The Art of Reaction and Interaction

Where I pontificate on recording bands live in the same room, using technology, and striving to capture great performances.

There is a production dance between capturing raw performance and achieving technical perfection. As a recording engineer and producer, I've spent years navigating that balance and have thoughts on prioritizing performance, leveraging technology, and possible techniques for recreating the magic of live recording.

Prioritizing Song and Performance

From the listener's perspective, the most important thing is performance. When an excellent performance of a great song is taking place, you need to capture it quickly. It can be a fleeting moment, and it's more important to record it than it is to screw around trying to get sounds dialed to perfection. You risk everybody being exhausted and bored and playing lifelessly - with perfect sound. It's not worth it. I get things sounding solid quickly and move out - making sure everything is technically acceptable. I'll deal with whatever I have to address in post-production.

Especially with the tools that we have available today, there's so much cleanup and enhancement you can do to a slightly compromised recording. The forensic level of sweetening and correction we can do now is fantastic. That is an excellent use of modern software and AI tools. If you have to move quickly to get a recording done and you're not 100% happy with the sound, there are tools now that can help you correct many of the issues.

What you can't do is take a pristine-recorded lackluster performance and imbue it with energy and excitement. When I hear producers distorting and heavily affecting things, I know the performance wasn't engaging. They're trying to make it sound a little unusual or weird to make up for that. That's become standard practice - creating sonic concoctions based on something other than performance. They're creating a vibe out of technology. And that can be interesting to a point. I use effects and all kinds of stuff. But it's when the artist can interact with the technology from a performance standpoint that it becomes exciting.

The Art of Interaction

Technology can be a partner in performance. It becomes exciting if you set things up so the musician can play with the feedback they're getting from the technology. They are interacting with the technology. It's informing their performance. What makes music human is reaction and interaction. It's not particularly interesting to be perfect. Perfection can be dull. You can be precise in what you're trying to deliver and achieve: your own feel, your own swing, your own timing, your own use of your tools - whether that be an instrument, your voice, the way you play drums, or the way you play bass. But it's the personal little quirks that we have as individuals that give us our style. That style is what musicians spend most of their lives developing. That style combines their taste profile and what they can do, given their physical and mental abilities and how they work around their limitations. That's what keeps music from sounding homogenized. I'm intrigued by that intersection between technology and the musician. I'm exploring ways to capture that intersection as an aspect of performance.

An example of this would be recording vocals. Until now, my approach to recording vocals has always been to capture and monitor vocal signals as dryly as possible because I don't want anything hidden when evaluating the performance. If somebody sings a little pitchy, I don't want to miss that because it's covered with too much of a reverb or delay. But, as a vocalist myself, it would be interesting to play with vocal effects as a live performance element. I'm thinking increasingly about how I can do things in the room to generate an effect with which I can react. Then, when we're listening back and evaluating the take, I can hear the dry vocal and blend in the affected signals to taste. The point would be to incorporate the effects treatment into the performance. In his book How Music Works, David Byrne talks about how styles of music developed in part as a response to the spaces in which the music was played. That concept also applies to inorganic effects.

Robert Plant did this in Led Zeppelin. He usually wanted to hear whatever effects they planned to use on his vocals as he sang. That probably started because they had to record the vocals "wet" because of the limitations of working with 4 tracks. The effects needed to be processed and recorded live with the vocals simultaneously. Or they only had one reverb or delay unit, and they needed to be able to use it differently when mixing the drums. What started as a necessity turned into a preference because he found that it affected his performance.

I've felt that way about guitar effects for a long time. I almost never add processing to a recorded guitar signal. I always want to capture any pedal effects or amp reverb/tremolo in the recording from the amp. It's one of the reasons I went to such great lengths to set up my bi-amped rig.

So I can have stereo FM modulated vibrato from my Magatone Twilighter Stereo and harmonic tremolo from the Fender Bandmaster all at once, along with whatever pedals I use. I know what the final recorded sound will be while recording. But that bi-amped setup is also about capturing as much interest and depth from a single guitar as possible. Trying to get the most sonic interest out of the core performance, so I don’t feel the need to reinforce it artifically with other guitars.

Why Live Studio Recording Is Superior

I was recently doing an interview for a local band, and one of the members said that going to a studio and spending a week making a record was a dead concept. That's probably true in the minds of many artists. Probably has been for a long time. But I don't agree with the idea that it's somehow more efficient and effective to record things piecemeal.

