Is recording music in parts cheating?

No.

For the music I'm trying to make, recording in parts is the only way, otherwise there would be no music.

The rest of the time, I'm practicing to get my parts down. This is personally how I grow as a guitarist.

HOWEVER.. If I were to take said piece of music, not commit the time to learn how to play it, and somehow trick an audience to think that I could perform it.. Then yeah, I'd consider that dishonest or 'cheating'.
 
Definitely not.

That said, I still strive for full takes once I have a song written, even if it has 3 verses/choruses that are the same parts. I’ll inevitably do something slightly different as the song goes on that gives the song a little more character and isn’t just a copy and paste from one section to the other. I’m more strict about this with vocals and drums than I am guitar and bass. I don’t want to hear the same drum fills in every chorus and I don’t want to hear the vocals copy and pasted over. I always try to build a song so the last chorus is the climax and if it’s just a copy and paste of the first and 2nd chorus, that’ll never happen.

It also helps get the practice in for playing the song live, if that ever happens.

But when I’m writing, I’ll copy and paste, punch in, use whatever trick I can so nothing holds me back from writing the next part. Everything I do is in chunks. It’ll start with a riff, then I’ll write a drum part, then the drum part will usually help dictate what the next guitar part will be and I kind of leapfrog off of everything. There’s no way I could do that in the writing phase without starting/stopping.

That said, I’ve got a few songs that are entirely written around improvisations.

This is my favorite song I’ve written yet and everything but the double tracked vocals in the chorus were improvised. It started with the first thing you hear, I had that same guitar tone going through the entire song when I “wrote” it, I just went back after and used different guitars/tones for the final version. The lyrics are 100% improvised and everything but the double tracking on the chorus is first takes. There’s some imperfections in the takes, but it’s way too special of a song to me to fix anything. It showed me that I had the ability to do that and after almost 20 years of writing songs, I didn’t know I was capable of something like that. It was a really rough period at the time and clearly all that had to come out, I just wish I could tap into that whenever I wanted to.



And this is another one that was similar- I was playing around with a delay pattern and just pressed Record in Logic, then went through after and recorded all the other instruments to the improvised guitar part.



So if you aren’t tracking something specific and are just in the writing phase, don’t stop if you’re onto something that excites you. See where it goes. It certainly goes a long way in getting out of the basic verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus structure.
 
TSJMajesty said:
Out of necessity...?
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The context of why they were edited is important because with Metallica, it’s occurred for two reasons: on AJFA they had to record it section by section and were punching in all over because Lars couldn’t hold the tempo. On The Black Album they basically just had multiple takes of drum tracks and fills that they wanted to stockpile so they could edit in the best fills for the song. There’s one part in A Year And A Half Of where Randy Staub fucks up and basically creates a reel of nothing but drum fills and Lars is laughing saying “If you know anyone that needs any drum fills, we’ve got ‘em for sale.”

Just like vocal takes are often comps of whole takes from start to finish and the best lines are selected, it gets done with drums, too. I think Portnoy is another guy who has comped some of his drum tracks. It’s also how Gilmour “wrote” the “Comfortably Numb” solo and has tracked a TON of his solos. He just improvises the solo a few times then they pick the best parts out and mix them together. I can’t remember who it was, but I remember seeing one clip somewhere of a drummer just doing multiple drum fills to a click, with the intention of dropping the fills into the song after the fact. Might have been Sevendust.

Man, I’m glad to be alive in the DAW age. Editing that stuff on tape back in the day was an art form in itself; you had to sync tape machines up to fly in the comps/edits at precisely the right time, or physically cut the tape and splice it to the main track. Fuck all that. Now you just highlight the two takes and crossfade them, it takes longer to move the mouse over the section than it does to do the actual crossfade.
 
Maybe this is judgey. I know more than a few guys who have been playing guitar
for decades and they still only play their favourite bits and pieces of certain songs.
Sounds great, but there is something limiting about only knowing the iconic riff
to "Crazy Train" and not being able to play any other parts of the song. These are also
the guys who are impossible to jam with.

