slow down, guitars....

[JBroll]

+1 006, Scorpio; -1 Darkening, OP.

If the situation is, as suggested, that a band is spending rare and valuable time in the studio... why the shiteating fucksauce have there not been serious rehearsals for eight thousand years before entering the studio?

There's no two ways about it - if this is done it'll sound pretty asstastic.

(Vinnie Vincent, anyone?)

So you could slow everything down, track at 75% speed or so (trust me on this, even here it'll sound like chipmunks fucking each other with helium tanks, you don't want to go lower), and then ramp the speed up significantly. What do you get? Well, the 'natural' time variances are going to be squished (think of it like this... you'll be 'squeezing' the audio shorter by around 15 seconds per minute) and it'll sound bizarre, any kind of phrasing will sound completely off compared to other fragments that weren't zapped, 'off' bends will probably be more noticeable (as the difference in frequency between two notes increases when you go higher) and every fucking noise will get significantly higher.

Every fucking noise.

Love string squeaks everywhere? Crank the speed, and it'll be like nails on a chalkboard! Pick noise sound perfect? Make it into bird calls!

If you wanted to do this, get whatever reference track you want slowed down properly, tune the guitar down so that it's in tune with the 'reference' track (Wait, what's that? Strings too slack down there? Whoops... in all that time spent going down a tritone and trying to get a playable layout before giving up and going to GC for some heavies and a truss wrench, you could have actually learned to play...), practice with the reference track for a while and get all set with that, record for another 7 hours and 59 minutes (yeah, saving time is GREAT!), and play with a speed tool for hours trying to make it not sound like Jabba's ass.

If you're doing this to save time, with all the tweaking and shit you need to do I wouldn't expect any decent results. Maybe I'm being a little over-dramatic... maybe I tried this too and gave up after seeing how useless it is... I guess we'll never know.

Jeff

 

[Morgan C]

Honestly I'm all for 'cheating'. Its rare for someone to be a good composer AND a good musician. Stuff like this allows us to hear stuff by good composers. I dunno about you guys but I'd rather hear a better composer than a better technical musician.

While on the topic of this, I have to make a confession. My band is made up of a few not-very-good musicians, our guitarist has only been playing like 2.5 years. We're recording our EP, but he couldn't play some bits. I put my finger on the fretboard while he was recording one riff because he couldn't get his hand there in time. Did it for bass too. It sounds good, I honestly couldn't give a damn how someone creates something as long as the end product is good. Flame away

 

[JBroll]

I'm not generally opposed to shiny toys and such (although I have very mixed feelings about Autotune in some cases), as I think the biggest thing to aim for is getting the actual song presented properly - but this is very different because getting the results to sound good will take much longer than just getting the part down better. If Autotune took a year per track fuckers would be doing vocal takes over and over until it was done right; as optimistic as I usually am I don't see this working out at all. This is why I disagree strongly with almost every comparison Darkening made (and although I agree that calculators are cheating, I have to correct the tuning statement because *real men* hit the string and count the wiggles... really fucking fast) - it won't save time and sound decent. If you're lucky you might get to pick one of those two, but I wouldn't even count on that.

Jeff

 

[Aaron Smith]

Joey, the "X-form" Elastic Audio algorithm in Pro Tools sounds really impressively flawless even when you're stretching or compressing a piece of audio to twice or half of the original length. With the old fashioned TCE tool you could get nowhere NEAR that much adjusting without the sound just going to utter trash...

 

[Metaltastic]

Its name is Joey...?

 

[Metaltastic]

I have to correct the tuning statement because *real men* hit the string and count the wiggles... really fucking fast

Hahahahahahahhaha, if it weren't so beaten to death, that'd be a great Chuck Norris fact AND Y'ALL JUST GOT JBROLL'ED!

 

[Chryst Krispies]

 

[Executioner213]

I remember seeing in a Pantera home vid (vol 2 I believe) where they were tracking guitars in the studio, and the song was slowed down while Dime was playing the main riff to "Strength Beyond Strength"...how long ago was this? Apparently, it was working for them....

