bitflipper




The biggest drawback to the one-man-band approach of building up a song track-by-track is that you lose the interaction between the virtual "players" that would normally occur with a real band playing together. 


Amen

But whatever you do, don't quantize! (OK, if you must, quantize just the kick, but stop there.) 

Amen

Political correctness dictates that I have to make an exception to my no-quantize rule for EDM and hip-hop. Some genres expect machine-like quantization, so if you're into those genres, disregard everything I've said so far. And go sit in the corner until you come to your senses.

and AMEN!

gotta love Bit's insightful commentary. 

gotta love Bit's insightful commentary. 

indeed....

gotta love Bit's insightful commentary. 

AMEN!




Mike

My process is similar to post#3.  As a solo artist writing all the parts and recording them too.  I usually make a mock up version where I usually start with recording a guitar line, then I'll work on some drums and just keep adding to the track bit by bit. It will sound odd where I cut in but it's just a demo. After I got a good idea about arrangement,I'll start a new project,  I'll kick on the metronome and do the entire guitar line, then drums to it.  After that, it's all downhill.  Overdub away.  Now you have a in-time project that you could jam to live on your keyboard.  Forget anything that takes the human out of drumming. It took me years to get away from my drum machine and finally learn to play them. I'm so glad

i don't know if sonar's audiosnap has gotten easier to use since S6PE but if you are a guitarist i would recommend using it in reverse - lay down some rhythm guitar (acoustic is best for catching the spikes, even if you don't end up using it) and then use that to line up your sequenced drums.

didn't see this mentioned skimming through, but the corollary to "don't quantize" is find a groove. no matter what genre, even happy hardcore trip hop glowstick, there is a groove. sometimes (as in the happy hardcore etc.) it's a lot more dynamics (and very fast) and less about timing. sometimes (slow blues) it's a lot more timing and far less dynamics. but there always is one, or its boring. 

i remember back in high school, when i was still sequencing MIDI, playing a song (which was perfectly quantized of course) for a couple of my friends (girls) and being taken aback when they started dancing to it. (After all, this was serious work.) years later, i realized a very important fact: people want to connect to your art. even my perfectly quantized sequenced-over-many-weeks really-not-that-good intended-to-be-a-serious-yet-upbeat song had enough emotion and life and dynamics to go straight past the "brain" and right to the soul, somehow. 

guitarhacker said something very important: write the song before you start recording it. if it's not alive in you, if it doesn't come out of you naturally, if it doesn't make you smile and take you somewhere amazing, it won't do that for anybody else and no amount of recording goodies will change that. the only counterpoint to that is, record your inspiration. doesn't have to be sonar, you can do it with a handheld recorder or even your smart phone.

when you've got the song written, when it's part of you, then record it with your key instrument, as a scratch track. go from there. click track, lay drums on top of the scratch track and audio snap, whatever. just get the song recorded and the rest will come pretty easy, because it will either fit, or it won't.