by Ryan Thomas
Missed or wrong notes, timing issues, flubbing an entire change – these things happen to every musician. A perfect performance does not exist. On stage, these mistakes are easily forgivable: venues aren’t always acoustically favorable, which makes it hard to hear details; half of the audience probably isn’t paying close attention; and a split second after the mistake, the missed note is but an echo.
On a recording, mistakes become ghosts, willing and able to haunt their creators long after the initial crime was committed. Once the album is pressed, there is no real possibility of absolution, rectification or exorcism. So it's incredibly important to make a track as flawless as possible (unless major mistakes give your song some sort of charm. Unlikely.).
Studio mistakes can be fixed through retakes and editing. Excepting for the expenditure of time (which equals money in most studios), a musician has the option of re-tracking a part as many times as is necessary. In the most basic scenario, the best track is selected from the lot, and becomes the final take. However, any modern DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) makes it all too easy to go the next step and edit a piece of one performance into another. In this way, mistakes and other undesirable elements from one performance can be replaced with “clean” parts from other takes. The state of one track’s final edit can be staggeringly complex.
With 10 different takes, a guitar solo, vocal performance or any other track can be composed of snippets from each, mangled and reassembled like a mad scientist’s monster. It looks more or less like a man, talks more or less like a man, and functions far better than the pile of corpses from which it was composed, but upon on closer inspection, things are just a bit off. In a normal performance, notes are really decisions, consciously, or perhaps unconsciously chosen to fill a role that ultimately becomes a song. In this way, a melody or chord progression is a string of causality, wherein the first note or chord determines the appropriateness of the second, and so forth.
Editing a track destroys the inherent flow of a performance and replaces it with a more removed, empirical logic that aims to fix flaws the easy way at the cost of nuance. Improvised tracks are the most problematic in this sense because the selection of each new note is completely dependent on the notes before. A good solo can perhaps be likened to an expression, or a series of words and sentences designed communicate something to the listener. Editing completely breaks the flow of the solo by rearranging these “words” into something that is often less meaningful.
Even in a set melody, in which 100 guitar takes contain the exact same line and hit all the same notes, each performance contains nuances unique to that take. For instance, the small differences in the positioning of the guitarist’s fingers change the way her fingers move from fret to fret. Because of the guitar’s intimate interface between fingers and strings, each note’s tone or timber is unique and the tone of the following note is affected by that before it. Vocal, horn, and most other performances contain the same nuances. When you edit, you always create a rift in the performance that may or may not be noticeable.
To illustrate this, I have included two versions of a section of a song I've been working on (a piece of my evertually forthcoming Necromantic Opera). The section is dominated by a David Gilmore-esque guitar solo that aims to convey the conflicted feelings of a prince who faces a huried coronation after his father's death during a great war. The first clip is a solo I recorded months ago — it is all one single take, with only a single edit to eliminate a nasty pick noise between phrases. The second clip is something I just put together to demonstrate how an edited version of a similar solo sounds. It is a compilation of the cleanest parts of five different takes during which I tried to recreate the older solo.
HNKingDeadUncutLead by HiltStudio
HNKingDeadEditedLead by HiltStudio
The unedited solo represents an honest performance. It was completely improvised on the spot, and so contains small mistakes, missed notes and a bit of uncertainty. The second, edited performance is far more "perfect" with no missed notes, more consistant tones, and better timing. I also find this edited solo more bland, lacking in character and emotion, and less expressive than the first. Because a real performance is a chain of decisions, small imperfections can add punctuation and character to a piece and precipitate pleasantly surprising results. This can actually be seen in the waveforms of the parts. Top wave is the unedited guitar solo. Notice how much more uniform the bottom wave is than the top. This indicates a smoother, less dynamic performance, which I find characterstic of more conservative playing and later takes.
While the unedited solo was the second take I had ever played for that solo, the edited version was played by a guitarist who was very familiar with the material. I have listened to the song many times in the months since I first recorded it, and so knew every note I was supposed to play. I think this familiarity creates a performance that lacks freshness and experimentation. Without fail, my first takes always have the most vibrancy, and “wow” factor. I believe that this is true for most people. In Sound On Sound’s March, 2011 issue, the authors discuss how Bruce Springsteen would teach his bandmates songs in the studio and then roll the tape, making every take an early one. To me, early takes are more about playing the song the way it should be, and subsequent takes become a matter of trying not to mess up. I begin to play with a conservativeness that is not at all enthralling, and often times, I still mess things up.
The point: Editing and studio tricks cannot adequately replace a single, quality performance. To be clear, I edit tracks in almost every song I record and I love the time it saves, but I’m well aware of what I’m losing. The difference between a heavily edited part and a solid performance is subtle and may not be quantifiable to many people. But like mistakes only a musician would notice, these details combine to make a very real difference in the song's overall impression, and that's something that everyone notices.
Ryan Thomas is a musician and home-recording engineer from Lincoln, NE. While he can play a mean guitar, his drumming skills leave much to be desired. Chide him for this in the comments below, or read more at HiltAudio.wordpress.com.