Recording.... ok..now it's time to screw up!

I might just upgrade this weekend. Like I said, this is the third time I went to go use a tool that I didn’t have in Artist.
Thanks Alexis. I appreciate your time and input~!
C

Same feeling here. I really appreciate the input

It’s amazing how like you say you can play something perfectly then you play a bum chord or note when recording.
I find I’m hopeless at playing in time to the metronome so I load a simple drum track without any fills to play to and that works for me. Afterwards I often delete that drum track and use another with fills etc.
I often record several different style bass tracks and choose the one that suits the tempo of the instrumental. It all depends on the day. Sometimes I only need one take when recording a track and other times multiple as I stuff things up. :hugs:

1 Like

LOL well I know that feeling but I think I could get it with a bit more practice. I have in the 90’s did the same thing; replacing the click (I use the woodblock sound) with a drum kit (usually triggering an Alesis DM5) and I have to say it does make a difference.
Yeah I guess everybody is different when it comes to this stuff. I just though by now I would have worked out some of this. It drives me nuts.
Thanks for your input on this. It helps to have what works and doesn’t work for everybody as it helps to maybe try things that haven’t been tried yet. I can get used to playing to a click but this song I’m working on has five or six tempo changes that are necessary. When I’m playing it freely without a click it sounds smooth. With the click on, the transistion in my playing a more pronounced and obvious. This isn’t acceptable. If it doesn’t sound as it does when I’m playing it freely than it’s not good enough. I will make sure this piano lead track is as good as it can be because everything else is going to be based off of it.
Are you playing bass on keys or an electric bass?

Hey Alexis,
I have since purchased Pro 12 and started looking at the time warp feature on a midi track. I can certainly see how powerful this feature is for sure. The one thing I noticed that I have to get a handle on is find the beat to base the tweaking on. Since this is a lead piano track and the song in some cases has a bit of swing/groove I’m struggling visually to see the beat to move the grid too. Most of the sound isn’t that hard to see it but certainly not all of it.
How are you doing this?

I stopped using the built-in metronome years ago. I now have multiple MIDI tracks in my templates in lieu of a traditional metronome. These tracks are all connected to an instance of Groove Agent. The audio output of Groove Agent goes to a cue send. Then I have tracks set up in the upper zone

something like this:
CLICK (MIDI track)
- 2/4 (Folder track)
     Woodblock 1 (MIDI track)
     Beat 1 (MIDI track)
     Beat 2 (MIDI track)
- 3/4 (Folder track)
     Woodblock 1 (MIDI track)
     Woodblock 2 (MIDI track)
     Beat 1 (MIDI track)
     Beat 2 (MIDI track)
- 4/4 (Folder track)
     ...

And so on. The track “CLICK” doesn’t contain any MIDI events. The MIDI tracks in the below folders all have 1 bar long events through out the entire length of the project.
Then I just copy click track events from the “template” tracks (such as “Beat 1”) and put them on the main “CLICK” track. (I have macros with keyboard shortcuts to do this quickly.)
I have set up the keyboard shortcut [C] to enable/disable the cue send so that pressing [C] on the keyboard in effect turns on and off the click track.

The benefit of this is I can have different types of click on different sections and not have click where it is not needed. Recording artists really like this. If the artist requests some custom click, it is very quick and easy to realize, be it a custom sample or custom click pattern.

2 Likes

That’s a really cool setup, and a great idea! Might have to steal it :slight_smile:

Hmm interesting solution. Yeah I’ll have to look into this further for sure.
Thanks man!

Howdy @C.F.Christopher !

Yeah, visually with piano audio it’s hard to see.

What i do is i also record the piano MIDI. Then it is super easy to see!

You don’t have to use the piano MIDI for anything else except creating the Time Warp grid if you don’t want to. I personally also use it to edit/clean up my piano parts themselves: doing things like getting rid of those super short unintended notes, or even wrong notes, where my fingers were misbehaving :smile:; dragging a right hand part up an octave for a second verse for a little change, “because face it, no one who is going to hear it is a music critic, they won’t notice!” Etc.!

Alternatively (i.e., instead of recording piano MIDI and using it as above): As you’re listening, use the Tap Tempo function to create a first draft of the tempo track/grid lines. With that in place, it’s much easier to visually interpret the piano audio waveform in terms of where to put a grid line, and you can adjust the grid lines manually wherever you felt your Tap Tempo tapping didn’t quite cut it.

