After a few months of trying to play a professional studio producer alone in my bedroom, I’m starting to wonder if I took the wrong advice from a friend.
That friend told me that they prefer to record a clean guitar into the mix so that they can adjust it as they like later. The idea seemed to make so much sense at the time, and in fact for people who treat music as a profession, it does seem to be the best way to go about things.
I tried recording track by track and I got a very professional sounding demo, but something didn’t sit right. The life seemed to have been drained from the recording. It felt sterile.
I had gone from one extreme to the other. Too raw to too polished.
If you’ve been able to follow me this far, you can probably at least understand why I prefer experimental music to pop music 4 times out of 5. I like naturally occurring magic. I like sounds that come from the heart and most people don’t realize how heady most professionally recorded music is.
It can have some heart in it, but it usually has more head. Some people get good enough at the hard skills that they can make something polished and clean without it having a lot of thinking involved, but thats’s usually after years and years of experience, or it’s a whole production team that covers the artists tracks so everyone thinks they’re perfect.
I decided that I’d try a different approach from before and record everything exactly as I play it live. This seemed a bit underwhelming to me because I was having fun trying to rearrange the songs for a proper release instead of doing it the same as I do it live. Truth be told I love artists who have multiple versions of their songs that sound noticeably different.
But these songs have actually changed a few times and I can just as easily keep making new versions. I could release these versions as a kind of snapshot in time of what the songs sounded like in 2026.
In a way it feels like I’ve defeated the purpose of the live album I just released but I’m free to add layers and more effects anyway and I will. Backup vocals galore, bass and some surprises.
It actually makes recording a whole lot easier. I can use the same settings to record 4-5 of the tracks which are electric guitar based and do them all in one or two sittings.
If things go well iI can fast track these tracks and have 4 songs ready for mixing by the end of the month, moving my whole schedule a month forward. If it goes poorly we are back to square one.
I guess I should enjoy this process. This is exactly what leveling up looks like
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Ok so now it’s the end of the day, I managed to record take 2 of 3 songs. They sound pretty good but there were way more mistakes than I’m happy with. I’ve got to decide to start over or to patch them up.
In any case, this new philosophy of recording live and than editing and adding afterwards makes this whole process a lot easier for me. It’s also great practice!
I said it was take 2 but actually for one song it was take 1 and the demo for this song sounds amazing!!!
