I'm writing this in the lab today trying to distract myself from my medical problems, so I'm thinking about music and recording. I discovered something about myself thus past weekend: I like to keep things simple when I record. Too much freedom in recording becomes rather paralytic to me. I find myself sitting on guitar tones trying to dial in the ideal tone, when instead I should be focusing on the spirit of the song. Who cares if the guitar is not perfect. It's the imperfection that makes the song what it is.
If anything, I started going back to basics when recording guitar. I find a tone and that's the tone I record with. I force myself to stick with that tone because that is the tone that I recorded my track with. If anything, that would be the tone which brought out my playing for the song. Anytime I have switched tones and reamped the guitar, I found myself finding things I didn't like in my playing with that tone. Then I would try to re-record the troubled parts and then I would just lose the whole spirit of the song. Talk about wasted time, because I wind up undoing what I did and reverting back to my original imperfect tone, which was after all perfect.
I found myself reviewing some unfinished songs I recorded over a year ago, and discovered that the ones I recorded directly from my X3 absolutely rocked in my ears. So, I did an experiment this weekend and recorded straight from my POD, and sure enough, things just rocked. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was working so nicely with my playing, so why should I change it? I'll probably find myself doing things this way more often.
-- Posted from my iPhone... because I can