There is only one caution I can think of now when using the audio MIDI to help create the grid, as i described at the top here: it is way too easy to put a grid line so that it lines up exactly with the beginning of the note/chord, etc. The problem is that it’s very likely you’ve intended your playing to be not slaved exactly to land on the grid, that you’ll have all kinds of “not quite on the beat” notes/chords, that you don’t actually want to land exactly on a grid line. In other words, you may want your note/chord to precede or lag a bit from a drum hit that was exactly on the grid.

How to deal with that i don’t have an easy answer, except to listen to your final version with a drum click that is slaved exactly to the beat, and where the piano sounds “too much on the grid”, make little adjustments to the grid lines to move them off the piano notes.

Sorry so wordy! I’m away from computer now, so can’t look at a project as I’m typing.

Have fun!!

1 Like

When I use the time warp feature to create grid from a freely played piano part, I am also using MIDI. Then I usually find whichever notes are closest to where I want the beat and visually aligning the bars to there, possibly finer than a bar if I’m doing a slowdown or speedup, such as for an ending or transition.

But the key is that, unless I’m intentionally doing something like a solo jazz piano thing (where I want the grid mainly for time-based effects and/or editing convenience), that initial piano part is almost never the one that will end up in the recording. Rather, it’s intended to get the structure and general feel of the song down (I’ll be singing along with it at the time so it will be similar to how I’d play it live, but I don’t record the singing), as well as to get a more accurate stab at tempo to how I’d do it (I frequently find I misjudge if trying to set a constant tempo manually, and, of course, that wouldn’t tell me where I naturally speed it up or slow it down). Then the next part I generally put down, after getting the tempo map and laying out the structure with markers, and tweaking the tempo map to smooth it out, is drums, which are programmed with Superior Drummer 3 loops, initially in their song editor, then dragged to the instrument track and muted in their song editor (so I can tweak them later). After this, I track all other parts to the drums. I often track a new scratch piano part first, to get a better feel with the drums, but still not one that is intended to be final, even if it occasionally is (that actually happened in my current project). The reason is that, if I’m playing without other instruments backing me, as I would do piano/vocal on the live front, I’ll play a lot more notes than would work in the context of my typical production, probably play keyboard bass, etc. So I want enough of the key instruments that will be in the arrangement to be there before I go back to record a keeper piano part that isn’t so tempted to overplay.

As for grids versus note locations, editing mistakes out, and so on, I usually use the drums for (custom) grid, so those won’t be on a rigid grid, and do soft, incremental quantizing where needed. I also tend to track any parts multiple times and comp from there to get the bits that feel best in context, mostly only editing to fix errant notes where the feel is right but a note isn’t.

I don’t worry much about “cheating” by editing, quantizing, and/or “whatever”. I figure I play the same song different every time on the live front, so I’m not looking to capture an exact part, but rather to get the best “reference part and feel” for the version that will be heard over and over – at least if anyone actually listens to my recordings. :rofl: It’s a similar thing to tuning vocals, where someone listening to a live performance only hears things in the moment, with all kinds of other distractions (e.g. visuals, crowd noises, alcohol, etc.), but a recorded vocal gets played over and over, so things that weren’t noticed the first time may be noticed by the 20th time.

1 Like

Ahh. Thank you. Very helpful.
Yes there are several music passages in this one song I’m working on that have a “feeling” where the lead piano isn’t on the beat. It’s actually early. That was the trouble I was having. I would like to feel like I have at least of couple of options for recording when it comes to timing. I can play to a click on many songs but this one is a bit more difficult for me because it has 5 tempo changes and in some places things intenionally don’t fall on the beat. If I can get used to two or even three methods of recording in time I’ll be happy.
My main goal is to not have whatever method I use take the natural feeling of the music out of the song. It drives me nuts and makes me feel bummed out when I listen to the song after recording and hearing this almost forced feeling to keep it to a click. It needs to feel like it does when I play it freely but with a uniformed meter/tempo.

Thanks again for your input. I do appreciate that. How long have you been using Cubase and what are you using for gear when it comes to the majority of your music? Also what type of music do you tend to create?
Chris

One way that i tell myself i can preserve the feel is to not have an exactly flat tempo, even in parts of the song that are “written” to be at a single tempo.

I found a youtube or two that showed how some very successful studio-recorded songs were basically never at a single tempo from bar to bar, and some of them when mapped out had a tempo grid that wandered around like a drunk sailor at 3 AM on a Saturday morning! So i figured i could get by without completely flat tempos from bar to bar, and sometimes i wonder if slight variations actually subliminally improve the listening experience.

