General Music Chat

I dont have a problem with using enhancers when recording, but if your singer just dosnt have a good voice, you may not be able to build a true fan base (people other than friends and family who love you regardless of how you sing or play) to get you to the next level, assuming that's what you're striving for.

Recording studio owner, Les Ledo once told me that, "you can turn good music into Chicken sh*t, but you cant turn Chicken sh*t into good music".

And yet, I've seen enough performance art to know that there is a time and place for experimenting.

I'd buy the software and use it if I could justify the cost.

That being said, the old expression about polishing turds applies.

Misusing a tool never turns out well. Not using a tool because you don't trust it limits your possibilities.

Ok Sound good vs be good. You know. "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

Practice practice practice or edit edit edit?

A lot of folks today turn on the pitch correction or the editing program. When you do that you only hurt yourself. You can either perfect your skills just as all really great musicians have done through repetition and hard work. Or you can fudge your way through with editing tools.

Posers are phonies in every aspect of life. And that is what someone is when they present something they edited as something they actually accomplished. Accomplished being the key word. Anymore, you can hear a musicians CD and want to have them in your band. Or even envy how good they are. Then when you hear them play live that polished performance is gone. Basically, you were lied to.

I have heard great recordings and then seen a live performance by the band. The recording was top notch, but the live show that you paid big bucks to see sucked. Now is that fair? It seems rather like bait and switch to your following.

I know good musicians that have started to rely on editing software. Their live performances eventually show that. A mike is not a vocal enhancement. In most cases it just makes you sound louder. And FX do not change a wrong note into the right note or tune your guitar for you. So Aren't we really talking live editing vs honed skills?

I have heard a lot of musicians and singers that have improved through practice. Musicians have always (Up to this point) made great efforts to hone their craft. I know my picking isn't that big a deal, but I may spend an hour trying to shape a single note to perfection. Every note in a song is important as another to me. I do not mind playing a song over and over until I get it right, even if that takes tens of dozens of times. I could use editing, but then I couldn't learn to do it right every time.

There is a point where the rubber hits the road. You can either desire to sound good at the cost of your own advancement, or actually be good. I would rather listen to a live performance with the typical human flaws as opposed to hearing that perfect machine like performance brought to you by modern day electronics.
I enjoy sound FX as much as the next person. ( Not note / pitch correction devices ) But my playing doesn't rely on any of them. And most of the time I play better live because recorders make me nervous where as people don't. I guess it's because when I play live the bad note is soon forgotten, as opposed to it being etched in stone. If I screw something up on a recording, I delete it and play the whole thing through again. Simply because I obviously need the practice.

If you want to get honest with your music, play in front of a video recorder when you practice. Then you can see the areas that you don't like or where you need to improve. And work on them so you sound good live.

Back away from editor and teach those stupid fingers or vocal cords to learn to do their job properly. I can't even count all the singers and pickers that I know who have made CD's that sound ten times better than they are. And I have heard what other musicians have to say about them.

That's not the way you want your peers to think about you.

I saw the Melodyne software last year and was pretty impressed - It really is amazing how far sound technology has come along - I think it's great but as is the case with everything, has some interesting potential in other areas as well - for instance, impersonating other people 0.o. Let the conspiracy theories begin! lol.

Back on track tho - I'm a purist too in terms of what you're selling - if you rely on pitch correction then your album should give credit to the software that made it possible for you to sing in tune. It's only fair!!

Sir Jamsalot and his Pitch Correction software!
Thursday at 7:00 p.m.

Just think - you could conceivably just send your software to perform for you while you go to bed early that night!

Pitch correction software is also used to correct musical instruments, in particular guitar. Say you play an amazing lead that's perfect except for a note that's flat. Your options are (in order of usual preference) to play the entire lead again, try and punch just the wrong note or use software to fix it. Using the software doesn't diminish your abilities, just as the other two options don't. Of course we'd all like to play it perfectly the first time but that's a rare occurrence.

This has become quite an interesting debate. I have to agree and disagree with Slacker G on using tools like editing and pitch correction. Yes, in a sense it is cheating and robs you of perhaps the "making it to Carnegie hall" level of musicianship. But on the other hand, not everyone want's to make it there and many just will never have the skills. It does mean they should stop making music. And I don't believe it makes them posers. If this were true, a good deal of the musicians here at Bandmix as well as at Soundclick should perhaps give up making music all together and take up something else. Musicianship, especially when it comes to vocals is quite difficult and a lot of the people that I have listened to here probably, and it's just my guess, are not going to get "big" any time soon. It's a nasty business and the pool of musicians out there is very big and full of some mind blowing talent that will never make it to the top. I have a personal friend here in San Francisco who's voice and level of musicianship as well as his writing is stellar, yet his career has been a battle for quite some years. But he still does it. Not because he's a poser, because he loves music. I don't begrudge any one who comps a vocal take or fixes a stray note here and there. I agree from a purist point of view it's not the real deal, but if it makes you happy, do it! Many of my songs have pitchy vocals and I'd use correction if I thought it sounded good. But in my experience it sounds off to me. I choose to keep the mistakes or re-record if I'm too offended by the mistakes. When I feel pitch correction has reached a point where it's not audible in action and is transparent...I'm in!

