Comp together your best takes

Something I learned while watching the recording engineers at Berklee College of Music (thanks for all the help Scott, Fred, and Jason) was to comp together the best recordings you’ve made.

You don’t need to have one long, perfect take. As long as you have all of the different sections recorded well and they’re somewhat around the same tempo, you’ll be able to edit them together to have one good take.

Here’s a screenshot of the piano track for a version of Joy to the World that I’m putting together with my students.

This is the waveform for that piano track. I recorded three different takes and comped them together. The top one is the finished track. You can see that it’s different colors and it alternates between the colors of the bottom three. That’s how you can see where the edits are.

Most of the edits are quick and just getting rid of a few small mistakes, but put together it sounds much better.

And it’s hardly noticeable when you listen to the finished track.

Most of the time you want to make sure you crossfade the tracks (often fairly quickly) so that you don’t notice any transitions. But the way you want to edit it changes depending on what the specific edit is.

One thing that can help make this easier to manage is playing to a click track. That way all of the different sections will be in the same place every single time. It’ll also make sure that the tempo doesn’t change when you do edits like this.

A click track isn’t required. I’m recording a number of Christmas songs that’ll be up on my YouTube channel soon where I didn’t play to a click. For those recordings, I’ve mostly been making small edits, sometimes as short as one chord, because there are tiny little things that I want to clean up.

This technique is super useful. The main thing is to make sure that everything is timed correctly. You can do this visually as well as auditorially. Listen to the track and make sure it sounds good. Your ears are the best way to check it, but you can also use the waveforms. Do they line up if you compare them? That way everything will sound good when comped together.

Good luck. Hope this was useful.

ISJ