Rehearsing for Music Recording

Video Transcript

"Before you go into the studio, you do want to rehearse your material. This doesn't just mean rehearsing as a full band and playing out the songs -that's what you do before you go in and do a live show. No. You want to rehearse the particular parts that you're going to be doing and rehearse the experience of playing along to something that's already recorded. So if you're a drummer, of course you want to rehearse with the whole band and hear everybody. But you may also discover that you want to rehearse with just a click track if your session is not going to involve everybody else playing along. By doing this, you'll know where you are at each point in the song without having the band there to guide you through the process. As a guitar player, you're going to want to play along with a drum track and be able to do it without having the singer around. As a singer it's important to rehearse beforehand so that you know just how you want to intonate here, what you want to stress there. Certain techniques that work live, like over-exaggerating a line, or things that are combined with a body gesture are not going to translate on a recording. So you want to think about just how you want your part to be immortalized once it hits the record. It's good to get together, even in just a small group like singer and a guitar player, guitar player and a bass player, and to run through everything beforehand. That way once you get into the session, you're warmed up, nothing is coming at you cold because it is a performance. Even though it's a recording, you can redo stuff and each part is played separately most of the time, it's still a performance and you want to perform well."