Cool stuff on your player VI. Nice influences.

Pitch correction software is also used to correct musical instruments, in particular guitar. Say you play an amazing lead that's perfect except for a note that's flat. Your options are (in order of usual preference) to play the entire lead again, try and punch just the wrong note or use software to fix it. Using the software doesn't diminish your abilities, just as the other two options don't. Of course we'd all like to play it perfectly the first time but that's a rare occurrence.

"If you can't do it in a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans under one white light bulb, you can't do it!" ~ David Lee Roth

Yes, more, more. Thanks for any compliments. I'm not a fantastic musician. I've never pretended to be. In fact I'm the king of mediocrity. What was the line in Amadeus "I'm their patron saint". I'm only proud that I can get up in the morning and sing anything. I feel blessed to walk into my studio pick up one of many instruments and have anything that sounds like music come out. And do it all by my lonely self! And yes therefore I fix things. Crappy guitar playing, poorly thought out orchestral arrangements, need more ice in the scotch etc. But I also use tools to create moods or enhance a songs overall feel.
I have used pitch correction on drum notes. The fast attack on drums allows for pitching fairly well. because I often use loops I don't have the luxury of tuning the drums with a good ol' drum key and at times the pitches of the loops will fight with the key of the song or what the bass is up to. So I have on occasion pitched them to better suit. There a lot of nifty tricks I use.
if you listen to my song "Everyone Dreams" though, you will notice how horrible my vocal pitch is. Every end of a phrase is barely reaching. But I won't change it because my mood was where I wanted it to be and it added to the the overall stress of the song. I could re-record it in a better key for my tattered voice, but I was writing and recording it very fast and trying to capture the emotion of my lyric. It all was done and finished in around a half hour and it was time to move on.
Anyhow enough of me. Do any of you ever feel the immediacy out ways the re-recording? A real fun challenge that I did for a British podcast was to write several one minute songs. The idea is to write and record it as fast as possible. No fixes. No elongated mixing. And have it come out as a complete idea. I think everyone should try this. It's much harder than you would think. But for me it was a good exercise in letting go. If anyone gives it a try let me know. I would love to hear your one minute marvel.

Anyhow enough of me. Do any of you ever feel the immediacy out ways the re-recording?

Absolutely! Mostly because in my experience, recording just the simplest of ideas can take a long time due to all the tracks that have to be coordinated.

A real fun challenge that I did for a British podcast was to write several one minute songs. The idea is to write and record it as fast as possible. No fixes. No elongated mixing. And have it come out as a complete idea. I think everyone should try this. It's much harder than you would think. But for me it was a good exercise in letting go. If anyone gives it a try let me know. I would love to hear your one minute marvel.

I did just that on New Years Eve because I wanted to kick off the New Year with a new resolution, "put the perfectionist on the shelf and just get it done". So I set my mics on record (see my latest profile pics), and recorded some simple rythem idea I had. Then I started a second track and hit record - then just recorded a simple solo that seemed to follow the rythem I put down.

I plan on doing this more often actually because my perfectionism has a tendency to end up in a lot of partially completed ideas - but nothing really completed :/

Grand idea - thanks for the encouraging words!

"Put the perfectionist on the shelf and just get it done".

Something I have to keep reminding myself to do. The impatient and perfectionist sides are in constant conflict.

hmmmm

It's good to hear I'm not the only one. Trying to make things perfect has always been a nasty tug- o-war for me. Years ago I wrote and performed with a friend of mine who was just the opposite. He was a visual artist by trade and seldom worried about the technical side of what we did. He was all about the moment and the interaction. People would often say he was the Lennon to my McCartney. Nice compliment. I wish either of us were of that caliber. But I understood the intention of the comment. I was a detail man, involved in the how and he was more about the why. He still is to this day. I find his music almost unbearable for the most part, yet he has many fans of what he does. It must somehow be the ability to find the balance.
So who's up for writing and recording a one minute song? Record it down and dirty....post it....and we can all talk about the results. Any taker's?

Live musicians need to proceed with caution: Anything you do in the studio, the listener will expect you to pull off live.

Hey Sir Jams, I checked out your midnight recording. that's just what I'm talking about. It appears that you just recorded it straight forward, down and dirty. mistakes...yeah might be some there... I'll leave that to you, but it's you in the simplest form. And it sounds pretty good, right? Now all you need to do is add an out of tune vocal over it and we can get back to debating autotune!