Harvey Reid has played and taught guitar for 30 years, was a former national
Fingerpicking Guitar Champion, and has released 17 highly-acclaimed solo recordings
of original, traditional, and contemporary acoustic music. In 1980 he wrote
the first college textbook for folk guitar. He now lives in Southern Maine.
"I have now made 17 recordings, and all of them have made money except one, and I am still at it after almost 21 years, so I guess that sort of qualifies me to expound on this subject. I am assuming that any one who is already making successful recordings would not be reading this, so it is targeted more at the beginner. I just listened to a Sam Kinison record, and his voice is shouting in my ears, so if this sounds slightly harsh, I apologize. It is meant to help, and the truth is that you will have to make most of the tough decisions, and your friends and family will not know how to help you other than emotionally. (HARVEY REID 2003)
First and foremost, if you want to "do something with your
music," the first and best thing you can do for your career
is to make a good recording. There are many definitions of what
a good one is, but if you make one, it will help you more than
anything else you can do for yourself. If you make a bad one,
it does not necessarily sink your ship, and the list of people
who have recovered from a lousy first recording and gone on to
do great things is a long one. But when you are an emerging artist
trying to make a mark in the world, it does you no good to spend
your precious time, money and wear and tear on your friends to
make an unsuccessful recording. This is all sort of obvious, but
worth saying. Having a good promo package helps, and being young
and attractive helps, and being a great talent helps, but none
of them helps that much if you make a bad record, and none of
them helps as much as making a good one. Anybody can make a bad
record, even if they are good artists. It's a lot like getting
your picture taken-- a bad picture might just be a bad picture.
It takes sometimes rolls of pictures to get an expression on your
face to last for 1/32 of a second, and it is hard to play a 4
minute song into a tape machine perfectly. I have done as many
as 43 takes of a song. Elvis did too. Go listen to all the takes
he did. It's just like a long, drawn-out photo shoot.
You only have to figure out what you are, what you are best at,
and figure out how to capture that on tape. (We will call it "tape"
even though you might be recording to computer.) If you can capture
your best work, you have made it. Deciding what is your best work
is hard, though, as is the act of capturing it. It is my strong
belief that you must do everything in your power to not get caught
up in the recording fantasy process or to compare concepts of
a recording with those of big stars. If you are an "unknown
artist" then your recording will do two things for you primarily:
1) you will send it to radio and gig people who will decide whether
or not to play it or to book you 2) you will sell it to people
who heard you perform live. In both these cases, it does you no
good whatsover to have a recording that does not sound as close
as possible to what you sound like on stage. It sounds harsh,
but nobody wants to hear your friends play bass. Unless you are
making a firm commitment to performing with a bass player, there
is no need to have one on your CD. "Commercial airplay"
is unthinkable for an unknown artist with a self-produced recording
in today's syndicated, corporate conglomerate world. Save your
time and money. You will almost certainly not get on commercial
playlists, and you will only risk looking bad because your drum
sound is feeble compared to Garth Brook's production, and you
simply will not be able to get a "sound" on your recording
like they get in the big-time studios unless you work with a big-time
producer. There is a whole world of technical things like reverb
and compression and how to get a drum sound, and the chances of
you and your small-town studio-owner/wannabee record producer
really making something that sounds big-time are extremely small.
However, if you have been performing for your friends, and something
is happening when you do, and you are pulling them in with your
music, then all you have to do is capture that magical thing that
happens when the music is right. That's all you are really qualified
to do, and that's all you should do.
Focus on you. Get a reverb unit-- something like a Lexicon Alex--
that has a decent sound and a Mackie cheap mixer and any kind
of a mike (preferably two mikes) , and make some cassette recordings
of yourself. If you play gigs, tape all your gigs for 6 months,
and listen to the tapes carefully. You need some reverb to listen
to vocals on tape, and it takes a strong stomach to listen to
yourself on tape for days on end, but that's what you do when
you are paying $100 an hour, and you might as well get used to
it for free. It is quite possible that you will make a better
recording of yourself in your apartment with a stage mike and
a cassette deck than you would in the world's best studio. The
sound quality will not be better, but sound quality does not matter
that much. What matters is capturing something exciting-- when
you are soaring and playing well. When you are paying $100 an
hour and looking down the barrel of a microphone (yes, they look
like guns till you get used to them) wondering how you are going
to pay for all this, you will probably not deliver a relaxed and
confident performance. But that is what you have to do, and if
you can do it in your living room, here is a chance you can do
it again, and it will help you vastly to have a reference tape
of what you should sound like.
And then, especially if you are in multi-track mode, you will
make the classic error. If you do your solo track first, and it
is not that great, then you or your engineer (you will be lucky
to have a real producer) will say "That doesn't grab me,
it needs something." Then you will spend hundreds of dollars
adding bass and lead guitar and harmony vocals to something that
was not that great to start with. Covering yourself up is the
last thing you need to do with a first recording. You are trying
to show yourself. Play the song better. Re-arrange it. Do a different
song. Find a way to make it work, or you should not be recording.
Which is why you should find a way to make it work at home first.
