Click Track, Anyone?

For the past couple of days, my friend Justice has stayed over at my apartment and we've been attempting to record. I say "attempting," because if you've ever dabbled with recording, you'll know that, while the ultimate result is rewarding, the process to get there is very tedious.

We've been waiting about a year to get together, between mismatched schedules and not having the requisite equipment. The first day, all we did was set up the equipment. I pulled my long ago purchased, yet never-played, drum kit out of the closet. (Because the heads were removed, and the drums stacked inside each other like a Russian nesting doll, they fit into just two suprisingly compact boxes). We spent about two hours just setting up the drums and tuning. Unfortunately, my chops are shot to hell.

Justice was primarily interested in recording drums and vocals for a song I wrote back in April - "Hoodwinked." Justice is interested in creating a funk/soul band, so the material I've been working on lately is geared to this idiom. It feels very much like writing fiction in a genre, with all the little rules, and (hopefully) creative subversion of those rules.

The sad thing about recording is that it doesn't lie. I can sit on my couch and play a little guitar and sing, pausing to cough, stopping and starting again after dropping notes, yet pretend that I gave a complete, musical performance. Needless to say, when recording, no such illusions are allowed. Having not played drums in a long while, my timing is really off. Rather than play the drum parts (which I hear perfectly in my head) straight through, we spent far too long indulging my technique, which involves attempting to play a few bars to a click track to keep consistent time.

We used this technique in April of last year for a recording class we took. We recorded fragments of drum tracks at a friend's house and then I pieced the structure of the song out of the little fragments. This is a satisfying experience, in much the same way that putting together a jigsaw puzzle is. The drawback is that you're using the exact same drum part for the 3rd verse as you did for the 1st and 2nd. We tried to compensate for this by overdubbing the rest of the instruments playing straight through. I think it worked okay.

Back to the present. The recording interface we're using has four mic inputs, so we used 1 mic for the snare, 1 for bass, and 2 for a stereo overhead to pick up the rest. Of course, all the drums leak into all the mics, so separation is something of a joke. As much as I enjoy writing and playing music, I do not enjoy fretting over drum tuning and mic placing, and getting levels. You could easily imagine taking days going thump-thump-thump-thump, tap-tap-tap-tap. Next time you wonder why your favorite band is dragging ass in getting the next album out, this may be part of the problem.

At the end of two-and-a-half days, we have two scratch vocal tracks, and two separate, incomplete, attempts at playing the drum track.

The dream lives on.