What the fuck is up with all the pesonal morality shit the last few days? "Fuck you if you use triggers". "Fuck you if you slow down to nail it, then speed it up". "Fuck you if your not rehearsed enough". "Fuck you if you play with distortion". "Fuck you if you use compression". If it serves the purpose and the band you record is happy, then piss on all that shit. Like it's been said: if the band pays you to make it sound that good, and they can't perform up to that standard, then it's thier problem - not yours.

Sure, I'm proud of guys like Jeff who are total brainiacs about this shit and have a bit of a reason to be resentful of people who want to be at his level without the hard work...but, it also used to piss me off when I was just getting into *name your guitar technique* and kids who had only been playing for weeks already had it nailed. Some people get to start with flint rocks and twigs, some people get to start with bic lighters...I guess all that matters is the personal accomplishment, in the end. If you are proud of doing something every chum dick can do, then good for you. If you are proud because you can record audio to water like Dethklok, good for you. Otherwise, keep trying and good luck.

 

[broken81]

Joey, the "X-form" Elastic Audio algorithm in Pro Tools sounds really impressively flawless even when you're stretching or compressing a piece of audio to twice or half of the original length. With the old fashioned TCE tool you could get nowhere NEAR that much adjusting without the sound just going to utter trash...

Yep just used this yesterday with a client. It was a very small part, tracked at half speed and doubled it and sounded great with no reamping. Yea Protools!!!

 

[Scissors61]

What's with the whole "everything gets higher when you do this" thing? I've done this a couple of times just using the time-stretch function in cubase, and everything stays at the same pitch...

 

[JBroll]

What's with the whole "everything gets higher when you do this" thing? I've done this a couple of times just using the time-stretch function in cubase, and everything stays at the same pitch...

That was assuming you were slowing the whole thing down without 'stretching' - if you were running things like you had a 45RPM that you were playing at 33, you could play notes lower so that they come in at the right pitch after speeding up, but things like your pick attack, string noise, muted hits, and all sorts of other things would rise in pitch. Haven't done much with time stretch or shrink, sounds like a recipe for disaster for any clip of reasonable length.

Jeff

 

[seditz740novaprospect]

im one of them people that will do anythign it takes to get the results a cliant wants.. the more tricks ya know the better.................

 

[Darkening]

This is why I disagree strongly with almost every comparison Darkening made (and although I agree that calculators are cheating, I have to correct the tuning statement because *real men* hit the string and count the wiggles... really fucking fast)

FACT: Counting wiggles is impossible. Perfect Pitch is not.

FACT: Dragoforce (for example) record for free at home. "Valuable studio time" sounds like a fucking craigslist ad, and this isn't the 80's.

8 gabillion rehearsals? What the fuck? Are we tracking to tape with the whole band live without any punch-ins? Then it's cheating, it's stitched together.

Way to go. You may be able to type yourself into something convincing but you're still wrong at the other end of this interwebz.

Jeff -2

Darkening +666

I guess all those opposed don't appreciate Zappa then. Shame...

 

[cobhc]

Seriously, these arguments over tightening things up in the studio, sample replacement, etc. They're all getting way old, I mean I don't agree with recording stuff and speeding it up, because it's not just a helping hand when something isn't quite right (such as a little quantizing/triggers), people take it overboard and use it to make them sound like they can play 1000BPM when in fact they can't. But let's just leave it, like Executioner213 said if the band want you to edit/quantize everything, and then they can't perform up to that standard live, then it's them who look like a bunch of fools, not you.

 

[JBroll]

FACT: Counting wiggles is impossible. Perfect Pitch is not.

FACT: Dragoforce (for example) record for free at home. "Valuable studio time" sounds like a fucking craigslist ad, and this isn't the 80's.

