Third Take

A few weeks ago, I sat down to track a guitar part for a song my band is recording. It just wasn’t working - I spent a couple hours tweaking guitar sounds, switching microphones, and changing mic positions, but nothing was making the part fit with the tracks we’d already recorded. Then I realized the problem wasn’t my gear or engineering skills - it was the way I was playing the guitar.

My guitar was in tune, I was playing the right chords, and I was playing in time with the music, but what I was playing wasn’t adding anything positive to the song. I changed around some voicings, reworked the part, and everything snapped into place. All of a sudden, there was a reason for the part - it added energy, and took the song forward.

The original part had been written months previously, under the pressure of a looming gig. I had to come up wtih my parts for a bunch of new songs quickly. I knew at the time that it wasn’t anything fantastic, but it worked to get us through the show. After that, it just stuck around, until it confronted me in the studio with its mediocrity.

After a couple hours trying to record the dull guitar part, I realized what was wrong. I’d been so wrapped up in the engineering aspect of recording that I’d forgotten to be a musician. I was listening for the wrong thing. It wasn’t how the microphone was picking up the sound, but the sound itself. I started thinking like a guitar player again, wrote a cool part, and the technical aspects of recording followed easily.

Knowing a bunch of alternate chord voicings and how to arrange them allowed me the freedom to create something new and record it, right there during the session. There was a time, a couple years ago, when I could not have done that. The hard work I’ve put into studying the guitar has changed the way I play.

This experience led me to an important idea for those of us who record ourselves: maybe the biggest improvements in our recordings come not from new gear or techniques, but from improvements in our own musicianship.