Workflow when recording?

[grolschie]

Hi there,

Any practical tips for a good workflow for recording songs on a BR please?

I am thinking to record a click track, belt out a rough chord progression on another, and then go about recording individual parts etc, before deleting click track and rough chords track. Is this a good place to start? Drums may be recorded at some stage.

Also, how does one get on with recording songs that change tempo?

Thanks in advance.
grol

[Greeny (No longer active)]

Hi there,

Any practical tips for a good workflow for recording songs on a BR please?

This is how I do it, so it may or may not work for you!

Step 1 - work out the tempo and choose a guide rhythm to play along with. I leave a metronome measure at step 1 as a 'count in'.

Step 2 - Choose your guitar effect and record rhythm guitar parts to tracks 1 and/or 2

Step 3 - Choose your guitar effect and record lead guitar / bass etc to Track 4

Step 4 - Choose your MIC effect and record Vocals to track 3

Step 5 - listen back to the recording and adjust panning, track volumes, reverb etc.

Step 6 - edit the rhythm steps with all the changes / fills etc you want

Step 7 - Master to mp3!

Pretty simple, huh?! There are plenty of other ways to do it, but I find this method fairly easy and foolproof.

As for changing tempo, I don't think that's really an option on the BR. Your best bet (probably) would be to splice two different song sections together in audacity or similar. Somone else may have a better idea though!

[grolschie]

Many thanks Greeny! :-)

[AndyR]

Yep, that's roughly how I do it as well. 

In case it's not obvious to you yet, grolshie - you don't need to put the drums on to an audio track unless you really want to for some crazy reason (eg you want to start hacking it about as audio or start combining two sets of drums - hey wow, I just realised you could do this!!  - Allman Brothers here we come  ).

Also, Greeny, I'm under the impression, at the moment, that you can change tempo during a song - although I've not tried it yet. It looks to me like every step in a drum arrangement can have its own tempo?? (Stuck at work at the moment, so I can't check it out)

Someone might be able to confirm this or not...

[Greeny (No longer active)]

Also, Greeny, I'm under the impression, at the moment, that you can change tempo during a song - although I've not tried it yet. It looks to me like every step in a drum arrangement can have its own tempo??

You're right... and now I think about it, you CAN alter the tempo for each step. I guess you'd have to set up the drum pattern first though, so that you'd have a click track ready (at the right speed) ready to play along with when the change comes. Yes... can see how that would work now!

[jkevinwolfe]

I lay down 2 bars of metronone, 2 bars of intro (if needed) and then let the V1 track play out. Then I record a scrub vocal and instrument on a track as reference. Then I build the rhythm arrangement before adding the "real" voice and instrument parts.

For me having a final drum arrangement early in the process helps give my vocals and instrumental performance more nuance.

[Geir]

Greeny's recipe is pretty much the same as mine, but sometimes I record both vox and guitar on the first take (if acoustic) to get the structure right at once. That's a take I may or may not use in the final mix depending on the quality.

Also if you plan on using more than 4 tracks the same recipe applies, but consider what you need to listen to when recording the next V-tracks and in what order you want to bounce later, when choosing where to record the different instruments/vox.

[Davo]

I record bass after vox and guitar, because I have some difficulty hearing bassline.

[grolschie]

Thanks everyone!

[Geir]

You're welcome!!

I mean welcome grol !! to the forum !!

Hope that workflow will work alright and that we will hear a song of yours soon !!