"Spontaneous" Tracking: A New Way to Record

"Spontaneous" Tracking: A New Way to Record

Combine tracking, improvisation, and looping for greater spontaneity

by Craig Anderton

Some people think that today’s music is too premeditated. And I must admit, if I could only play live or only record, I’d grudgingly take live performance because of the magic and spontaneity that are the hallmarks of a rewarding live performance.

This was brought home to me with the EV2 project, which consisted of me and Brian Hardgroove from Public Enemy. We could get away with just the two of us because in addition to Brian being a great drummer, I was using Gibson’s Digital Les Paul, and processed the hex outputs with amp sims in a laptop to create a monster sound—with the three lower strings going through an octave divider, the top four bused to a clean chorus sound, and the standard magnetic pickup outs feeding a DigiTech GNX3000 multieffects for leads. So, even though it was just a duo, because I play with a thumbpick and fingers (a legacy from starting off on classical guitar), the sound was huge because I could articulate bass, rhythm, and lead parts simultaneously.

This led to an improvisational freedom I’d never experienced before. Change keys? Sure. Stretch a solo? Sure. As long as Brian and I synched, we didn’t have to concern ourselves with any kind of arrangement.

So how does this relate to tracking? Unfortunately, Brian needed to move back to New York, which limited our live performance options. But I couldn’t go back to playing how I played before. Even when tracking solo projects in the studio, I wanted to maintain that duo feel, and play in a looser, more spur-of-the-moment way. Yet how could I do that without someone else?

PLAYING LIVE . . . WITH A DAW?

One day I was designing some hex patches with Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig, using the Digital Les Paul’s full bass/rhythm/lead sound, and started noodling around on guitar. I firmly believe in designing patches in context, so I opened up a drum loop to play against. Because I wanted to listen back to the patches, I also hit record.

Then a funny thing happened. I kept playing, and playing . . . stretching further away from my original licks. Some of the playing was inspired; some of it was awful, which would happen when I groped to find something but it never got off the ground. I ended up recording about an hour’s worth of playing, but when I listened back, there were definitely some cool potential loops in there: A measure here, a few measures there. I put loop braces around anything with potential, and saved them. Most importantly, they had a really live, spontaneous feel to them because they were so completely non-premeditated.

I felt I was on to something. Then one day in the studio after seeing a documentary on Buddy Holly, I started playing with the riff for his “Words of Love.” Remembering my previous recording experience, I set up an appropriate drum loop and started playing the various sections for the song. Over about 45 minutes it acquired an increasingly hard rock vibe; then I stopped recording, and started whacking away at the tracks to isolate the best loops (Fig. 1). Next came saving the loops, and eventually, there was a collection of loops which when taken together provided all the sections I needed for “Words of Love.”

Fig. 1: About 45 minutes of recording were reduced down to the best potential loops, with the rest cut away. After exporting the loops, they’re available for use in other DAWs (my DAW for studio projects is Cakewalk SONAR). Note how each string and the magnetic pickups have their own tracks; the “audio” track contains the bused chorus sound.

But these loops had a very different vibe. The pseudo-“live performance” aspect gave the loops a loose, “real” feel. Although I had used Ableton Live to record the loops, I switched over to Cakewalk SONAR and started bringing in loops to create the song’s rhythm track (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: The project arranged in Cakewalk Sonar, using the imported loops. This shows the rhythm guitar (top track, highlighted), lead guitar, and drum track (lower track). 

On playback, I realized that the music did not sound loop-based at all. It sounded as if I’d recorded everything linearly, and that the end result sounded much more “alive” than usual. Looped-based music applied to a song from the 50s, arranged as hard rock? Sure, why not!

It may seem like does the same thing as comping, but it’s different. Comping is more focused, and will be constrained to a maximum number of measures. With the more linear approach, if you play 16 cool measures in a row…no problem. Another difference is that having all the parts in one long, linear string makes it easier to jump around among different sections.

MOVING ON

For solo projects I’ve pretty much stopped tracking linearly, except for the initial recording of any long, linear tracks. Even when comping, I’m blocking off increasingly longer sections of the song to repeat rather than trying to nail one specific section. Often, I’ll come up with some kind of chord substitution that leads the song in a different direction.

Yes, it’s loop-based music…but it sure doesn’t sound like loop-based music, because the loops are bits and pieces from a longer continuum. Next time you need to record a solo project, give this technique a shot. Who knows? It might work for you as well as it has for me.

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 Craig Anderton is Editorial Director of Harmony Central. He has played on, mixed, or produced over 20 major label releases (as well as mastered over a hundred tracks for various musicians), and written over a thousand articles for magazines like Guitar Player, Keyboard, Sound on Sound (UK), and Sound + Recording (Germany). He has also lectured on technology and the arts in 38 states, 10 countries, and three languages.