Riffs are not songs. They are cool as hell, though. :)
 
grandinq said:
The book Perfecting Sound Forever is a great history of recorded music and hits on all these issues.
Click to expand...

@State of Epicicity hipped me to that book a couple of months ago. It is SOOOO good. :)

Even non-reading musicians should be required to read it. It really puts in context the
entire history of "captured" sound and all the magical fantasies, deception, wishful thinking,
and outright delusions that have come with each revolution in how we hear and perceive
recorded music.

It's just insane how the same themes repeat themselves, and yet each cycle of innovation
brings its own blessings and curses.
 
I don't think there are any rules for a recording; I think you should do whatever you can to get across the vibe and the feel that's best, that's the main thing. That said, I think you should then be able to play your song live well. If you record a passage that you can only pull off when the stars are aligned the right way, I think you should practice a ton more before going on the road.
 
I'd say that learning how to pre-produce your recordings is a necessary skill and art in itself...by the time my band is actually in the studio, we've recorded those songs in various demos many times. I already have the overdubs planned for and know that the leads will likely be comp'd, unless there's a part we're gonna do studio live, and I'll change my method accordingly. The rest of it is dial up a sound, know that I want it on these parts of these tracks, get those done, and move on to something else.

As @unix-guy said, we record the base of it live, albeit to a click. In our case drums & most of the bass usually stay because I end up doubling rhythm guitar and like to listen/learn the as-recorded drum part to sync to that. Likewise with leads, I'll tailor them after the fact to meet the hits that the bass and drums are doing, but the original session is full band in a room. We've never done one purely 'drums first' and I doubt our drummer would even be up for that.

Meanwhile I grew up recording in my parents' basement by myself, playing everything. So I would do drum tracks solo having planned the entire thing out ahead of time...and I got some really convincing 'jams' recorded that way. But having other people involved changes your process, so you work with what you've got.

End of the day, is your recorded project intended to capture the 'song' or 'you'. Generally the stuff I've done we strive to get the song first, and then figure out later how to best do it live. If it matters learning the comp'd solo exactly, well...that's more work I made for myself. If I just want the solo on the record to be something I don't cringe when I listen to, I'll comp the shit out of it. Not saying the live solo will be shit, it'll just be maybe...less adventurous? than it is on the record. I'd rather a guy play something he's feeling in the moment that's less elaborate, than focus too much on trying to replicate an album track and lose the organic part of the performance.

That said - when my home recording setup was an 8-track with everything ready to go, drums/bass/guitar/key/etc, and I'd come home on weekends from college and bust out whatever songs I'd been thinkin of during the week. I was much more productive then vs now where I have the ability to be 'professional' about things. There's something to be said for tracks where you just go for it, and there's no aligning of drum hits or pitch correction, you just hafta do it. I'm nowhere near as productive on my digital rig because I can make it more 'professional' - but it takes 10x the time and I dunno if the results warrant it. Those old recordings still make me smile because as a paid studio guy these days, there are a lot of risks I took that I'd never get away with or end up having to re-do a bunch of times. Just a snapshot of a different era of recording.

*biggest thing being drums. Not that I can't track live drums at my current place, but the stars aligned in that room in my parents' basement, and I got really good drum sounds with crap equipment in what should've been a crap space. My current room at my house is fine but I don't like the drum sounds and if I don't like that, there's no reason to bother going any further. If that changes and I can make the workflow better I hope to uncork that creative bottle again.
 
Cave Man said:

Is recording music in parts cheating?​

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Yes, in part. A lot of recording I made for few artists required multiple takes and even at the end the use of "flex time" to align the guitar track to the actual beat.
 
The reply to that question is very simple:

According to the definition of cheating, if you are recording for an examination or for a competition where recording in parts is not allowed, then it is cheating. Everything else is not cheating.

Carry on wayward son
 
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vetteboy79 said:
There's something to be said for tracks where you just go for it, and there's no aligning of drum hits or pitch correction, you just hafta do it. I'm nowhere near as productive on my digital rig because I can make it more 'professional' - but it takes 10x the time and I dunno if the results warrant it. Those old recordings still make me smile because as a paid studio guy these days, there are a lot of risks I took that I'd never get away with or end up having to re-do a bunch of times. Just a snapshot of a different era of recording.
Click to expand...

