Behind the Scenes: #15 The Instrumental Edits
A Peek Behind the Curtain: A Solopreneur Produces an Album Recording
Now that we'd finished the first recording session, and the instrumental tracks were done, I needed to use them to create a backdrop for the vocals I would re-record. That meant that I had to edit the instrumental tracks.
This is the part of recording that I truly despise: editing. Editing a recording means listening over and over the individual tracks of a song to glean the best bits of each of them to knit into a final track. Going through the entire song, you must notate which part of which track you want to use, notating the minutes and seconds of the tracks so that the recording engineer can understand exactly what you want. For example, 00:21‑01:02 means going from the starting point of twenty-one seconds into a specific track through one minute two seconds in that track. The final editing result goes something like this: track 1, 0:00‑0:12; track 3, 0:13‑0:16; track 2, 0:17‑0:22; track 4, 0:23‑0:28; and so on, for the full three or four minutes of the song.
It’s a tedious, time-consuming process.
In this case, I was fortunate that I had only one instrumental track for each take, meaning piano and bass were already together. They were recorded in the same room, but with the bass isolated, so although I could have asked for the bass track separately at some specific point if need be, that fortunately was not necessary. Still, it was a monumental task.
I had to listen to three or four tracks each for a three-minute song and a five-minute song, comparing each track to the others and making decisions on which portions of which tracks I wanted to use. Eventually, after four or five hour-long stints over several days, I came to my final choices and sent the result to the recording engineer.
He sent me a first edit for review, and once I signed off on it, he sent me a final instrumental track to practice to in preparation for the vocal overdubs I would do later.
My next task was to get myself comfortable with singing to the instrumental track.
Singing to a track, rather than with live musicians, is not comfortable for me. I’m used to a pianist following me when I perform; when singing to a track, I have to match my singing to what someone else has already played, which is the exact opposite. That requires that I know the instrumental track well enough that I can hear it in my head and not have to focus too intently on listening to it in real time while I’m singing, since that would pull me away from my interpretation of the song.
Once I felt (sort of) comfortable with performing to the instrumental track, I set up a session for re-doing my vocals in the studio.
Up next: Vocal Overdubs!
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