Music is love (but I'm not so sure about recording)

I've spent almost three hours this afternoon trying to record some music, and I reckon I've successfully got about one and a half minutes down. I almost managed to get the last minute and a half done too, but gave up when my fingers started hurting too much and my irritation with the headphones became too strong (they kept slipping off midway through the last section, so I was left concentrating harder on keeping them nearly on my head than on playing the perfect take).

So what am I doing wrong? Do I have the wrong plan - should I just sit down, record something, and be done with it? (Especially bearing in mind the fact that hardly anyone will ever hear what I've recorded anyway.) At the end of the day, every 'take' captures one unique moment, with all its own sort of beauty and all its own flaws. What is there to gain in trying to 'beat' one of these earlier moments?

The trouble is that I know I won't listen to what I've recorded again with any sort of satisfaction if I've not done something pretty bloody close to the best of my abilities; and because I don't play every day, don't play in a band, don't play regularly enough with a metronome, it takes me a long time to get the right mood in even a thirty second snippet of very simple guitar. And that's without all the stresses of perfect 'mood' takes that collapse heaving to the ground a few paces from the finishing line because of a slip of a finger or sudden over-confidence. So I think it's got to be like this; eventually, I'll get better at it, and it won't take so long. And I think that there's a degree to which the final take - whichever one it turns out to be - feeds on all the ones before it, often in ways we don't notice - perhaps a nuance of emphasis or attack, perhaps in the rhythms, perhaps even the way the instrument is positioned. And given that every recorded moment has the advantage of uniqueness, the final one has to do something else to be the best - and I think the right notes, tight rhythm and sound are the bare minimum required.

So I don't think it's wasted time - I just wish I could guarantee that there'd be something to show for every hour I spend at it.

Comments

[Le Poulet Noir]

I don't think there's any harm in being making imperfect recordings. If you are unhappy with your them it will encourage you to go back and make them better. I can't play a musical instrument for buggery, but I take pride in my writing. I worry about whether my blog entries are worth doing, but in the end it makes sense to publish them anyway and improve on them if I can see how.

[thesunbrothers]

The record button also has an inbuilt sensor which detects significance in a recording and transmits mind altering electrical waves accordingly. If a take really doesn't matter to you because you are just roughing out a song or trying out an idea then it leaves the brain well alone. If it realises, however, that you are certain on the part, sure how to play it and determined to nail it in a pass or two, it sends out very powerful electrical signals which make the hands forget what they are supposed to be doing, make the strings move from under your hands and, in the worst cases (ie when it's very significant to you indeed) rob the brain of all sense of rhythm. One might have thought that this feature would have been discontinued on modern recording equipment, but in fact it has been developed to new levels of sophistication. My recent solution has been never to press the record button at all, but I am hoping to improve upon this. Le Poulet Noir's suggestion above is far more useful.

[Le Poulet Noir]

I disagree with the last sentence of the Sun Brothers' comment. My input was the kind of thing you might read in a self-help book. The Sun Brothers' was the sort of article you would find in Nature or, at the very least, the New Scientist.
Could you not overcome the recording equipment's anti-perfection feature by replacing the "record" button on a modern machine with a button from a 1950s machine? I can't believe that the two anti-perfection mechanisms would be compatible.

[Peter]

Thanks both - since this post, I have gone closest to following the suggestion of simply not pressing record (apart from an entirely frustrating Sunday afternoon of faithless attempts to finish what I'd started). However, if things don't improve fairly rapidly, I'll consider creating a mutant recorder with the genetically immobilised anti-perfection mechanisms.

I should add that I do particularly like the idea that I might 'play a musical instrument for buggery'.