Finished Is BETTER Than Perfect

"Lifes a dance, you learn as you go" Recording, like any process that is both technical and creative, is a state-of-mind thing. Any single aspect of the process has the capability of being either a launch-ing pad or a stumbling block to better records. Experience brings a sense of pro- portion and circumspect “big picture” awareness that is hard to get from reading web forums and eq recipes.

It is important to work fast. Finished is always better than perfect. Always. In more ways than one. For one thing, you will change your mind about things as the recording develops. There are a thousand steps along the way, and if you get too stuck on one, you lose your inspiration and sense of proportion, you'll get frustrated and your ears will start to burn out, and you will start to hate the song and the sound.

Recording it will start to feel like a chore and a burden and that state of mind will show in the finished product, if it ever gets to that state. More likely, the project will become a half-forgotten waste of hard disk space that never gets completed.

The best way to work fast is to take as much time as you need to get ready for recording, before you actually start the creative process. This is actually a big problem with new clients in professional studios – they show up late, with worn-out strings and drum heads, out-of-tune instruments in need of a setup, they're hungover (or already intoxicated), they only got four hours sleep and haven't rehearsed or even finished writing the material, and so on. This is frustrating but manageable for the engineer to deal it with, it simply means that the client is paying for a lot of wasted hours to restring their guitars and so on. The engineer can take care of the setup for the first day or two and then get on with the business of recording.

In a self-produced home studio setting, this approach is fatal. If you're trying to write the song, learn the part, demo plugins, set up your instruments, figure out your arrangements, and mix each part as you go, you will spend two years just tracking the first measure.

So the next couple of posts are going to deal with methods and techniques designed to get you moving fast and making constant progress, and also with figuring out when you've stalled out. The whole idea is to keep the actual recording process a primarily creative and inspiration-driven one, and to separate, as much as possible, the technical aspects that a dedicated engineer would normally perform.

Setting Specific Goals

The best way to make sure that you are always making forward progress while recording is to set specific and achievable goals for each session. In other words, if you have three hours to record tomorrow, decide in advance what the “deliver- able” will be, as though you were answering to a boss.

For example, you're going to get the main rhythm guitar track for this song recorded all the way through in three hours, come hell or high water, even if it's only half as good as you hoped. This means no shopping for plugins, no second-guess-ing whether you need different pickups, no deciding that the bridge needs to be re-written, no surfing the web for guitar recording tips, no testing to see how it sounds with a new bassline, no trying out alternate tunings, etc.

Please note that are certain kinds of loop-based and sequenced/automated electronic music where sound design and stuff normally thought of as “production” is an integral part of the compositio- nal/performance process. The same principles of efficiency apply to any kind of production, but they may apply a little differently if your core creative endeavor is built around selecting, mixing, and processing existing sounds, as distinguished from music that is created and performed from whole cloth on more conventional instruments.

If you need time to do any of the above before you can be sure you're ready to cut the rhythm guitar, well, then, THAT is your project for tomorrow. Instead of trying to record the guitar part, you've got three hours to decide on the best bridge arrangement, or to try out different plugins, or to test alternate tunings, or to re- search and test different setup recipes, or audition plugins, or whatever.

The whole point is that no matter how many things need to be done or tested or thought through or tried out, come the end of tomorrow's session, you will have absolutely and decisively crossed one or more of those steps off your list. No sane person would ever deliberately decide that “I'm going to spend the next three months second-guessing the amp tone and the particular voicing of the palm-muted riffs on the second turnaround”, but this is exactly the danger if you don't decide in advance how much time you're going to spend on these things. Boredom, ear-burnout, and self-doubt are your enemies.

In a commercial studio, you'd have the reassuring hand of an experienced engineer and/or producer to tell you when it sounds great, or when it's time to stop and re-examine that 7sus4 chord and so on. You don't have that. So you have to trust your prior decisions, and just as important, you have to trust your future decisions and your overall talent.

It's one thing to say “we'll fix it in the mix.” That's bad. But it's another to say, “I know that this is a good song, and that I can play it, and that I've been happy with this sound before, and I know that everything is going to sound bigger and better and more polished and professional once I've laid down all the tracks and have processed and mixed the whole thing.”

It's very easy to get trapped in self-doubting tunnel-vision. It's important to get it done right, but it's also important to get it done. You may not achieve every goal you set for yourself in the time alloted, but at least you'll reach a point where the clock runs out and you can set yourself a better goal for next time, armed with specific knowledge of what you need to work on. Setting specific goals in advance hedges against dangers on both sides of this see-saw. You have the opportunity to set aside enough time to do it right, while simultaneously preventing yourself from getting lost in an open-ended vortex of trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm going to step back for a minute here and make some general points about preparation and organization.

The preceeding post was some compiled opinions and excerpts from threads written by some great folks on the Gearslutz forum, the moderator mentioned their was no problem with us creating our own version with the information, so the following is some of the best information and concepts that i believe you, my readers will find especially helpful. Bottom line is i couldn’t have said it any better, these concepts and ideas are top notch, and pure gold. You can read the entire 53 page massive thread if you’d like, here. http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=29283