What’s the difference between, you know,  a live recording versus a record? Well, particularly nowadays, less so years ago, particularly nowadays, everything you are hearing in terms of modern music production is basically in time with each other.  Now, it could be a bit of a late lazy sense of time, sort of a hip hop sense of time. It could be, a really sort of a head punky kind of sense of time.  But you’re hearing things that are all being played together, but because of the nature of computers,  things being tracked separately, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of the modern pop production job is timing things to basically make them  sit, sit together in terms of the way that they, if we go about years and years ago and you listen to the Rolling Stones, listen to the police, whatever band you’re talking about, a lot of those, any band that was essentially recorded in a room at the same time, that would’ve been about the sense of timing and the ch choosing of the takes, and which takes sounded better, where the, where did the band all sit together?
The bass and the drums work together with the guitars, the piano, and the vocals and all these things.
But as I say, now we’re working with computers  and, things are often being recorded separately. vocals and guitars are recorded separately. sorry, just turn my, phone off. vocals of guitars and pianos, everything’s being recorded separately.
And the thing that will make it sound more polished  is, having everything sound like it was all meant to be in the most, a perfect performance way,  in fact, and we’ll do a session on tuning vocals at some point. but people often talk about tuning vocals and everything. And in my experience, that it, as much as the tuning is concerned, it’s the timing of instruments and vocals that actually create the most sense of polish,  funnily enough.
so listen, this is, let me share the screen. IW  if I can inspire you about one thing, which is the longer you do this music lark,  okay, the better you’ll get, and esp, especially if you do it with a sense of  intention, a sense of craft, and you just practice, practice, practice, and,  and you, you try and get better as much as you can. What will happen is you’ll get to a place where things will sometimes surprise you.
And I had this lovely little thing happen, a few days ago. I was working on my track,  and I’m not really a guitarist, but I put some guitar down  and, on this track and maybe just realized how far I’d come in, the whole sensibility of things that even as a nont guitarist,  I basically didn’t really have to touch this guitar track.  It was remarkably in time. and, I sort of had a little moment. I stopped and went, God, I can remember when I would’ve taken me,  you know, an hour and a half to have, to have track some guitar on a new song.
And here was this time when I was like, oh, I’ve just sort of done it, you know? So, you know, conscientiously working hard at music and production and recording and everything will reap, can reap great benefits. Â And remember the place you’re working towards is that things are getting quicker, faster, and therefore you just feel generally sort of happier about everything because you’re making better music quicker.
And that’s just great. so there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s always further places we can go, you know, there’s always room for improvement. anyway, so I put this,  put a bit of guitar down and, and, the other nice thing was, is that  I kept, I kept forgetting to be a bit wrong ’cause I wanted to put some guitar and some percussion down that was a little bit off  in the timing so I could correct it for you.  But I kept sort of forgetting and getting it right, and having to go back and do it again.
So, weirdly enough, this little exercise took me far longer  than putting a proper guitar on a proper track. anyway, I’ll give you a quick blast, of where I am at the moment. Okay? So this is super rough, and I’m basically gonna take you through the process of tidying this all up. Okay? what I could do, I could have sung over the top, but I chose not to, we’ll just focus on instruments for the time being, but this is just where I am for the moment. So I’ve whacked down some chords and some guitars and various things, and a bit of percussion.
I, I’m gonna use the quick swipe comping feature that we used before for the guitars, the percussion I just put down in a take, you know, so just have a quick blast of where we are. Â Okie doke.
There we go.
So what are we talking about? Something, you know, quite nicely recorded. It’s all there, you know, it’s ready for you, ready for anybody to sing over, that kind of thing. But it’s just all a bit wonky, you know, it just goes a bit out of time.  And I also want to draw my, my, your attention to that thing of just being genuinely out of time. things that are out of tune and things that are out of time will  inevitably sound basically a bit amateur.
Okay?  And, some of the demos, some of the things I receive, some of the things that people send in every now and again, I get something which sounds pretty out of time, you know? And essentially my first thought is, is that it’s kind of sounds a bit amateur. and I think it’s important to just take that on board, really. so practice the timing of your playing. we’ve got logic, we’re learning how to use it. Let’s learn how to get into that sense where we can present a more professional product  in the early days of your demos.
So we say we all we’ve got here is a bit of percussion, some guitar give you piano, put a voice on top. And we’ve got the beginnings of a nice demo of a song of which anybody can then make a judgment on whether it’s  worth taking forward into a more fully produced place or not. But this is the place that we start from,
So  let’s look at this guitar part for the time being. Okay. so let’s just do, use the comping function.  Just,  just go here, get closer to the beginning of this starting guitar.
See if I prefer the beginning of this one. This take,  no, I prefer the pickup.  Better pick. We’re gonna go all the way to The end. Just  gonna check these. Oops, gonna check. Oops, just  gonna check these. sta static spread chords. Let’s see what these chords sound like here. If they’re any better.
This is the previous one, okay? They’re a bit more out of time, but they’re more definite something. I’m gonna choose those ones. Okay?  So  what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go up to here, we’re gonna go to the A function here. We might have talked about this before. I think we’re gonna go export active comp to new tracks.
So we’ve just compiled various versions of the guitars. Let’s go export active comp to new track, okay? Â And that is going to, Â as you say, created here, audio nine here. That is a mixture of all the takes of the guitar that we’ve just done. Okay? Â So what we’ll do now is we’ll close this, Â the arrow here, Â which we’ll sort of hide all the takes of this. And we’re going to mute here, this region acoustic guitar, that’s the original one.
And we’re gonna label this here.  Guitar  comp.  Okay? And this is, this is the track that we’re going to be working with at the moment. Alright?  Now,  before we get into, logic’s timing function, I’m just gonna do one thing, just gonna show you one thing, which is a first port of call to a degree with something. So this is just a little error  in the comping. So I’m gonna get rid of this little region and open this up here.
Now then let’s just talk about this thing called, called the grid. Alright? I’m just going to make a bit of space  here so we can see  right now. Then look here at this, I’ll highlight it here. This, this guitar chord here. Now you can see, presume  right in, but here, around here, that’s the beginning of the guitar chord. Let’s, let’s hear it. So that’s where the guitar chord falls.
Now, let’s go up here to, at the beginnings of our grid and our timeline across the top where the beats and the bars are. And you’ll see here the number 16. Okay? That means it’s the 16th bar. And if I click here, the  play head, as we call it, the line down the middle, will show us that that is the beginning of the, of, of bar 16, or the beat one of there. Now that guitar chord here  is supposed to hit, it’s supposed to come there. So we can see that this guitar chord here is early.
Alright,  so the first thing I’m going to do, I’m just going to get rid of this little region, because that was just a little bit of an error in the comp thing. Get rid of that.  The first thing we’re going to do is I’m going to click here. As you see that I’ve now highlighted this region,  and I’m going to  hold down control,  sorry, I’m gonna hold down shift,  sorry, my fault. I’m gonna click and drag,  and you can see I’m dragging that wave form.
So it begins to start  at the beginning here,  the beginning of this line. Okay, so let’s press play again now.  Now, so this one suddenly sounds, actually, it sounds a little bit tiny bit late actually, ’cause it’s sort of a spread guitar chord. I’m just gonna move it a little bit earlier. Okay, let’s listen.  And this one here, this chord here, if we zoom in here, the second chord here  is kind of hitting around the same time as well.
Let’s, let’s take that one and we’ll move it  forward.  Okay? Click on this region and just close it up  here. And there’s a fade that logic has already created there.
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