I saw an interview with the dean of, I think, Berklee’s recording school. This was some time ago, but what he said really struck me: He was asked how he felt about digital recording, and he said it was great in so many ways, but he, even at that relatively nascent point, was seeing a change in people, that they would that they would take forever to get a mix perfect, that in contrast, the analog days forced one “to make a decision,” as he put it, and that no one wanted to make decisions any more, that they were just too focused on polishing the recording until the end of time.

I’m not necessarily of one mind or the other about this point, but I love to learn the thoughts of those who are immersed in it.

I do think a mix can kill feel, and I’m put in mind if 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago. In the mix from the original album release, I always feel this rush, this urgency, and I feel it from the drums and especially the hi hat; it just feels like it’s propelling the song like a train, implacable and undeniable. It can’t be argued with or reasoned with, and to me, the rest of the instruments are in its inescapable orbit, to mix metaphors.

In contrast, the Steven Wilson mix is so very different to me. It’s very pleasing to hear in every purely sonic way, but, for some reason, I never get the sense of urgency in that mix. It’s sounds perfect. But, to me, the magic of the original, the adrenaline and the urgency, is gone. Had I only ever heard the new mix, that song would not have struck me or stayed with me the way the original mix did.
 
State of Epicicity said:
I saw an interview with the dean of, I think, Berklee’s recording school. This was some time ago, but what he said really struck me: He was asked how he felt about digital recording, and he said it was great in so many ways, but he, even at that relatively nascent point, was seeing a change in people, that they would that they would take forever to get a mix perfect, that in contrast, the analog days forced one “to make a decision,” as he put it, and that no one wanted to make decisions any more, that they were just too focused on polishing the recording until the end of time.
Click to expand...
I agree.

It happened all the time when I was making dance music. I was never that good....so take it with a grain of salt. But, if I had the goal of bouncing to audio as quickly as possible or of getting all the parts "ready" and then emulating something more like a traditional recording workflow (even if I was just recording from one DAW to another via ReWire or ReaRoute)....I always had better luck. Obviously, that doesn't matter as much when you're sketching/writing....but once the song was arranged, I wanted to get to audio fast and commit to as much as I could.

If there was still MIDI in the track when I started mixing, I'd change things all the time and never finish.

I'm sure people are different from each other and some people love writing up to the last minute. But, I think it generates fundamentally different music from separating all the steps.
 
I'm a complete amateur, so have no dog in this race, but I suddenly remembered an opinion from Ted Hughes, ex British poet laureate, on the effect of word processors on submissions to a kids' literary competition:

https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/a-child-with-a-word-processor/

TLDR - word processors make it easier for people to express their thoughts and therefore submissions got longer but not as well honed as the shorter submissions made on typewriters.
 
Few weeks ago watched interview with Brian May and his talk about the several tracks Freddy Mercury recorded the choir vocals for Bohemian Rhapsody and they hoped the level of the mixed down stereo track fits to the rest. Because there where no 24 or more track recording devices at this time.
The song never would be possible without "cheating".

So we should be glad that cheating exists and is be used 😉
 
Renderman said:
I'm a complete amateur, so have no dog in this race, but I suddenly remembered an opinion from Ted Hughes, ex British poet laureate, on the effect of word processors on submissions to a kids' literary competition:

https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/a-child-with-a-word-processor/

TLDR - word processors make it easier for people to express their thoughts and therefore submissions got longer but not as well honed as the shorter submissions made on typewriters.
Click to expand...

That article is really interesting. That’s of course the problem of not editing your own writing. I know when I’ve written music with band mates in the past it’s involved just a ton of argument and editing with one person, but almost none with another. And I’ve found that in music I wish I’d hear a little more fanciful ideas and indulgence in tangents and weirdness. If everything is concise all the time, it starts to resemble a product or a briefing more than a work of art. Sometimes succinctness is essential to the art, that in itself should not be a goal, in my opinion.

