Lessons Learned from the First Recording

While you wait for the next song to arrive - which shouldn't be long now - I'll deliver on the promise I made a while back to share what I learned recording the first one.  I probably shouldn't have left it so long before writing this up, but I don't think I've forgotten much.

The Law Did Rise was the first true recording I've ever done.  I'd run a direct line in with my guitar occasionally just to preserve an idea, sometimes along to a drum pattern I had.  But this is the first time I had done a full blown song.  Needless to say, there were a few bumps.  Some things I learned were:


Take thorough session notes
Settings, levels, mic placement - make sure you get everything down, and make sure keep track when you make changes. Otherwise, you might have a difficult time later when you go back to record new sections or patch things up.

For example, the guitar tone in the song's second solo was from an early take.  I had made a few alterations to get that sound, and I forgot to save or make note of what I had done.  A few days later I made adjustments the structure of the song and had to re-record the guitar parts.  When tried to dial in that sound again, I found I couldn't get it quite right.  I never was able to replicate it.

Record everything
By the time I had finished The Law Did Rise, I had accumulated roughly 1.6 GB of raw audio.  This may sound like a ton, but given the cost of storage space these days, that's a drop in the hat.  So record everything.  Even if you know you haven't rehearsed enough and the take is likely to be bad, you never know what might come out of it (such as the aforementioned guitar solo; it may not be the cleanest take I did, but in the end it had a vibe I liked better than any other).

Compressors are your friend
Good mics and preamps are excellent at picking up on all the subtle dynamics of your playing and singing.  Unfortunately, this also includes the stuff you don't intend.  My slightest lean away or towards the mic, the smallest change in pressure when picking notes on the bass... every imperfect nuance was captured.  Trying to adjust the levels for all this manually would be an absolute mess.  Luckily, compressors help greatly to combat this.  It doesn't take all the feel out of the track; it just lets you keep the emphasis on the stuff you actually intend to emphasize.

If it's feeling wrong, change it immediately
If something isn't feeling right, that's a sign something needs to change.  There was one point in the tune where I often found myself messing up; I always expected more bars between the end of the chorus and the start of the next verse.  Instead of adding more bars, I continued on, telling myself I just wasn't used to it yet.  The result?  I ended up adding those bars later and had to fix the tracks for every instrument.  If I had paid attention to what my brain was trying to tell me when it was still little more than drums and acoustic guitar, I would have saved myself a lot of time.

Those are the big ones that come to mind.  I'll likely have some more in the future (the new tune will almost certainly yield a couple).