Fun with Loop Recording

Here's a tech tip for you players in Twitter Symphony and elsewhere. When you are being your own engineer and playing something that takes both hands, and sometimes a yet un-evloved third one, it can be tricky getting ready to play that first note of a piece you are recording. Then add in the "red-light jitters" many of us can get and even a single clean take can be very frustrating, time consuming and in general not be an enjoyable experience.

I was having a tough time with our Director Chip Michael's latest piece "Flutter By". Symphony No 2, which is finished for my part, had everything in straight tempo. Flutter By introduces rallentando and accelearando. For symphony No 2, I had made my own click tracks in logic, my own measure markings, and could easily jump to a bar or subdivsion if I needed to make a little tweak.

However, we tried to find a way to move from Chip's DAW to Logic 9 which I use. There might be a way to do it but I never found one. Nor did I have any luck trying to exactly approximate the tempo variations. I thought I was just going to have to learn how to play this straight through.

To get ready to play it straight through I first started playing along with the sample track we get sent. At first I was playing it in iTunes, which became a pain in the butt having to restart it every time. I had the idea I could import the audio to Logic and use the loop playback function. I'd simply highlight the entire sample track and Logic would repeat it until I pressed the stop button. This became a great practice tool, and then I thought "I wonder if I can record this way..."

Turns out you can. Here's the tutorial I followed. It's short and to the point. It's for Logic but check around for your DAW. I'd bet Garage band is very similar.

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mixing-mastering/how-to-comp-tracks-in-logic-pro-8/

This was done in Logic 8, but 9 is the same stuff.

So I have my loop running. And I decided I'd play through 7 or 8 times. Then I sat down and listened to each "take". I used the music, and had the sample playback going too, so I could hear any errors. I listened to each one, marked what wouldn't work and I came up with
8th take- clean
7th take- Measures 23 and 24 were wrong, but correct in take 6
3rd take- Measure 32 was wrong, but correct in take 5. Also measures 71-72 were wrong but correct in take 4.

This recording was easy. I didn't have to worry about playing the first note write. The whole first take was a mental write-off to me. I still had some "red-light jitters" but they were minimized since I didn't have to stop playing. All I had to do was composite the takes. Here's a screen shot of what that looked like.

So that's it in a nutshell. It was a lot less stressful to play, and I didn't have to be perfect the whole way through.