Tracking

Tracking is where the magic starts. You've spent all this time writing the songs, you've booked your studio time and everyone's arrived at the studio. Here's (roughly) what to expect:

• Coffee. Or tea, if you prefer. If you've booked a studio with a bit of nowse about them, the engineer, his (or her) assistant and the studio manager will already be there when you arrive, with everything opened up, switched on, ready to go and a nice brew on the go. Grab your gear out of the car, drop it in the live area and take a few minutes to have a cuppa with the guys. It's important as well as refreshing, for many reasons: Firstly, introductions - it's probably the first time the engineer has met you, he probably doesn't know your name, the names of the other band members, and he may not even know what kind of music you play or what instruments you have. Secondly, it gives both you and the engineer a chance to discuss the plan for the coming days, your expectations and ideas, and how the studio is set up and tends to work. Finally, it gives you a few minutes to adjust to your environment and hopefully explore the studio a little bit. It's often intimidating walking into a professional studio, and getting used to the ambience will relax you immensely.
• Once the introductions are out of the way, it's down to work, and there's a lot of it. Recording takes time, and a 3 or 4 song demo is a lot to fit into a 2 or 3 day window. Tracking boils down to capturing the performances of the band, and getting your sounds into the mixing desk. Every engineer will work differently, and every band will have different instruments, requirements and need a different approach, so don't be surprised if things differ slightly when you get to your choice of studio. Some studios like to isolate everyone and capture the whole performance in one shot (ideal if you're on a short time-scale), others prefer to overdub and capture one instrument at a time. Either approach can work depending on your skill as a band and the layout of the studio, and you'll probably find a mixture of both is pretty common too. So the first stage is to get everyone set up, sounding great and get a mic on everything!
• Once everything has a mic on it and we're getting levels and nice sounds in the control room, we'll set up a headphone mix. This will allow all the band members to hear everyone else and any click tracks, guide parts etc. Beware, it can get loud, so earplugs might be necessary! The upshot of all this is that we should find ourselves, by around lunchtime, with everyone in the room together (or at least with visual contact) and with all the instruments nicely isolated and sounding good.
• Lunchtime on Day 1! Everyone's eager, but now is a good time to take a quick break, get yourselves fed and focussed for a hard afternoon's graft.
• Now that everyone's refreshed and raring to go, we start tracking. This process will take between half and two thirds of the total studio time booked, and we'll work through the songs laying down the tracks until all the parts of all the songs are recorded. If we're tracking individually and overdubbing, first off we'll look for a "keeper" take on the drums for all the songs, then we'll pack the drums up and move on to the guitars, basses, vocals, keyboards etc, one at a time, getting the best performances and sounds for each part. If, on the other hand, we're looking to capture the whole band playing the song in a one-shot, we'll go through the song until everyone's happy and we get a take where everything sounds great.

By the end of the tracking process we should have every musical and vocal section recorded, and it's time to move on:

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