone else's studio tends to seem so time-consuming in comparison to being in the isolation of one's own workspace, working and recording at one's own pace.

to be fair, 
my personal view of recording comes strictly from a 'performer's perspective,
due to the many years i played on the road.
 
but i bring that same work ethic to writing and recording my own music,
and somewhat influence other folks i work with to strive for the same thing.
 
the end result is honest.
 
 

Gosh a good topic, and I've missed more or less.

Since the advent of recording technology, there have been two types of 'musicians' live and what you could call sonic painters. Neither way is right or wrong. For me, I can do all the theory and I can paint. Mind you, I prefer the fundementals of theory rather than an exact use of said rules, because here's the thing...each successive generation of the western art music tradition have more or less re-wrote the rules until the rules have basically been thrown out. This has actually been detrimental as hopefully some of you can see...Beiber anyone:).

Musicianship is different to composing, and composing is closer to sonic painting in contemporary music culture. I think it's important to have a handle on both...but not to beat yourself up too much if you sketch a line in or play a perfect line in. It actually limits a composer and indeed limits musical exploration. Case in point, I'm working on a Nilson Without You cover...I was trying to fix an old versiom I did in 2011...I gave up and started again...but even though I could hit every note outside the cans...inside I could not. I've since worked out that my crappy mic's diaphragm is too small making it hard to pitch, so I've taken every instrument out of the tracking mix and just sing to a piano melody...sometimes one word at a time. Sonic painting. If I worried about the fact I was painting and not playing then I would not be doing the piece and I'd be limiting my musical exploration. Imagine if I was say The Beatles and did this...I can't sing that line George...it's too high, we can varispeed it, but that's cheating George and I won't do that. Imagine, there would be no Rain or Strawberry Fields.

The big issue in contemporary music is we've trapped ourselves in last centuries' music culture...studio, band, record then play live. We need to separate all that. In the 'studio' we paint and live becomes more based on improvisation.

The music industry that we've all grown up with is gone. The idea of bands and recording in studios with engineers and the like is gone. Like anything in history...there is an expansion and then a contraction. Think about the recording studio...it grew exponentially, and there was a studio on every corner it seemed...then gone. Whilst there will always be sound engineers - well into the foreseeable future because our world is made up of audio-visual content...increasingly the music sound engineer will go the way of the dinosaur. Why bother with temperamental musicians, when, so long as you know the fundementals and can paint sonically? And in this, we see the final stage of the contraction of western art music by returning us to the age of the composer again...of course slightly differnt...still no use for temperamental musicians. It will be the composer who can improvise using machines and real instruments and sell this as a performance that will usher in the next phase of western art music