Live Tracking Tips

Hello all. I've had many bands ask me in the past if it' s best to track live or lay the song down instrument by instrument. The honest answer is: there is no right way to do it. But there are things to keep in mind...

What to Track, and what not to track...
When tracking live it is usually best to stick to doing the basic tracks and maybe some scratch vocals if they're needed to keep the band on the same page. In a typical set up this means drums, bass, guitar, and maybe keyboards. Actual vocals, backing vocals, guitar leads, other keyboards parts, and percussion need to be saved for over dubbing...which can be difficult and messy depending on some of the following factors.

The most important thing...
Be Tight! You need to be well rehearsed otherwise live tracking will be a disaster. If there is guitar, bass and drums all recorded together and off from one another, there is absolutely nothing the engineer can do to make it better. Translation: You're S.O.L.

More about the click track...
This comes up even often in live tracking situations. If you are an extremely well rehearsed band sometimes tracking to a click can take away from the "feel" of the song, and when tracking live that's something you're definitely trying to capture. The problem you can run into is that if you track live with no click, then you have potentially tied the hands of the engineer and hurt your wallet. Because you didn't use a click, you're music isn't "on the grid", meaning locked into a specific tempo and grid lines inside your tracking software. Now when it comes to doing overdubs and editing, it becomes either impossible or an extremely time intensive task (which easily equals more money out of your pocket). For example, lets say the entire band played the second verse one progression too short or with an incorrect chord change. If you successfully tracked to a click and were around being on the grid, it could be fairly easy to simply pull a progression from the first verse and edit that into the second verse where the mistake was made. If, however, no click was used, then you likely wouldn't be able to do so because the tempo probably varied slightly from the first verse and any such edit would sound very unnatural. In worst case scenarios, you have to re-track the entire tune, which takes more time and costs you more money.

See my previous blog regarding the importance of a click track for some background.

The round up...
The main thing to take away from all this is taht live tracking isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It completely depends on the sound you're going for, but you had better be prepared. Be extremely well rehearsed and make sure you have all your parts down. This process will test your salt as a band more than tracking instrument by instrument, and nothing is worse than having that come as a surprise while paying for studio time.