And I think that poet also did himself a great disservice drawing these conclusions from such an endeavor. If you are on a board, reading through 800 literary submissions, you’re an editor, not a wide ranging critic, and the sheer volume will make it seem boring. It takes this sacred act of writing and turns it into something as dry as reading resumes, in my estimation. It’s an interesting conclusion regardless of this context, but I am dubious of it.

On the other hand, I see a parallel to modern screenwriting, which seems so focused on people in capes, so maybe he has a point haha.
 
vetteboy79 said:
I'd say that learning how to pre-produce your recordings is a necessary skill and art in itself...by the time my band is actually in the studio, we've recorded those songs in various demos many times. I already have the overdubs planned for and know that the leads will likely be comp'd, unless there's a part we're gonna do studio live, and I'll change my method accordingly. The rest of it is dial up a sound, know that I want it on these parts of these tracks, get those done, and move on to something else.

As @unix-guy said, we record the base of it live, albeit to a click. In our case drums & most of the bass usually stay because I end up doubling rhythm guitar and like to listen/learn the as-recorded drum part to sync to that. Likewise with leads, I'll tailor them after the fact to meet the hits that the bass and drums are doing, but the original session is full band in a room. We've never done one purely 'drums first' and I doubt our drummer would even be up for that.

Meanwhile I grew up recording in my parents' basement by myself, playing everything. So I would do drum tracks solo having planned the entire thing out ahead of time...and I got some really convincing 'jams' recorded that way. But having other people involved changes your process, so you work with what you've got.

End of the day, is your recorded project intended to capture the 'song' or 'you'. Generally the stuff I've done we strive to get the song first, and then figure out later how to best do it live. If it matters learning the comp'd solo exactly, well...that's more work I made for myself. If I just want the solo on the record to be something I don't cringe when I listen to, I'll comp the shit out of it. Not saying the live solo will be shit, it'll just be maybe...less adventurous? than it is on the record. I'd rather a guy play something he's feeling in the moment that's less elaborate, than focus too much on trying to replicate an album track and lose the organic part of the performance.

That said - when my home recording setup was an 8-track with everything ready to go, drums/bass/guitar/key/etc, and I'd come home on weekends from college and bust out whatever songs I'd been thinkin of during the week. I was much more productive then vs now where I have the ability to be 'professional' about things. There's something to be said for tracks where you just go for it, and there's no aligning of drum hits or pitch correction, you just hafta do it. I'm nowhere near as productive on my digital rig because I can make it more 'professional' - but it takes 10x the time and I dunno if the results warrant it. Those old recordings still make me smile because as a paid studio guy these days, there are a lot of risks I took that I'd never get away with or end up having to re-do a bunch of times. Just a snapshot of a different era of recording.

*biggest thing being drums. Not that I can't track live drums at my current place, but the stars aligned in that room in my parents' basement, and I got really good drum sounds with crap equipment in what should've been a crap space. My current room at my house is fine but I don't like the drum sounds and if I don't like that, there's no reason to bother going any further. If that changes and I can make the workflow better I hope to uncork that creative bottle again.
Click to expand...

Great post! :)

There's so much to be said about "going for it," and not getting paralyzed by a performance, or
analyzing things prematurely! Hell, I even think that is the place where the best music still comes
from. Just being spontaneous, taking risks, being willing to fail, and suck, and taking the risk to
crash and burn----because sometimes it may be brilliant. Safe is never brilliant, is it?

Thanks for the reminder!! :)
 
State of Epicicity said:
I saw an interview with the dean of, I think, Berklee’s recording school. This was some time ago, but what he said really struck me: He was asked how he felt about digital recording, and he said it was great in so many ways, but he, even at that relatively nascent point, was seeing a change in people, that they would that they would take forever to get a mix perfect, that in contrast, the analog days forced one “to make a decision,” as he put it, and that no one wanted to make decisions any more, that they were just too focused on polishing the recording until the end of time.
Click to expand...

So true! Bounce multiple tracks down to a single track and you were definitely committed!! :)

And we always ran the risk of scorching the tape (not that it is the right term) with too
many overdubs, or failed bounce attempts.
 
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