Learn from your mistakes and use quality sounds

Learn from your mistakes and use quality sounds – and if you don’t, that’s a big recording mistake. I didn’t take that very seriously for quite some time. In fact it’s a lesson I’m still learning to this day. Allow me to elaborate.

You might think its well and good to pick any synth sound in your arsenal and play your little heart out while you are recording, but the truth is, if you don’t take the time to find a good tone, then you are just making a song out of noise. This is as far as the general listening public is concerned for that matter.

There are plenty of top quality synth, guitar and keyboard sounds available from a variety of different software manufacturers. One that comes to mind is Native Instruments.

Take your time to sculpt a good sound.

Once you pick your instrument – then tweak the knobs to get your instrument just right. THEN you can plan your rock solid performance with grace.

This same concept also applies to live instruments. PLEASE PLEASE tune your guitar before recording. And whenever possible, use fresh strings. This gives the best tone. Use a good EQ setting on your amp, and don’t over-use the overdrive pedal.

This song is a short example of a good concept with a bad implementation. I used all stock instruments from my Studio One 4 DAW which, in fact are not that great sounding. To boot – my keyboard was slightly de-tuned for some reason. I think the pitch bend wheel was loose.

Since everything was out-of-tune, I had to overuse Melodyne to do pitch-correction. And what’s worse is my performance was off beat in many places so I used a quantizer to help with timing. Another mistake is a small edit mistake that is clearly audible near the first part of the song.

Other than not using quality sounds – learn even more from your mistakes!

Other than all these mistakes, the feel of the song, I believe has a good sense about it. It seems to be a good musical idea and still worth listening to. If I said it once, I’ll say it again – learn from your mistakes!

Here is the song, and when you’re done, check out my other posts.