I'm coming from a five-day recording session with a band called Small Moving Parts. We recorded nine songs in five days - Thursday thru Monday. That's a lot of songs captured in a very short period, including overdubs for all the vocals. It was highly productive. But most of that productivity comes from the fact that we were recording those songs live as a band. Drums, guitar, and bass tracked live. And piano and drums for a couple of songs. And live vocals and guitar for a lovely song called "France." We recorded with no intention of replacing any of the live instruments. And because of that, we were able to track 6 of those songs in 3 days. You cannot be that productive doing things piecemeal, song by song.

Immediacy and Spacial Cues

There is something to tracking live in the studio with everybody playing together in the same room. The immediacy of it. You know what you have at the time of the recording. You immediately hear the personality of that song. The album's personality develops as you record. You know when things are working. You know, when they aren’t.

There's an interaction between guitar, bass, and drums happening live and from microphone bleed. All the elements are excited as if there is electricity in the air. From a technical standpoint, the recordings may be compromised with respect to the isolation of instruments and occasional sympathetic resonances. But that's a small price to pay - and can be overcome by microphone choice and placement and mixing tricks.

There's a cohesiveness to the live-in-the-studio sound. Built into that recording are realistic delay measurements based on how far that guitar amp was from the cymbal and snare that was hit. It provides a realistic depiction of what the room sounded like that is hard to fake. There's a coupling that happens between microphones, making the result thick and rich. I remember my days recording to 8-track: 2 guitars, drums, and bass in a great-sounding room. Those recordings sound far bigger than songs with 15 drum tracks and multiple overdubbed guitars. The live performances are more immediate, more intimate, and real.

The Uncertainty of Layering

Building up tracks layer by layer is fine. But you only know what you have pretty far down the line. And, many times, musicians hesitate regarding whether something is good because they've built layers of sound up over time. They struggle to decide what to keep and get rid of. They don't know if it works as they are doing it. Having never experienced it as a cohesive piece, they recorded on faith that it will work. In the process, they’ve had little ability to react to changes. Once a drum is recorded, you can play to it, but the drummer can no longer play to you.

The Importance of Visual Cues

If you're in the room with a drum set and playing guitar or bass, your timing will be more precise in my experience than overdubbing. I am impeccable at overdubs. I can play it tight. But it’s still tighter when I record live with a drummer. Overdubbing, something is always slightly behind or slightly ahead because you're guessing. It feels a little uncertain. An excellent live performance sounds absolutely certain. The reason for that is I'm reacting not only to what I'm feeling in the room, which is the physical impact of the drum hits - but I'm also visually seeing the drummer's hands move before he makes contact with the drum. So I can anticipate with accuracy. Light travels faster than sound. It’s like lighting - by the time you hear it, it’s too late. Science!

It also makes me wonder if the layered recording approach might be improved by having video recordings of the drummer that you could watch while you overdub. While still lacking the feel of the drums in the room—the sheer volume and percussion (no pun intended)—video might provide enough visual cues to strike a compromise. That might be something I experiment with for some solo work I'm going to do soon.

Again, layering production isn't necessarily a bad thing. But if you can base your approach on a singular performance, it will be more impactful. Even if you start with only drums and guitar, live in the room. Or - if you're brave enough - track guitar and vocals and overdub drums and bass to that while watching a video of the performance.

I'm going to try that. Record a vocal mic, bi-amped guitar, and ambient microphones in the room with a couple of cameras on me. Videotape the whole thing, take the best performance, and cut together a video that I can then watch and play drums to. Film the drum performance, cut together a video of the drums and the guitar, and watch that to overdub the bass. It may mimic some aspects of that live environment I miss when layering. I'm sure other people have done something similar, but I have never heard of it. Probably because it's a pain in the ass. We shall see!

New Fretful Dreams Episode

In this episode of Fretful Dreams, Randy King and myself talk about our introductions to playing music, the music posters we had in our rooms as kids, hair metal, and the Atlanta club load-ins in the 90s.

New Record Plug Magazine Podcast

This Record Plug Magazine podcast episode features an interview I did with Atlanta's Gorgeous Beast. They talk about the musical changes and similarities with Erica's previous band. They also discuss their writing/recording approach, and upcoming PRF BBQ show after Steve Albini's death. Jefrey Debaser also talks to Shonali Bhowmik of Ultrababyfat, Tigers and Monkeys, and her new solo effort. Victory Hands gets a show shoutout with a recent live clip.

Upcoming Victory Hands Show & Chad Radford Article

Victory Hands will be playing this coming Tuesday July 9th at Boggs Social & Supply with Coda Nova, Facet, and NAW. Hope to see you there!

Victory Hands also got a wonderful write-up from Chad Radford. It’s in the July ‘24 issue of Record Plug Magazine. If you are in Atlanta or Athens, please pick one up. For out of towners, he will likely post it to his site closer to the end of the month.