One-take Recording
Just because you have the ability to endlessly edit and overdub your tracks, it doesn’t always mean that you should. Hollin Jones explores the world of one-take recording.
Recording and editing music hasn’t always been as easy as it is today. As recently as the middle of the last century, recording meant playing everything together as it was printed directly to shellac or vinyl disc. The concepts of overdubbing and editing were nonexistent in those days – you had to play everything at once and get it right first time or pay extra for another disc. As you might expect, this approach encouraged good preparation and musicianship, although it also limited the number of people who had access to recording music, which remained an expensive and highly specialised process at the time. Recording in one take also required the mixing engineer to be very skilled, balancing channels during recording without the luxury of knowing that any errors could be corrected afterwards.
In time, the advent of tape and multi-channel recording meant that recordings could feature separate tracks that could be played back afterwards and even overdubbed to add new parts or correct errors. Eventually, hard disk recording and DAWs with virtually infinite track counts effectively did away with any notion of ‘limits’ on how you record music. And although software and computers have opened up the world of music production to pretty much anyone nowadays, they have also diminished the element of conventional musicianship required to produce tracks to virtually zero. That’s not a dig at producers who don’t really play an instrument, it’s just an observation. Some of the greatest albums of the last two decades have been made by producers whose instrumental skills can only be described as basic at best.
Keep it simple
On a more serious note, you can view the amazing, open-ended flexibility of modern DAWs as either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, they do allow you to get everything exactly right: to create beats, melodies, structures and soundscapes that could never be achieved by people playing instruments in a room. There are very few things that can’t be fixed using the tools available and you can amass a collection of virtual instruments far more cheaply and easily than if you wanted to own physical versions of the same things.
But looked at another way, software can actually slow you down, providing so many options and possible avenues that you fiddle endlessly with ideas or structures, never settling on one. You can always wonder if a track will sound better if you change that synth sound or add a few extra beats here and there. There is no ‘end point’ with software because you will basically never run out of tracks, effect slots or CPU power if you employ track freezing. In a hardware studio, an older one at least, you might have only 24 mono channels, so you know broadly where the limits of the technology lie – but with software it’s endless. We can probably all think of albums on which someone has tweaked and added until the end result is a bit of a complicated mess.
Multi mics
There is an argument to be made that one-take recording in its various forms can be liberating and fulfilling in a way that repeatedly overdubbing and looping material then endlessly rearranging it can not. There’s no getting around the fact that if you go down this route, you or the person you are recording are going to have to be able to play an instrument, but then most people reading this probably can to some degree.
The most obvious reason to try out some one-take recording is to recapture some of the spontaneity that is lost with non-linear DAW recording. It’s often by jamming through ideas that you come up with something unexpected, a gem that would never otherwise have appeared if you were recording short loops then sticking them together in software. And there’s nothing to say that your one-shot recording necessarily has to be the finished product – it can serve as a musical sketchpad to be used to develop ideas. This concept will be more familiar to people who have played in bands, with jams often resulting in new material (although you have to record it in order to remember what you played).
Many people may also recognise the concept of the ‘happy accident’, when a great-sounding section of music suddenly comes together unexpectedly. Slight imperfections can actually add to the character of a recording and may not need to be digitally ironed out – though it should be acknowledged that this applies more to music played with real instruments than to electronic/dance music forms.
Speaking of which, although we are mainly talking about recording audio using microphones, MIDI fans are not left out entirely in the cold. Reason 5 and Record 1.5 feature Propellerhead’s Remote system, which lets you connect multiple MIDI keyboards and controllers to a rack of equipment then record them all at the same time, which is a form of one-take recording. The difference is that the resulting project file will still be totally editable –
so it could potentially still tempt you to start endlessly cutting, editing, copying and pasting unless you have tremendous willpower.
Down in one
One-take recording can take many forms. We have mentioned the brainstorming and jamming aspects of it, but there’s also the recording of pre-rehearsed material. This is rather easier with a small number of people, particularly a solo singer or musician. A lot of early blues recordings were captured in one take with just one or two mics. Performing this kind of recording can be a refreshing change, especially for someone used to fiddling for hours with timestretched loops and MIDI tracks in a DAW. There’s something much more natural and musical about someone performing a piece skillfully in one go.
There are a couple of ways to approach this kind of thing – and the good news is that they don’t generally require a huge amount of kit. At its most basic, one-take recording can be achieved with a small digital recorder strategically placed in front of a performer. We’re not talking about a mobile phone with a memo recorder, but a dedicated digital recorder such as those from Yamaha or Zoom. If your only experience of portable recording has been a Walkman with a plug-in mic, you’ll be amazed at the quality of recording you can get from these modern Flash-based devices with their pro-quality stereo microphones.
This technique requires a bit of forethought from you as you will need to either do a quick test recording to check the levels or monitor on headphones and move the recorder to the optimum position. If at all possible, it shouldn’t be moved while recording, as this can adversely affect the balance of the sound. This is probably the purest form of one-take recording as it involves just a single stereo track and captures more or less what you are hearing in the room. It’s also the quickest and easiest way to record a jam session or a musical brainstorm, and if you do it a few times in the same room, you’ll get to know how best to position the recorder to get the best balance of the instruments.
