tips...014.
A REAL RECORDING SESSION WITH POWERTRACKS.(cont.).
ok.after replaceing a guitar amp and tuning the drums n replaceing the bass players lousy bass
or haveing the bass player play better..lol....
you finally have u think a good first track in ptw.
what i would normally do in this difficult situation
is give each trak in ptw i recorded a different take name.
for example track 2 ...name ..."bed track take 1"..
track 3...bed track take 2 etc etc etc.
till i had a good take and then delete the bad takes of course.
or mute em..in traks view or mixer view.
after each take i normally would save as again to the seq name.
ok..so we finally have a good take right ??
so lets now analyse the take.
at this point you should hear a guitar on the left side..another on the right.
bass n drums center.
sounds good right ??
n the bands happy on playback.
they actually kept in relative time to the click...lol..
so its pretty solid.
at this point tho you hear on playback low down a bit of amp noise.
lets try lowering it.
try ptw's noise gate. (as i mentioned before.).
and see if more clarity is obtained in conjuction then
bring up ptw's 10 band real time eq.
a recommendation. its tempting to boost eq...a common mistake.
CUT is often more effective. notice the extreme left band of the
10 band eq ?? try lowering it, n see if a clearer result is obtained.
heres the reason. in lots of situations theres lots of junk build up in lowest end
frequencies. (also the ptw real time analyser will let u look at the frequencies in the track.
and display their preponderance.)
but what i normally do after recording is clean up a track
particularly focusing on the lowest of the low end.

now lets experiment further.
mebe the track sounds too dry. ??
you dont have to commit any fx at this point.
but mebe for musicians cans for further tracking.
copy our perfect track 2 bed track to track 3.and label it
bed fx. and add some ptw echo or reverb to it.
just a smidgeon. then bring up track 3's fader in tracks view or mixer view just under the dry
original track two. this is where a lot of experimentation
comes in. there are numerous ptw reverb n echo/chorus settings.
so..before the band had come in you should have experimented to see what was
pleaseing for mebe useing in the CEFE session.

if theres some frequency that really stands out badly.
try ptw's built in para eq. hilite a bad bit in ptw's audio waveform window.
and use the ptw analyser to display the offending frequency
that stands out. then hilite the whole track and dial in ptw's paraeq
with the same freq's and process the track n see if the result is better.
at this point i'm just giving u an inkling of various ptw tools.
when used together and over time as experience is gained they can save
you lots of problems. and solve various probs for u.

(as an aside.if your adept...and experiment...ptw's real time echo chorus is superb for vocal
tracking...more on this in later posts.)

ok....back to business.
lets say no matter what u do u just cant get the bed one track sounding right.
ok...in that case we are going to use it as a guide then.
we will thus record each instrument as a track on its own track.
first drums then bass then the individual guitar tracks as individual takes on seperate tracks.
thus you would need to name track 4 as rhythm guitarone.
trak 5 as rhythm guitar 2, trak 6 as bass etc etc.
if things were really drastic i might leave blank tracks in ptw tween
different tracks.
so lets say trak 6 the bass is recorded on.
i would leave trak 7 blank n name it bass spare just in case i needed it to record another bass take.
(more to come.)
(perhaps people could comment on if they are finding this thread usefull or not, as its a ton of work for me posting a ton of tips over the next month or so. in fact ive just scratched the surface so far....lol. please comment in the off topic area...so this thread is left intact for folks to copy in entirety as i enter all the tips.)