The easiest way i use to adjust how flat vs. variable i want the bar-to- bar tempo changes to be is to use that function that effectively lets one “compress” a variable tempo track, with a potential compression target of no change to completely flat, and everything in between.

I think i may have said this before, but i learned through painful experience to immediately store the original tempo track when recording!

IMO, all that is important, but no less so is preserving the natural playing of notes and chords so they are not quite on the grid (even in a project where the tempo track is completely flat). I’ve found it’s sometimes too easy to lose that when using Time Warp, and in those cases creating the tempo track with Tap Tempo can be really helpful.

PS: I don’t know if your questions were addressed to me, but if so: i record piano and voice for songs I’ve written, the only audio being the vocals and the piano. The main vocals are mine, and bringing others in sometimes to sing as well. Revoice Pro is hugely important to me! Other instruments are VST. My physical set up is in my sig, very modest as befits my target audience - friends and family! I’ve used Cubase for maybe a year or two, in the sense that in the 15 years or so that I’ve owned it i will often take months off at a time, or longer - most recently 3+ years!! I started with a version called something like VST 5.2. If i could I’d use Cubase and write/play music 24/7, but life gets in the way …

But I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to be able to do what i can … “making records” is so cool!

1 Like

Hi @rickpaul ,

Can i ask you please, do you ever revise your piano recording by replaying just a part (maybe a few bars, e.g.) somewhere in the middle of the piece?

Or, alternatively, decide you like the piano you’ve recorded, but want to alter the song structure by inserting some bars somewhere in the middle?

I find it hard to get smooth transitions at the beginning and end of the part I’m dropping into the middle of the piano piece, that’s why I’m asking! :grinning:

Thanks!

Hi Alexis,
Yes that question was directed at you. Sorry I didn’t make that clearer.
Thank you.
So you just make your music for you, your friends and family? That’s great. I honestly wish I could have that mind set.
For some reason it has taken on a much much more serious mind set in me. I guess because I’m now old and after all this time and feedback from musicians I respect, I still don’t have much to show for the 30 years I’ve been playing and 24 years I’ve been taking it seriously. A lot has to do with “organic” health issues. I never do anything halfway or hack it. If I can’t do it well and up to my skill standard I would rather not do it at all. I just though my issue would come around and cut me a break so I kept at it. Maybe if I was still in my 30s it wouldn’t feel so critical. I’m not sure.

So what is a “sig”? Do you share you music with any else besides friends and family?
I’m very familiar with long periods of time that you don’t do music. For me it’s not life getting in the way for the most part. It’s more like I’m so upset that I can’t fix my health issues that it derails me.
I’m assuming that your music has piano and vocals for the most part and the rest are virtual instruments provided in Cubase?
What does Revoice Pro do that Cubase can’t do?
Thanks again for sharing.

Hi @C.F.Christopher !

It took me forever to realize that for me to expect to make professional sounding recordings without putting in the “10,000” hours was nothing but being amazingly conceited. It’s a profession and an art … why in the world would I think I could do that well without putting in the hard work for years, just because I badly wanted to?

Once i got there it was extremely liberating. Now I try to make each recording a little better than the last, and I’m good with that! Actually, there’s more, I’ve occasionally hired others to add to my tracks - drums, female vocals, etc (locally, and on line).

Revoice Pro - not cheap, but saves hours and hours of time aligning different vocal takes, creating high quality doubles, and it has a VariAudio type function as well that I think sometimes sounds better. But i use it mainly for its excellent and very mature coding that aligns multiple vocal tracks with almost a single mouse click.

Back to the online session players/vocalists … they are definitely not cheap, but can deliver +++ results. One can spend even more $$ and pay for professional engineering/mastering, with the result that the project sounds just like “a real record”. I haven’t gone that far, and probably won’t ever, given my target audience and the $$$ involved … but I’ve been tempted!!

https://studiopros.com/hire-session-musicians/

1 Like

It is an art and takes lots and lots of practice for sure but in this day and age many THINK they are pros simply because they have a YouTube channel that gullible people support which tends to give this person even more confidence. Not a good combo for sure. Everybody is an expert now. It’s not easy to sort the true pros from somebody with a Youtube channel and a bunch of gear that presents themselves well.

