speeding up recordings???

Long Johns

Hi folks,
Sorry, total production philistine here - a musician in other words...

Long story short, we have a load of songs recorded with an engineer. Album release should bein a couple of months. They've been done in Cubase with click etc and drums lined up with drumagog (I think). Drums will be heavily sampled by the time we get round to mastering. Guitars heavily layered and edited.

So someone has the idea of speeding the album up (across the board, all tracks). Possibly and probably to make it sound more commercial, which makes me want to puke. They're good songs but we're independent with little or no intention/chance of signing a big deal so we're in charge 100% creatively. To give some context, we've speeded up everything significantly already to the point where we've listened to the rough mixes a lot, and if anything, there's one or 2 that are possibly too fast and the rest are maxed out. Im 100% sure the songs can't benefit from this, it's not just musicians being precious I assure you. We've compromised a huge amount already.

Its like looking at 13 paintings and saying "yeah, not bad, but they could all do with a bit of red". But I'm digressing, sorry, ...that could be another thread altogether..

Because I still know so little about the tech. side of things, can you tell me would the music degrade signifcantly with such an implementation? Maybe not...I don't know...what do you think?

PaulBrewer

Any process can have a negative impact on overall quality.

Tempo stretching most certainly is one.
The quality has improved a lot in the last few years but I've not heard anything that doesn't leave some negative artifacts.

To express a personal view - the idea of 'speeding up an album' sounds daft and indicates a last of direction and focus for the project.

Tempo is a decision best made at the start of a project, not at the end.

Long Johns

believe me, I couldn't agree more with your personal view Paul.

I was just curious as to the technical ramifications also, cuz if it's not technically sound to boot...it makes it all the more preposterous.

Can I ask would it simply be a standard no no to do this or is it done much? On a scale of 1-10 how strange a proposal is it to just speed up drums, bass and guitars from the point of view of end quality?

PaulBrewer

As I say I've not heard it work without significant artifacts.

I do use it myself in situations where one might experiment with the tempo of a demo in Live, Logic or PTools to hear how a redone track might feel at a different speed.

I've also Tempo Stretched some 'secondary' parts , say a percussion or FX part that isn't musically degraded by the process i.e. it may not be a hi-fi part in the first place, to copy from one take to a different tempo take. It's not as if this process doesn't get used, just not generally on a whole mix.

With regard to strangeness - I'm used to hearing total bollox ideas daily so I'll give it a 7 ...;)

Seziertisch

If you were working with tape it would be possible to speed up the whole thing and tighten up the bands playing quite a bit. A lot of the Smiths recordings have this done (particularly effective on This Charming Man). You will notice that the guitars are about a 1/4 step sharp. That said it isn't an extreme tempo change. Otherwise the vocals would have to be resung at this pitch, speed them up and you have Alvin and the Chipmunks happening.

Otherwise to decide to do it for a whole album is completely crackpot. Decisions on tempo should have been taken before even setting up a mic. I know a lot of times a producer will get a band playing in rehersal/pre-production and then when he feels they have really dropped into the groove he will note the tempo for future reference. This way there won't be any "Can you play it at the same tempo as you did on Tuesday? We are ... No, you're not etc."

Long Johns

@ Paul
Yes these are album tracks, with layers upon layer of guitars on them already, so its not like we're doing a bit of reconn, to see where they might go if we sped up the click for 'actual' recordings. They're won't be retracking done, just a speed up. It's just f*cked up to me TBH, especially the notion of applying a sweeping logic to the whole album, totally f*cked up.

@ Seziertisch
yeah, the suggestion was to record vox again, more madness given the effort put into getting the takes. The whole phrasing and delivery would need radical overhaul with the new tempos too.

I don't know why I'm even discussing this on a forum cuz it's not gonna get discussed in the studio! I just needed some opinions to make sure I wasn't completely losing it.

dav nagle

If you import all the wavs into pro tools 8 you can select the entire project and in polyphonic mode adjust the tempo. Apparently the quality is very good and if it you lose quality but the song feels better it's a good trade off.