DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My guitarist friend Steve recorded four takes of the main guitar track for my song, Ode to Soup. Then he recorded two harmony tracks for the second half of the chorus, plus a “powerchord” track for two of the verses. It’s an awesome arrangement, and really took the song to the next level.

But it left me with about twenty tracks of guitar to mix down. (Remember that the guitar was recorded with two microphones, doubling the amount of data to manage as well as the number of edits needed.)

The fourth take was labelled the “keeper” — meaning that at tracking time, we felt it was the best of the lot. But no single take is perfect, and even more importantly, what seems perfect in performance rarely stands up to the scrutiny of repeated playback. When I was finally mentally prepared for the task (read: I’d futzed with everything else for a week without making any substantive progress) I listened closely to all four takes and made notes about what I liked in each. What I found surprised me: I had indeed captured guitar magic, but it was spread evenly across all four takes.

Combining them was a challenge. I used a technique advocated by ProTools book author David Franz, whose Digizine article about creating a comp vocal track describes the process. It can be used for any instrument, including multi-tracked instruments. It could even be used to edit drums, although you’ll develop RSI in the process.

The trick is selecting exactly the same material from two tracks and pasting it into two other tracks. Selection accuracy is key; if I pasted the chorus from the Beyer mic even one sample off from the position of the SM57 version of the chorus, the guitar sound would change, or could even be out of phase. I needed the comped SM57 track to be identical, in terms of edits and transitions, to the Beyer track.

Of course, it’s not as easy as simply copying and pasting. Each such edit brings an opportunity for a bad transition. Crossfading between passages fixes many such problems, but in several cases the notes didn’t line up — Steve improvised some of the sections, and the basic material was different. I used ProTools’ TCE — time compression and expansion — widget to stretch out some passages to compensate for notes I’d clipped out.

The longest such edit happens right before the first harmony section. I needed to replace about a half-second of audio to make the edit work. Stretching a note that long with TCE seems to make it go flat. Also, because I had to repeat the edit for the Beyer mic track, the stereo image moves around. The combination is either a neat effect or a mistake. But I guess that happens a lot in recording, and you don’t know until the 100th listen which it is.

Pictured is my workspace in the midst of the guitar comp.