The more layers you have the less perfect they need to be

My youth orchestra just had a virtual concert the other day so I edited together a virtual orchestra video. I had my students record themselves playing along to a track + video of me conducting and I layered them all together.

I also recorded myself playing violin on it four times. I’ve been playing violin for about a year. I’m not very good and my recordings were far from perfect, but I left them in the recording because they added some extra beef to the sound. It made the violin section sound larger.

It also made me realize that the more layers you have, the less perfect they need to be. If you have only one recording you’ll notice every imperfection. If you have two you won’t notice each imperfection as much. If you have three you’ll notice fewer imperfections in each recording. That continues. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. My guess is that if you have five recordings of one violin part and one player makes a small mistake, but all the other players don’t make that mistake, you’re still hearing four correctly played versions of that part.

And the more layers you have the more “correct” versions you’re hearing in each section.

Going back to my violin recordings for my youth orchestra. Each recording on its own doesn’t sound very good, but together they sound great. There might be one of them that has an imperfection, but the other recordings don’t have that imperfection, so the majority of the recordings you’re listening to are “correct”.

Try it out if you’re adding layers to something. Try to just record multiple quickly and if you need to make small edits later do so, but at first try to pump out a bunch of them right away.

ISJ