If you can make a cassette of one of your songs, by playing and
singing right into a tape recorder, that sounds pretty good to
most people, then you have something. And the situation gets bad
when you realize you just spent $500 working on producing a song,
and it still doesn't quite work, but your financial investment
is so great that you have to keep it and move on. You can do a
similar thing laying down a click track and putting all the stuff
on before you do your part-- you have already spent so much money
you feel like you have to go through with it. Recording engineers
and the small-town studio guy always encourage you to overdub
and add more stuff, and you should not listen to them. Somebody
who hears you at an open mike and buys your CD will not want the
drums anyway. They already liked what they heard-- that's why
they bought your CD. They don't need or want it to be different.
And if the promoter hears your CD and books you and then you show
up to play and sound different-- that does not help much either.
Forget about the Beatles, and all the stuff you have seen and
read about how they make commercial records. Think about how they
made records for the first 50 years-- they stuck a mike in front
of the artist and pushed "Record." You have to find
a way to capture something real and something exciting, with a
minimum of production and things between you the artist and the
listener. I make a point to only record with people I already
peform with-- I don't like the idea of using a "hired gun"
on a recording, even though it is done all the time. I recommend
that if you are going to use other musicians, only record "live"
with them, and do as little overdubbing as possible. It never
has the same urgency. I don't even think people should play music
together when they are in different rooms. I cannot sing with
someone unless they are at about arm's length from me, and that
is how I record it, and I will never use baffles and separation.
It's going to be a single sound when it is done, so let it be
single sound from the start.
I have never known the title of an album before it was started.
I have never been sure of what songs were going to go on the recording.
I have always had songs that I intended to record that didn't
make the cut. I have always found or written things at the last
minute that turned out to be hilights of the recordings. Be prepared
to give up on anything, and be prepared to be open to a last-minute
idea or song. Recordings are a good motivation to finally learn
or even write a song, and to finally work out the way you play
it or sing it. Since I record at home, I often record the song
over and over, and listen back as I am working it out. It is very
hard to tell how it sounds until you hear it. It is incredibly
common to be wrong about how you think you did. Never stop in
the middle of a take, or slam the guitar down before the final
fade is done. Wait until the fade is done, then swear and say
it sucked. You will be surprised how often you find out it was
your best take. Just because it felt great does not mean it was
a great take. You might have to do it again. There are a lot of
false positives and false negatives in the recording process.
If you get frustrated, stop. I only do another take if I am enjoying
it, and if I am sure I can do a better one. As long as they keep
getting better I keep recording. When they start falling apart
and getting worse, stop or switch to a different song. One of
the most enduring things I have ever recorded was something I
had no intention of recording, and I was just trying to settle
down agfter a frustrating hour trying to record something else,
and I wanted to sing this new song I had just learned, to make
myself feel better. Luckily I told the engineer to roll it, and
13 years later people tell me how it is their favorite thing I
have ever done. This sort of thing happens sometimes. Don't show
up without a plan, but don't be afraid to scrap the plan and lunge
for something that moves you at the moment. Don't think you have
to go do a killer first take. (They do exist, but not that often.)
You might have the mike position wrong anyway, so do a few tentative,
non-killer takes first, and make sure you are happy with the sound
before you let loose. Changing the mike position a few inches
can make a huge difference, and if you don't get involved in making
those decisions, they can be easily made in a way you will wish
you could change later.
It costs a lot to record your music, but it costs as much to listen
back to it at $50 an hour. You could do another take in the same
time it took you to listen back to the one you just did. You could
re-record the song 5 times in the time it takes you to identify
where you need to fix something, rehearse the punch, do a bunch
of takes, listen back to them and talk about it. You are almost
always better off doing the whole song again. Consider making
a DAT or cassette tape (or MP3) of the whole session and just
letting it roll, and then go and listen back to everything 2 days
later. I never schedule more than 3-4 hours at a time in the studio,
and always leave 3-4 days between sessions to listen back, evaluate
how I did, and plan for the next one. Forget that rock & roll
movie hype about working around the clock for a week and grinding
out a masterpiece. It has been done, but it is not likely, and
the story is more romance than truth. Take a few weeks and you'll
avoid more mistakes. Your ears get tired after 3-4 hours anyway,
and it is really easy to make bad mistakes and not notice them
during a 12-hour marathon session.
Remember that if you ever are dead sure that you nailed a song,
and listen back to it with a profound sense of YES, then you probably
did, no matter what you might think a week later. There is always
a devilish sort of rotation, and if you listen to a recording
you made, certain songs will make you cringe and others will make
you happy, and They Will Not Always Be the Same Songs. The same
listener listening to the same recording will change their mind
a lot about what is good. This is important to understand. If
you send a 5-song demo to your 5 best friends and family, and
ask them to rate the songs, they will disagree, and you will disagree
with them. They will not even be able to agree on what is the
best song, or what is the one that should be left off if they
had to delete one. Recording an album is hard, but listening back
and evaluating it all and deciding when it is good enough and
when it is not, and what songs should be on it-- that is Really
Hard.
Remember that you will always grow tired of a recording of yourself,
and if you drag the recording process on too long, you will keep
thinking you have to re-record things just because they have sat
too long. Remember that no matter what you do, your recording
will fit what they called in statistics a "bell curve."
There will always be some of it that is really special, and there
will always be some of it -- usually an equivalent amount-- that
is the worst, and there will always be the majority in the middle
that is just fine. You cannot escape this. If you try too hard
to squash out the mistakes, you will squash out the excitement
also. The most exciting performances almost always seem to have
the most mistakes, and you have to decide what a mistake is. It's
a mistake to squash out the life in the music by trying to get
rid of the mistakes."
© by HARVEY REID 2001
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