So I'm sitting here comping vocals from a recording sess on Monday...

Cirrus

... and my singer just blew me away. I didn't think it was anything that great during the session, we were just getting on with it like usual. We dry hired a studio but there was a guy there kind of watching over us and our bassist was in doing work on the couch at the back so I guess I was distracted from actually assessing the emotional impact of the vocals.

But fuck. Sitting here at home with my headphones on compiling the three takes with various extra lines here and there into one take and I'm just blown away by the guy - the emotive intensity is so compelling, he's hitting high notes with such power and confidence.

It's moments like this that make making music so awesome. I'm done now, going to go have a whisky.

randomhandclaps

I always think that's why it's best never to comp or bin anything straight after finishing takes - despite the insistence of a lot of singers.  When you are working, chatting, checking levels and spinning around on your chair you aren't usually in the greatest head space to prioritize emotional content.  

Also it's funny how we tend to ignore the first takes when recording assuming they won't be the bests as the singer is just warming up and settling in but sometimes they are the best bits.  Then the last thing you do always leaves an impression of how the whole session went, meaning that if it wasn't too great as the singer tired or people were mucking around a bit as it came to an end you can leave feeling something was just OK, then go back and listen to brilliant things we didn't take in or were overridden by later takes.

Cirrus

Wisdom for that! Usually I like to make decisions there and then to keep things moving forward but with vocals in particular I just can't do it when there's other stuff going on. I need that time to let it all sink in and arrive at it fresh. I do tend to have a good mental map as the session goes on of which bits are sorted and which ones need more passes, maybe some extra direction on delivery etc but I'd hate to immediately comp a master take.

digitalscream

It's one of the reasons I love Reaper - you can record over any track, and it just creates an extra take. It means that you can keep going and going and not clutter up your editing window, so there's no need to edit stuff while recording.

But yeah...had a few moments like this while editing our album. Some of the stuff our girl came out with was truly astonishing (as well as actually being so loud in the room that she triggered my tinnitus once).

Cirrus

It's the same in Sonar - they call them take lanes so you just keep recording over the top, then later there are various shortcut keys etc to select phrases to loop and just switch between the various takes. Then you can just click/ drag sections of each take to select them. It does really speed things up, though it took me a few hours to iron out various little pitfalls including one setting where it does make a new lane for each take, but also deletes all other takes that overlap with the latest one. Which meant that half the takes were totally gone from the project (anything that at least had one snippet not overlapping another remained) and I had to import about 30 audio files back in. Le sigh!

Danny1969

I normally get about 15 minutes to mix a whole record, seriously! I was once recording yet another keyboard overdub on a record we had been tracking for nearly 8 hours and the bass player says to keyboard player  "hurry up Harry there's only 12 minutes left and we need some of that to mix it" !!

In Protools we have the Playlist, one nice touch is you can expose the playlist when your finished tracking, highlight a bit of vocal, right click and it will automatically put in on a comp track. 

Cirrus

Danny1969 said:

"hurry up Harry there's only 12 minutes left and we need some of that to mix it" !!

SOME of that? I guess it's going to be an offline bounce then.  )

PolarityMan

I love tracking vocals. Our singer is so fast at it, we only do like 2 or 3 takes and normally all of them are really great even nails harmonies first time. It takes a little longer on tracks where our bassist has harmonies / main vocals but all in all it's just about my favourite part of the recording process.