So long story short, I've been recording this band's album, track by track, and everyone has recorded except for the second guitarist who started today. The band rented a studio for three days for him to record his parts. Today was the first day and after setting up and finding some good tones we start with the first song. I quickly realise that something weird is going on with his timing. He was always ahead of the tempo, playing completely out of "the pocket". I told him and even showed him why that sounded weird and how ahead he was playing in comparison to everyone else. I told him to try another song in an attempt to get him "unstuck". He did the same thing on the second song. After many hours we try another one. Same thing again. I politely told him that he needs to take some rest, he agreed and we are going back to the studio tomorrow morning. The thing is that im pretty sure its going to be the same tomorrow. The weird thing is that this guy has a classical guitar degree. By the way, the rest of the band was high af by the end of todays session and they couldnt communicate properly. Do you have any suggestions on how to help him get better withing a short period of time ? We have like 2 days for him to track 9 songs. I dont think that its going to happen. It feels so bad to have to tell him time after time that his take is bad. But theres nothing I can do.

 

Everyone has a dominant ear. For most people the left ear specializes in slower and lower frequencies and the right ear specializes in faster higher frequencies. I read a book called "The Conscious Ear" by Alfred Tomatis. In the book he explains that there is a wide range of times the information can get from the ears to the brain. Different people have different wiring getting from the ears to the part of the brain that deals with sound. In the book he recounts how he helped people with severe stuttering in the 1950s by having them speak into different lengths of plastic tubing held up to their ears. With every 10 feet adding a certain number of milliseconds delay to what was leaving their mouth and arriving at their ears. With the correct distance tube they could speak without stuttering at all. And with practice they could eventually speak perfectly without the tube.

Perhaps the issue with your guitarist is that in a studio setting he is not hearing his bandmates in the way that he does when they play in rehearsal. Maybe he uses visual cues to stay locked in time like watching the drummer or feeling the floor vibrate with the drums in addition to "hearing" with his ears.
Under the time constraints that you are facing hear are some offered suggestions:

1. Try doing something radical in his monitor/headphone mix. See if it is better to have the playback all or mostly on one side or the other?
2. Try using different sounds for the click. If there is not a click, try using a drum replacer plugin to trigger off the snare or kick some sound that catches his ear better. A sound that you can control and try the aforementioned panning and level adjustment to see if he can lock in better.
3. Some people cannot play to a click because they have never practiced it. Some people can't play with headphones, especially singers. Maybe set up a situation where he is hearing the playback through speakers.
4. Get one of those subwoofer vests for him so he is feeling the pulse instead of just listening. If you can't get one in time, have him sit on a subwoofer or PA speaker with all the treble turned down.
5. Take the time you have and figure out how to build little runways before his entries in his parts of the songs. Sometimes if you can loop the sections by the third or fourth go round non-click players can get locked in. Break it down into smaller bite sized chunks to record instead of spending time doing the entire song at once.
6. Are you sure there isn't any latency in the monitoring as well as the recording end of the process? Check out his monitoring chain personally and do some tests with a click and the mic to make sure everything is lining up correctly. Sometimes plugins added for monitoring reverb or delay will add just enough latency to throw a brother off time. Sometimes it is some other setting, maybe something on the master buss. If he is the last one to go maybe the computer is buckling under pressure from the rest of the tracks. Maybe the system was in a soft crash and just needed a reboot to get those buffers reset.
7. Steve Vai has a great exercise where you take a metronome and clap along to it. Trying to make the metronome disappear completely by the sound of your hands clapping. Maybe test him and see if he can do it at all, and then see if he is better with the metronome on the left ear or the right? Then when you go in the computer see if this gained info helps him sync up.
8. Get radical with the monitor mix. Maybe there is too much going on for him to hear himself and whatever he needs to hear to lock in.
9. Get really good at some editing and time stretching tools in whatever software you are using.

Good luck.

 

i don't think you can fix "him" in any small timeframe. you could get him to track all of the material out, so that way you have it recorded. and then fix timing mistakes as best as possible on them later. or you will run out of studio time without them done anyway. it's not your fault if he cannot keep time, but they can blame you for not recording all nine songs (to themselves.)

Option 9 in above post. Logic Flex Time is very good for this. maybe your daw has an equivalent feature.

 

Replace him. Seriously. He can't cut it. You're going to make yourself crazy. Hell, don't tell him. If I had a dollar for every guitarist I've replaced after the fact and they don't even know I'd have... I dunno, 9 or 10 bucks...

 

It'd be a like teaching a singer not so sing flat and sharp notes in two days.

I'm surprised, if they are a band in that you didn't record them together and then go back to parts and overdub or try to repair damage down the line.

 

When you tell them it will cost more to fix it all, they will probably be already expecting it. Maybe he is predictably off on each take, and it won't be all that bad to fix. This is what Flex Time works like, it's based on hitpoint/transient detection, and re-aligning mistakes. it's very tedious.

 

Last edited: Jul 29, 2023

You can add a metronome any classically trained musician should be able to lock in on a metronome. If he is locked in time you can slide the whole track there are latency issues confusing him, the rest will be in time.

Outside I am not sure what you can do.

Not your job to fix stuff like that. Unless you have a stake in the band, capture, pin and print.

You were paid to capture their sound and if that is part of their sound, so be it.

 

Once a musician picks up a bad habit, it's pretty much stuck with him for life. Some are able to 're-invent' themselves but the first key is recognising that you have it in the first place.

 

my timing was worse than I'd prefer most of my life, and then I was finally diagnosed with adhd in my middle years and realized bad timing was part of the symptoms. weird as it sounds adderall (or other meds) may help your guitarist (especially as there don't seem to be many other options for him)

 

If his tempo is higher than other tracks tempo then pitch down the tracks and play him pitched down version so his tempo will be higher than pitched down but should be good in normal tempo then
Maybe sounds stupid but if will work then it doesn't be stupid. And he doesn't even need to know about your little intervention

 

It sounds like he might be anxious and trying too hard, classical guitar players who have only ever played classical guitar can struggle to play in a band situation. I was once in the company of such a player, in a relaxed place where we were just playing bits of songs and improvising. This guy was playing in classical guitar competitions with many years experience but he sounded like a beginner with less formal music. The pocket isn't the same as a metronome and that was partly his problem, he was too precise.

 

maybe the rest of the band is off.
a little crystal sugar (from one of my cereals) might help some of the slower players.

 

I always play around with the Nudge tool in Reaper.

 

No one's getting better at anything within a short period of time, not within hours or days.

If you're lucky, he's ahead in a constant way so you can just move his tracks a bit.
If this doesn't work, you could try to quantize his tracks but this could be difficult to impossible (in a sufficient way), depending on the sound.
Best would be to ask the other guitarist to play these parts too.
Usually, studio time is too valuable (too expensive) to find out why he has this difficulties. He needs to do this on his own, better with the band.

 

Improvising is next to impossible for the vast majority of classically trained musicians as they are always shown pretty much exactly what to play. I've seen Itzak Pearlman trying to jam and it was interesting to see him fail so miserably for one of the greatest violinists ever. Check out :36 onwards of this video to hear his chops. If he were in your band he'd need it all on paper.

 

Thank you all so much for taking the time to try and help me out ! Small update from todays session : He never got to fix his timing but I got the other guitar player to learn and play his parts. Even I played on one song haha. I think we are going to finish the guitars on time tomorrow thank you again !

 

There's always the "Phil Spector techique."

Point a loaded revolver at his head.