I too was looking into session players for instruments that I would rather have a real player rather than using VST or other emulators.
Check this site out. This is a link to the sax player I want to used but go into the rest of the site and you’ll find a lot of players and engineers among others. MUCH cheaper too then the website you linked me to.
https://www.fiverr.com/fabiansaxy/record-saxophone-for-your-next-project-2-time-grammy-award-winner?context_referrer=subcategory_listing&source=toggle_filters&ref_ctx_id=fd8584bdd7af3d76f8d59b0371b45a6f&pckg_id=1&pos=25&context_type=rating&funnel=fd8584bdd7af3d76f8d59b0371b45a6f&ref=seller_location%3AUS

1 Like

Hi @alexis. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve never replayed just a part of a piano track somewhere in the middle of a piece (my memory’s not good enough to be certain I’ve never done that in the 3-4 decades I’ve been recording with a computer (initially with just a MIDI sequencer and hardware sound modules – before that I was just recording live playing onto tape, with no potential for editing beyond just redoing the whole part), it’s definitely not something I do regularly. If I felt the need to fix something in the middle of a piece, after having already comped a part from multiple takes, I’d probably just do some editing of the MIDI in the key editor, just as I’d do for fixing errant notes or even thinning out parts where I may have overplayed. Because piano is my main instrument, I often do fewer takes of that than other instrumental parts – probably 3-4 if I’m going for a keeper part, whereas with most other instrumental parts I’ll do 6 takes, or maybe more if I’m having trouble figuring out what I want to play.

Rather, my general process is to record multiple takes of the piano part in looped recording, so I’m playing the entire song some number of times in a row, then comp a part from there. With piano parts in particular, I’m probably not playing too terribly differently in each pass, especially if it’s a song I’ve been playing live regularly, though, in the context of a recording with other instrumental tracks and background vocals (as opposed to just my live lead vocal and piano configuration), I may be varying things a bit, maybe experimenting with playing some parts in different octaves than I’d do in a solo piano/vocal performance, or just playing less busy parts. So the bottom line is, even if I’m comping parts from multiple takes, the feel is likely to be pretty similar in each take, so the main challenges will be if I need to tweak some notes at the points of transition, for example if the octaves change or I just need to smooth some other differences out, and I can do that with editing. (Actually, the biggest challenge there tends to be if I’ve used the sustain pedal at different points, where it is before the cut in one take and after in the other, and stuck notes result in the comped version, but that is a super easy thing to remedy in MIDI editing.)

As for the song structure question, most of the time I’ve worked out the song structure before I even start to record, or at least in the earliest phases of recording. That is a big part of the reason I record a scratch piano part without a click early on. In particular, if I were to block out something that has time signature changes, such as a bar of 2/4 at some key point(s) in a song that is mostly 4/4, I might not remember correctly without the context of the playing, and, if I were recording to a click, the emphasized first beat in a click would get off somewhere in the song. (I generally don’t like recording to a click anyway, but dealing with this sort of time signature change with drum loops means having to be certain of where the time signature changes are ahead of time or the drum beat would get off.)

That said, there have been times where I’ve been doing a new version of a song I’ve recorded long ago, where I may be using the MIDI tracks (and maybe even some of the audio tracks) from an older recording, where I’ve also changed how I play a song structurally in the meantime. So I’ll at least need to deal with adding measures in the MIDI, and it depends how much I can actually use of that original MIDI versus how much I am redoing from scratch on whether I’ll handle that by just replaying parts entirely, doing some cutting/copying and pasting, or just replaying specific sections and working those into the existing parts. That last possibility is the one you are asking about, and I think the key is that I’d initially do that on a separate track with the same virtual instrument, getting started recording the part at least a few measures, but probably most of a song section, before the part in question and recording a bit past the part in question, then using MIDI editing to figure out how to extract just what I need to put in the new measures. By playing along with the existing recording prior to the missing part, I get into the feel, so there shouldn’t be abrupt changes in feel in the measures being added.

If it is cutting up an existing recording and rearranging sections, say for some kind of extended remix or “radio edit” of a longer piece, I guess I’d have to be pretty sure the transition points could work and/or do some editing to smooth transition points. My music mostly tends to be in styles with non-quantized feels, though – i.e. the sort of thing live players would do. So I am usually wanting the structure to be worked out before even starting to record the keeper parts.

2 Likes

Thanks, @rickpaul ,

I’ve bookmarked your great, information-dense post! Almost all non-quantized here also.

Regarding the MIDI editing in the MIDI editor - yes all the points you brought up about problems at the points of transition (pedalling, note lengths), and some you didn’t bring up like inserting silence (I think that might be the command) to put a new section in … it can all be done, but I find it frustrating, it’s easy to do a step a little bit wrong, and it’s hard to go back to just before that step.

All this is from (painful!) memory in Cubase 9.5, I haven’t tried it yet in C11 Pro, maybe it’s gotten easier.