8 gabillion rehearsals? What the fuck? Are we tracking to tape with the whole band live without any punch-ins? Then it's cheating, it's stitched together.

Way to go. You may be able to type yourself into something convincing but you're still wrong at the other end of this interwebz.

Jeff -2

Darkening +666

I guess all those opposed don't appreciate Zappa then. Shame...

Way to misread what I actually said - I'm not opposed to studio trickery but I cannot see this ending well. Next time you try to pick an argument, try actually arguing points given - instead of having a list of unrelated attempts at sarcasm, making a 'correction' clearly missing one of the OP's own statements, and continuing a faulty train of thought to the clearly silly conclusion that I don't like Frank Zappa. Approaching notable level of fail in 5...4...3...

Jeff

 

[dan weapon]

The way I see it, and this is probably just backing up what other's have said before me;

"cheating" is a grey area... Where is something cheating and something not cheating? Quantising, triggering/drum replacement, TCE, punching in, copying and pasting sections, having more than 1 attempt at recording a riff.... It's a blurry line.


I am all for doing whatever it takes to get the BEST result on a record, because that is what most people are going to be listening to. If it sounds very noticeably triggered or auto-tuned then that obviously isn't the best result (unless you REALLY want it to sound 'fake'...)

If you pretend you can sweep pick like Yngwie by playing the individual notes and then speeding it up 2-4 times then you WILL look like a chump if you try to pull it off live or attempt to play it in front of someone if thay ask.

If you can do a great representation of your recorded work live then I don't give damn what studio trickery is or isn't used.


For the record I try my hardest to 'cheat' as little as possible when tracking guitars; it helps you to be a better player. Ok, sometimes it might take 50 attempts of playing a riff, especially if you're quad-tracking - but I see that as practise.

 

[JBroll]

I think that at the end of the day what's important is to figure out what part of a performance is important and do everything possible to keep everything else from getting in its way. If the songs are the important thing, keep everything that could distract from them away; if the performances are the important thing, don't fuck with them. Sometimes, though, the 'quick fix' is neither quick nor a fix and I suspect that this can turn into one such case very quickly.

Jeff

 

[cobhc]

Yeah, I think tightening stuff up is fine, because most of the time it is just a small fix, and the musicians can nail a 99% accurate version of the cd, in a live situation.

 

[ze kink]

If it's me playing, and especially if it's me recording myself, I cheat as little as possible. That usually means I try to do everything with single takes. It also means I can really get carried away and do huge amounts of takes, sometimes I even go over 300 to get the tightest results possible. But if I have to record others, I imagine I'd do whatever gets the job done. Luckily I haven't had to resort to anything like recording stuff slower, but if I had to, I'm pretty sure I would.

When I recorded my friends' band (one of the first recordings I ever did) there was a song only the drummer could play, but the guitarist just wouldn't do it slower (not even a couple bpm!) and it ended up sounding like mushy shit. In that situation recording it a little slower and then speeding it up to match the drums would've probably been a very good option. I doubt the guitarist would've agreed to do that though, as he was kinda like that. After a few tries, he also butchered all the solos with completely random shred (think Slayer) because he coudn't play what he originally intended, but he wouldn't want to "dumb them down". It was really always either or for him with music, and his visions were pretty fucking weird. The band later started to play punk and got a saxophone player, the guitarist then switched to playing organ, and after that the band started to play children's music! It's a shame the guy was diagnosed with brain tumor soon after that, and he died this summer. And I just noticed I got completely sidetracked, but whatever

I've heard good results with the complete opposite, recording faster and then slowing down. KYPCK's album's drums were recorded like that: http://www.myspace.com/kypck
Kind of makes them really heavy and makes cymbals crash and sustain in slow motion, which I think sounds pretty cool!

 

[-J-]

oh yea, that's right - it was the BEATLES

I thought their producer slightly sped up their recordings after they were done to add a bit of excitement to the song, not because they couldn't play the parts. Not sure though, I never bought that book of their recording techniques.