Ever gotten annoyed or frustrated when recording yourself? This tutorial will cover 4 things you can do to ease the stress when you are both the recording engineer and the talent being recorded at the same time. And as always, the tips covered in this tutorial are all while using Apple’s Logic Pro with VoiceOver, the built in screen reader in MacOS.
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We start out with the simplest of the tips, which is increasing the metronome count in. This gives you a bit more time to get comfortable in playing position so you are ready to go on the downbeat. Too often when recording ourselves, one or two bars may not be enough breathing room between pressing “R” to start recording and being ready to deliver that awesome take.
Secondly, we’ll look at using a drummer track to the project so we have something to play along with instead of just a click in our ear. Since the drummer track loads up with an 8 bar region which you can extend or repeat as many times as you want, it saves you having to come up with a drum beat first and allows you to get to recording much quicker. Hit those links for some additional tutorials that may be helpful as well.
Next up, we’ll take a look at doing a punch recording. This allows us to tell Logic to only record to a specific time range in the project, e.g bar 2 to bar 3, so we can focus on getting just that part right. The beauty of this method, is that you can move the playhead back a bar or two and press record from there. As Logic will only ever record while the playhead is between the punch Locators, you can play along so that you are in the groove by the time the section logic will actually record comes up.
Our 4th tip centers around using Locators to set up a cycle range so you can record multiple takes quickly without having to stop in between. Once you have these takes recorded, you can go through them, and comp them into one great take.
Honorable mentions as far as tips to make recording yourself go smoother include, creating a template and a personal favorite hack that you can combine with the template idea, which is having a pitch reference to tune my guitar quickly, among others.
If you’ve got any tips of your own you use when recording yourself, hit the email link at the top of the page and let me know.
