DAW Guitar Tracking
DAW Guitar Tracking
When recording today’s many times sub par
bands, timing in the elctric guitar recordings can be a REAL nightmare.
You dont bother even trying to get a good whole take, its WAY beyond
that. You figure with your digital editor, you can pretty much fix it
up if they can play it halfway right once sort of.
But then…egads man! The distortion track on the screen looks like
dough-ey pooh! How can you tell where the pick hits the string? Oh the
pain!
Here is one, very ambiguous about where the note starts and stops.
This track MUST be edited. Playing was done by a band much more
interested in practicing in front of a mirror than together
Relax though, weve got a trick!
Many tracking apps allow you to recod a stereo track, so thats just what we will do!
1. Send a cable from the guitar straight to a direct box.
2. Send the balance dout of the DI into your mic pre, then to tape
3. Take the 1/4″ split from the DI to wherever the guitarist would normally plug in.
This would be his wah, amp, whatever
4. Mic the amp’s distorted tone and send that to your mic pre then to tape
5. For this example, put the distorted guitar on the left and the clean
on the right of a stereo track in your app. If you can only record mono
tracks, then put the distorted to track 1, clean to track 2
you should end up with something like this. Notice how easy the bottom half of
the track will be to line to the click or grid
but wait theres more. Well, now you got the new
pain in the ass of hearing the distorted come out on one side and the
clean coming out on the other. Enter Gsonic with Gpan!
The panning app is free and easy to use, it comes with the
shareware stereo enhancer, so if you like it, drop the guy a line, pay
him his schillings and thank him for his hard work. But again, gpan is
free. Go get it
Put Gpan in the track insert of the stereo guitar track you have.
Open gpan and set the clean side’s gain to -infinity. Set the distorted
side’s gain to zero, and pan it to the center. Now use your app’s track
panner to put it wherever you want.
Now you can edit to your heart’s content, using the clean side, while
only hearing the results of your distorted side!!! WOO HOO!!!
Thanks Gsonic!
We’re not done yet. You can see piss poor dynamics from the guitar player in the
first pic. Accents in the wrong place
This can be a great tool to telling you where your strengths and
weaknesses are. In this second pic you can see a frankensteined
together part, now with the dynamic accents in the right place
Seems a shame to just up and throw out the clean half of the signal right?
Well, you dont have to! Just grab these
Free, and nice! Guitar amp sims, pedals, and stuff
Throw them on your clean half of the track, by duplicating the track
and using only the clean side (again, maybe gpan comes to the rescue)
These are VST, so if you can only use direct-x, go grab directixer or any of the
other dx to vst adapters
Mix to taste with the distorted track, or replace it or whatever! You may have to
do some sliding around to kill some phaseyness