Is There A Right Way to Record?

Tomorrow I’ll be going on the road in the Pacific Northwest for about ten days. I won’t have much access to computers or the time to write in the blog as much as I want, so I am committing to doing a minimum of two posts next week, more if I can swing it.

I got an email from my friend Paul Adams, (www.pauladams.org) and he asked about whether I record my vocals live with the guitar, like I would perform on stage, or record them one at a time. I realized that I have done them both ways all of my recording career.  And that many people may wonder what is the best or "right" way to record.

When I was on Wooden Nickel/RCA in the mid seventies, I recorded rough vocals and guitar with the band as we were laying down the tracks. Then after the basic tracks were layed down, I did all my vocals in one evening. We didn’t have the budget for more time. I mean we only took an hour for each basic track, so they felt it shouldn’t take that long to sing it. Wow.

That was quite a scene at the time. We scheduled three songs per three hour session for basics, so I would show the musicians the song and they would read along on the simple chord and arrangement chart I had written out. Very few actual parts, mostly chords, tacit, repeat, and fade or a written ending.

After all the tracks were layed down, I would redo my guitar so that the engineer could get “proper isolation” (meaning that the guitar was on a track all by itself with no other sounds leaking in, as it would if the band were playing in the same room). That way, any effect or eq could be applied to the guitar without it affecting the sound of any other instrument. If it weren’t isolated then whatever eq or effect applied would also be applied to whatever sound leaked into the guitar track. Then the one night for the vocals I mentioned earlier, but to return to the isolation issue.

I am of two minds about this. While I think that it is wonderful to have that kind of engineering control, I believe that music has to feel good, and if it feels good then your ear and your heart tend to forgive anything else that might not be the way you, the artist, thought it should be. In the end, we don’t listen to anything isolated. It all comes together as a sonic mélange. Does the whole thing work? If so, you did it right.

I have engineered all of my recordings since the LIVE at McCABES release in 1985, so I know that I like isolation, if we can pull it off without effecting the connection between the players.

For my Freelance Human Being CD, which FI Magazine hailed as a masterpiece and one of the Top 200 CD’s of All Time (see http://www.jamesleestanley.com/reviews.html ), I sat in the studio with the guitar and a vocal mic and played each song for as many hours as it took for me to get it where I thought it should be. There were no overdubs, no punch ins, layering of tracks. Just me and a guitar live. That is one approach and it does produce a different kind of recording. It is also my biggest selling CD to date.

For Traces of the Old Road (http://www.jamesleestanley.com/store.html#totr ), I layed down rough vocals and guitars and then went back in and redid the guitars just the way I wanted them, then re did the vocals the same way. Then I burned a cd of the songs and listened for a few days. I tried a bass player who did very well, but he wasn’t as cognizant of my guitar as I wanted. and I didn’t have the money or the time to have him learn my guitar parts, so I just played all the bass myself.

…and the keyboards, …and the percussion …and pretty soon, I played every note on that CD, so I went with that as part of the concept and the over all sound. A completely layered recording.

I find that I like them both and for different reasons.

For my latest CD, The Eternal Contradiction (www.jamesleestanley.com/eternalcontra.html ), I did something that I’ve never done before. I first layed down the best voice and guitar live tracks that I could and listened to them for a few days. Fixed some of them and left others as they were. Then I gave the whole project to a world class percussionist, Scott Breadman, who has played with Lindsay Buckingham, The Rippingtons, and a host of others and has done the percussion for many of my CD’s, most notably, All Wood and Stones (www.allwoodandstones.com). I told him that I didn’t want to be there, as I would surely impose my view of percussion on him and he didn’t need me making his vision smaller by accommodating me. I just told him to make the tracks sizzle. And then I waited. A few weeks later, he sent me all the tracks back with amazing percussion that I would never have thought of. I just layed them in there and away I went to the bass player, Ken Lyon (The Lemonheads, The Divinyls. Mark Curry). We sat together for one whole day as he just layed down great bass. I made as few suggestions as possible, just making him aware of particular guitar things that I wanted supported or left on their own.

This might be my favorite recording so far, but the point is I’ve done it differently every single time. My Simpatico CD (http://www.jamesleestanley.com/store.html#simpatico ) is almost exclusively synthesizers and vocals, with very little guitar or live percussion. Follow your muse, do whatever you want, experiment and make it happen the way you want it to sound. If you don’t have the money to experiment in the studio, then do it at home, before you are on the clock. But there is no wrong way.