What to do with a depressingly sloppy guitarplayer

[JoeJackson]

Hey guys ...

I consider myself a pretty tight guitar-player when it comes to playing with a band, but when it comes to surgical tightness for recording - I just suck.

So, what do you do with sloppier guitar-players - especially on fast palm-muting-parts, that have to be sitting 100%.

I'm not talking about inhumanly tight 6-tracks-per-side-tech-metal-stuff - I'm just talking about your normal day-to-day metal

What tipps can you share while tracking, in the editing-stage etc.

I'm on Logic and already tried Flex-time, which IMHO gives recordings a sterile feeling pretty fast.

Cheers,
joe

 

[colton]

practice more.

 

[JoeJackson]

Shit ... I should have seen that coming.
I really DO practice. It's slightly sloppy hits and slight off-times, thats bugging me.

But this thread should not be anything about ME being sloppy. I asked about tipps for recording any sloppy player - I just used me as a reference

 

[NSGUITAR]

Copy+Paste.

 

[Emdprodukt]

Depends. Sometimes I record leads slower if the player can't do it. Slipediting can be helpful for some stuff. Record OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. Copy+Paste is only a solution for me if the band is running out of money. In the end I always make those suckers feel as bad as I can. Just for the heck of it. They usually feel really bad when you solo them though.

 

[Forceps]

What I do sometimes is let the client play a certain riff over and over again and record everything. In the end I select the best take, and most of the times they did nail it.

 

[AdamWathan]

Record it in sections as small as you need to for those sections to be 100% perfect. If that means 2 notes at a time, so be it! Just build the riff as you go, sliding each new section into the right place. Sounds much better to do it this way than to play it slightly sloppy and edit.

This is what an average guitar tracking session looks like here:

Those cuts aren't me cutting one performance and editing it around, literally every single chunk there is recorded as a separate take.

If they suck really badly, honestly I'll just turn off the click, solo the guitar and say "Play a chug... another one... try again..." until we get a really good sounding chug, then I'll crop that one and go paste it at the end of the riff, building it as I go.

 

[JoeJackson]

Whew! Yeah, well ... it's kinda obvious doing it that way, right?
So be it - let the chunk-recording begin

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Levels of suckiness and the appropriate reaction:

1) Pretty sucky: Lots and lots of takes and small sections at a time.
2) Oh my, that IS quite sucky: Same as level 1, but add in some furious copy/paste.
3) We might be fucked -sucky: Same as level 2, but add in ridiculous amounts of Elastic Audio.
4) Please excuse me while I stab myself in the eye with a fork -sucky: Tell the guitarist it just simply won't work and/or get someone else to track his parts.

 

[chrism3006]

This is always happens, normally after a band insist on both guitarists tracking despite me telling them it will sound better if only one guitarist tracks!

I just record in really small sections and edit the fuck out of it. Its slow and tedious but sometimes its gotta be done if you want it sounding tight.

 

[Keregioz]

Always record the direct signal from the guitar and then reamp it or use an ampsim. DIs are MUCH easier to edit, you can turn some terribly sloppy performances to something more bearable.

 

[pikachu69]

If you have to record one note at a time what right does the guitar player even have being in a studio let alone calling himself a guitar player?

Don't we just enable sloppy players by agreeing to fix it like this? this is by far the biggest negative of the computer studio. What happened to musicians being able to play their instruments and coming into the studio prepared?

If I have not already heard a band live I will ask to hear a demo or call into a band rehearsal sometime. This is mainly to make sure I want to work with the band, not because of style music but to see if they are worth recording. Most bands that can't play also want it done for next to nothing so most of that editing will be done in spare time so really, whats the point of killing all the fun and creativity? We are supposed to enjoy our work.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers.

 

[Fox Mulder]

No matter how hard we practice to a metronome everyday, we sometimes forget to 'loosen up'. If the part you're playing takes some effort, you're not practicing enough. So yes, practice till the point of loosening up. Relax your shoulders and arms. In other words, consume less calories while playing the guitar. It aint gym, it's music

 

[barricade]

I usually play it myself and tell the guitar player to show me the riff coz othwise he will end up having a lame recording... If you can't play guitar that good than get someone that can... it's that simple ...if he won't let you then just send him home to practice the parts.

 

[ahjteam]

If you have to record one note at a time what right does the guitar player even have being in a studio let alone calling himself a guitar player?

+1

I don't doubt that Adams way of working wouldn't give good end results, but IF I have a choice (and usually I do), I wouldn't do that. It only means it's more work for me, less work for them. Because 90% of the records don't get recognized anyway, so I would just rather make a record that sounds more like the band. More fun and less work for both parties.

And it would be a super humiliating experience to the player. Javi Pereras clips are a good example how programming can pretty much already replace a bad band. But then there is the singers... :Spin:

 

[006]

There's a difference between the moral issue of punching in the parts and what it takes to get a professional end result that sounds solid - I'd rather have a good sounding end result personally, I won't lose any sleep over it. Adam already mentioned something I have noticed too about editing bad takes - the notes may be there on time but the performance will still sound sloppy.

 

[amarshism]

Open session at 48k.
Change clock to 44.1
???
Profit

 

[mburton21]

I used to be a pretty sloppy player; however I got into recording

Hearing of the recording techniques used before all ITB recording really made me think about my playing: Am I really deserving to enter a studio if I can hardly record my own material?

It did take some amount of work but I went from having to do 20 second-ish takes (proud to say that i was never one of those two-note guys haha) to one-taking rhythm tracks. I have a pile of broken keyboards that resulted from venting my frustration when I had those 900 million bad takes in a row; however I found out how to save money on keyboards AND improve.

What really worked for me has already been said: Loosen up! I have found that if I am really tense and concentrating really hard on that one tough spot then I need to practice it a bit more, come back, and relax a little. If I'm relaxed its a breeze and I enjoy myself.

 

[AdamWathan]

Yeah as much as I advocate this recording method, I am also very pro "don't suck". But people suck. I was privileged my whole life playing with great musicians, I always assumed that's how everyone was but I was very wrong, hehe...

I don't think anyone should claim they can "play" a song until they can play it from start to finish without making a single mistake every single time. But stupid kids these days are trying to learn Necrophagist songs as soon as they pick up the guitar and never develop any sort of base level of solid technique.

 

[Harry Hughes]

Yeah as much as I advocate this recording method, I am also very pro "don't suck". But people suck. I was privileged my whole life playing with great musicians, I always assumed that's how everyone was but I was very wrong, hehe...

I don't think anyone should claim they can "play" a song until they can play it from start to finish without making a single mistake every single time. But stupid kids these days are trying to learn Necrophagist songs as soon as they pick up the guitar and never develop any sort of base level of solid technique.

Indeed.
Kids these days wanna play Between the Buried and Me, Dream Theater, The Faceless, Periphery and Necrophagist straight off the bat.
Yes, they learn the sweep picking to a degree (without a metronome), but put on a metronome and get them to play Paranoid by Black Sabbath or even some pop punk riffs, and they can't fucking play it in time, they can't pick hard enough, and can't mute stuff properly and the list goes on.
Unfortunately, it's just the way people are brought up really. Kids are all told they are special, never get constructive criticism and are all told they can be what they want.
As such, in their minds of many young guitar players, they are so special, that they don't need to start from the beginning and put in the hours to be able to play well and when they're told they can't play for shit, they just can't hear it in their own playing and are simply too egotistical and narcissistic to take criticisms and to take the time to improve.

All the best players are pretty much always the most humble, because they always know there's room for improvement, and unfortunately that's a rare breed these days.