Songwriting is a craft, so it takes experience, but there are some rules. There are four classes at Berklee Online that address this. If that's all you want - vox and guitar - then does it need to be any closer in solid tempo than it already is? They won't necessarily even need to hear the vox track. If you want to put other instruments - played by others - onto the recording, they will likely need a solid rhythm to follow, it's much easier. With that simple but regular drum track it's relatively easy to put fills in later, when you've got the rest of the tracks down, and you can hear where there's space for them. But, it's far more tricky matching a perfect drum track to what's already been done, as you found out! ![]() Whether this track stays at the end is a decision made later. And it's easier to re-record a small section. I still find it's better than a click track, or metronome, as it feels like I'm playing with 'proper' drums. Tempo-wise, experiment to find the optimum - often, I've recorded a whole track, only to feel that it's not quite the right speed or feel. Try to find the beat that's most appropriate, but that's not all that easy. I usually put a drum track down first, as a reference for all other tracks. Listening to the song, the guitar is fine on timing - the vocals wander a bit, but that's probably the way you want them to. ![]() It's going to depend a lot on what you do with it next. So you need to learn to put things on a more conscious basis. You're very musical that way, but now you've run into something where you charge at it and it doesn't happen. You just charge at it, and it just happens. I may be totally off base on this, but I get the impression you do everything by instinct and feel, without thinking about it. Finally I started listening, and it's almost unbelievable how much that helps. After decades as a self-taught guitarist, I've been taking piano lessons, and my teacher keeps telling me to slow down when I screw up. Do you tap your foot in time while playing? If that doesn't come naturally, that's the first thing to learn. The simplest thing would be just a kick on the downbeats (one thump underneath each of these words: "this", "never", "any", "better"). GarageBand's groove track feature is great, but it'll take some fiddling to get it to fit the feel you have there, and I wonder if that might not be what's tripping you up. I think you just need practice playing along with an external time source, and getting used to the idea that the downbeats are there whether you're emphasizing them on the guitar or not. I think you're slowing down a bit over the course of that Soundcloud track (solid songwriting effort btw), but other than that it's the same feel and tempo and meter all the way through, no half bars or dropped beats or funny business. Any idea what I need to study or practice in order to overcome this hurdle? I'm feeling overwhelmed and hoping for some advice that will give me direction and motivation. There are so many things to try doing or studying or practicing. So anyways, I feel like I'm going about this all wrong, or maybe it's just hard. I was inspired to make this post after spending several hours failing at writing midi drum phrases that would tell GarageBand how to warp this song correctly into time (in hopes it would give me a recording that I could use make a better drum track to help me play the song in time). Somehow this never works out like I planned.Ĥ) Make a drum track using the groove track feature of GarageBand, then re-record using the drum track My thought is always to cut up a recording into (relatively in-time) pieces, record again where necessary, make a drum track, redo the guitar over the drum track (or the cut-up guitar), redo the vocals once the better guitar is down. Well, I've tried this with a bunch of songs, while I've had more success with this than option (2), I've never been happy with the results. In fact, while I've tried this many times, I don't know if I've ever gotten past the first few bars. OK, well I guess this is probably the fool proof way, but, as an amateur it can take me days. I believe these issues, at least in part, stem from the fact that I've never transcribed the song I'm playing - I usually don't know where exactly the beats fit into the rhythm or amongst the words.Ģ) Transcribing/Carefully counting out each phrase, then recording with a metronome quantized/snapped to the beat inappropriately) in places. OK, now my songs are in time, but are different (e.g. How do songwriters make recordings that are in time?
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