How Multitrack Recording Works
Some of your are old hands at recording, but we've run into some excellent musicians that have mostly played live or haven't recorded their first album yet. This introduction section is for those of you who haven't experienced the power trip that goes along with multitrack recording. We're going to start with the basics and then get a more advanced later. So those of you who are more experienced can skip ahead.
First of all, a lot of folks are used to the idea of the entire band getting into a room and recording an album as if it were a live performance that you have to get perfectly right. Those days are long gone. Excepting live albums, jazz, and some classical recordings, most music is recorded by pulling each musician into the studio separately to record their parts, letting the multitrack recorder record each of these parts on separate parallel tracks. This makes scheduling much easier, for one thing, and it also means that you can focus on each musician and get the best performance out of each one. You can "do it again until you get it right." You can also experiment with different effects, perform it in different ways, or you can add more parts later if you get a new idea. Very often you'll bring in a single musician to do all of their parts on all of the songs of an album. For example, the bass player will take care of his parts on all songs on a single day. Now that a lot of music is recorded digitally, some albums are recorded with the musicians in different cities. The tracks are transferred over the Internet, or on shipped CDs, and the recording is done at a different studios.
Even better, multitrack recorders allow you to punch-in different parts in order to correct mistakes, or to add more parts. For example, if you record a phrase of music and find that the first part sounds good but the second doesn't sound right, you can punch-in the record button on that track at the moment that you made the error and fix the mistake. This is most easily done in natural breaks in the music or where you take a breath in a singing part. Most of the recorded music that you hear is actually a patchwork of different punches, often done on different days. Sometimes, on instrumental parts, they are even done by different people.
If this sounds like cheating, remember that the goal of recorded music is the final recording. When you hear an album, no one knows how it was put together. And while often we feel good when we're in the flow of playing music live, when you put a microscope on your music, suddenly you start to care a lot about tiny discrepancies in your timing or perhaps the one note out of a phrase that is slightly out of tune. When you have the tools to fix these issues and your goal is to have the highest quality recording possible, you will probably be more inclined to use the tools. Besides, punching-in a part to fix problems is a misdemeanor compared to the capabilities of computer-based recorders. The felonies happen when you use the digital recorders to modify parts from a singer who can't sing in tune into perfect pitch. And in most of the commercial music you hear, they sang that great chorus just once and got it just right, then they cut-and-pasted the chorus a few times in between the verses. And if there were timing issues, you can add a bit of padding in between parts to tweak it into the groove. Once music became digital, tools created for music do what a word processor did for writing.
If you consider this to be a bad thing, keep in mind that recording software also allows you to use a number of techniques that were either extremely expensive or impossible. There are an incredible amount of plug-ins for this software that can expand your sound and give you new capabilities. If you are at all interested in doing the recording yourself rather than paying a studio to do it, there is an exciting world waiting for you. Read on for some ideas.