Mixed signals
There are other kinds of one-take recording. Remember that ‘one take’ doesn’t necessarily mean one track, so you can use more than one microphone. If you are doing this you will probably need to use either a mixing desk to mix the signals and record directly into some kind of portable recorder, or use a laptop or other computer and a multi-channel interface. As soon as you get into using DAWs, you have to decide how you want to proceed because you will, in theory, then be able to edit material, even though that is against the spirit of capturing a single take. A tip to remember is to not record to a click track, as this will discourage you from trying to edit and cut up audio takes. It will also allow the players much more freedom and help to maintain a live, spontaneous feel.
The other decision you have to make is whether to record to a single audio track or separate tracks. If you record all your inputs to a single track you are sticking as closely as possible to the purest form of one-take recording, though you could also do this with a portable recorder. It will test your live mixing skills – the more inputs you have, the trickier it will be.
A safer method is to either record in groups or onto separate tracks. You could, for example, capture the drums onto a single track, the guitars onto another and the vocals onto a third. Or you might record everything to its own audio track. It really depends on what you’re recording and how complicated you need to make it. Obviously, the advantage of using separate tracks is that you can balance everything afterwards, though the temptation would also be there to start adding effects after the fact.
Many people recording today will have grown up using four-track tape machines. These were very limited by modern standards, yet they taught you a lot about recording because you had so few tracks to play with and overdubbing was far from perfect. These restrictions in some ways helped you to develop as a songwriter and producer. Even if you had to bounce down tracks in the same frequency range to free up space, at least it got you thinking about how the elements of your piece were working together. And going back and correcting small mistakes was tricky, meaning you often just left them in, something that added to the charm of a piece but would be all too easy to correct on a modern DAW.
Good technique
A compromise between single and multitrack recording is to use a smaller number of carefully positioned mics. This is based on the grouped recording concept to some extent, whereby you don’t necessarily try to record everything from a single microphone, but rather deploy a few mics to the right places. For an acoustic singer-songwriter this would be fairly easy. You would probably want to provide a vocal mic and a mic or DI for the guitar, keyboard or other instrument. To give yourself some flexibility you could also set up a more ambient room mic a few feet away, either to catch the crowd noise if it is a live gig or simply to have some ‘space’ available to blend in with the more closely mic’ed signal when you come to balance things afterwards.
In many older jazz recordings – notably those of Oscar Peterson – you can hear the glasses being clinked in the crowd and the occasional mumbled words from the audience in the background. It goes without saying that performances like this would have been recorded in one take, but while you might think it better to isolate and exclude the crowd noise, in these cases its inclusion adds greatly to the atmosphere, giving the music a sense of place and warmth that it would not have had if recorded in a studio.
In fact, until fairly recently all live albums would have been recorded in one take and then taken away for mixing. Sometimes a live album would even be released using only the mix captured by the engineer on the night, but while this could be thought of as perhaps the purest form of capturing music, it can also sometimes result in less than stellar sound. Quirks and moments of unexpected improvisation can really add to the character of a piece of music, but not being able to hear the bass orhaving the vocals much too in-your-face usually does not! Hence, bands with the budget and willingness to do so are now far more likely to capture everything in one take onto separate tracks then take it away and edit out any major problems later using a DAW before finally mixing and probably mastering the track as well.
This is more time-consuming but when you are at the behest of a record company paying for all the crew and kit you are less free to just submit whatever you want – and under more pressure to provide something professional and saleable.
Things get a little more complicated when you’re talking about a band, but it’s still not always necessary to mic up absolutely everything – drums being the most frequent source of multitrack madness. Of course you can do this, though it’s rare to go to the trouble of mic’ing up everything at the same time and then recording it in one go in a studio. People sometimes record a whole song together but it’s usually for the purposes of capturing the drums and bass first – the other takes are ‘ghost’ parts, for reference and to be overdubbed later.
This is largely a consequence of our being able to do this rather than it necessarily being the best thing to do! In fact, by overdubbing parts you can actually lose the vibe that you might otherwise have had by recording together. This is a major factor in bands struggling to transfer their live sound and energy onto their records – by separating everyone out and recording them individually you lose some of the chemistry.
Another issue is that since studio time costs money, there is a general assumption that what you come out with at the end of the sessions has to be perfect. As such, one-take recording may be more suited to less costly projects, but that has the added benefit of giving you more freedom to experiment and have fun without worrying about the budget.
Hole in one?
One-take recording is an interesting idea and something that’s great fun to try out. From capturing jam sessions on a portable device to recording gigs, singer-songwriters or even whole bands, it scales up in complexity from the very simple to the considerably more demanding and involved.
For those of us used to spending months tweaking loops and effects in our DAWs, one-take recording can be a really liberating way to make and record music. If you’re after a way to brainstorm and capture moments of genius, make a live album or just don’t want the hassle and expense of doing lots of overdubs, it’s a great solution. Best of all, if you remove the option to edit, you may find that you come up with something unexpected that really works.
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 92
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