Follow up question for you if I may please:

Are you playing to any beat here? My timing varies a lot while playing, and I think the best way for me to match up subsequent takes in looped recording would be to build a simple drum part keyed to the first recording that I can then follow in subsequent ones. But maybe you do something different?

Thanks again!

I don’t generally insert space in the key editor. If I need to insert space, for example a measure or multiple measures, I’ll generally do that in the project window. I can slice up other clips that are already there, then just move the clips that need to move to add space. If I need to line it up other than at measure boundaries (which can be done with the grid to help), I just look at the specific start point of the clip to be moved where it is, then change its start point to be those exact detailed coordinates other than for the measure number portion.

I think I already mentioned the part about playing to drums above, but, just in case not, or to clarify further:

When I do an initial take without a click to get the basic tempo and arrangement down, I’m not playing to anything. I then use the time warp tool to get the grid aligned with my playing, then I smooth out the tempo map (most of the time anyway).

Once I’ve done that I generally program the basic drum parts, typically in Superior Drummer 3’s song editor, to get the feel I want, not just one or two loops to play along with. (However if I don’t do the freeform tracking as the first round, so I’m tracking at a constant tempo, I’ll probably just use one loop for an entire song to play against, but it is still just for a scratch piano part to help in building the arrangement.) The drums I program at this point may end up being the final parts, but most of the time I’ll be tweaking them further later, for example to add cymbal hits and fills, or just tweak the beats to make them more or less busy and deal with any specific needs as the arrangement develops. The key is that the basic drum parts I program here will have the same feel as the final drums, other than for fills and ornaments.

Now, once I’ve got the drums to feel right, I’ll often go back and track a new scratch piano part, typically just playing the song once through – i.e. no comping – but with the key difference that it is played against the drums, so it will have a feel similar to what is needed for the song, rather than something that isn’t played with reference to the drums.

After doing that, I’ll go and track, comp, and edit other parts, such as bass, key guitars, any important lead parts (other than ones the piano will play), etc. These are tracked against the drums, and have the scratch piano part for reference, for example for chord changes and feel. It is unusual for me to have a final piano part while tracking other key parts because my piano part will be too busy – for example, it will probably include left-hand bass like I’d play live, and it may cover up ranges where the guitars would be playing, etc.

Now, once I’ve got enough of the basics down for other instruments, I’ll go back and track piano again, with all the tracks built to this point (including drums, of course), as references to play against. This helps prevent me from overplaying. And I usually track the entire song, using looped recording, 3-6 times in a row – however many takes I need until I feel I’ve got the entire song down without major screwups in any of the sections. After that I’ll comp the piano part from the takes. I start by slicing things up into song sections, but often I may end up slicing things up finer in some parts of the song, especially where transitions are involved. I typically comp from the end of the song forward so I can listen to the transitions in context when choosing parts. (I comp this way with pretty much all non-trivial parts for the same reason.) I will do some editing in the process of comping, mainly in cases where I like one part better for feel but there may be some off notes. I’ll also often do some degree of iterative/soft quantizing (to the groove I’ve extracted from the drums, not to a grid) during the comping process if needed. But, once I’ve got the comping done, I’ll go through the entire part more finely to catch bad notes, issues at the clip seams, etc.

With regards to going back after changes, the edit history can be very helpful if needing to go back to a certain step. However, I also save frequently and backup the CPR files to new names at key points so that, if need be, I can always import tracks from earlier iterations of the project if I’ve really messed something up and not noticed it until it was too late. This hasn’t been much of a factor for piano and other instrumental parts, but it has been a big help in cases where I’ve made bad comping decisions on vocals or accidentally deleted something at a forest level while working on trees and not noticed it until much later. :slight_smile:

I’m using Cubase Pro 12 at this point. I started with 9.5 after years of using Cakewalk/SONAR, and finally got to using Cubase as my main DAW for new projects at 10.5, then was using it even for most remixes by 11. 12 has made some nice enhancements (the multi-track freeze/unfreeze can be a really big efficiency boost for thick background vocals, for example).

3 Likes

Hmmm sadly I’m actually talking about piano midi not audio. I think things will “click” in my head with this soon…I hope so anyway.

I’m so discouraged that I haven’t worked at all on this in the last two weeks. Partly because I had so many anomalies with Cubase that I decided to wipe the drive clean and start over. Fresh OS install and all the software. This has fixed some issue that I was having with Cubase. I’ll get back to trying to get a decent recording of the lead piano track in the next three days or so. I find myself almost avoiding working in Cubase right now. I need something to go right!!
Thanks Alexis
Chris

1 Like