Full Takes vs Punch in Takes

Your question depends entirely upon the talent you're recording.

If they are stellar players then get the full take because good players will settle into a pocket. Working with Nashville players I'll usually ask they just play the whole thing over if they're wanting to punch in a couple of places, what is great is normally another player or two will want to take it with them and you get more and more to choose from.

If you've got players that are not as great then you've got to punch almost all the time. Usually it's because they let their minds get in front of their playing and they will mess a note up or play something totally wrong. With singers though, there is usually always punches.. when you're going for something and they just can't do it physically then you have to punch. I always give them a good runway though... little short punches and just popping in a phrase always seems to throw off the vibe.

If I've got a choice though I'm always wanting the full band with the singer to all be going at the same time from start to finish, and sometimes, I've had them nail it on the first take, what a feeling that is too, pure magic. Saves $$$$ too

Yup, as Jerome said, good players don't need to punch in nearly as much - if ever. And the excitement you can get from a good group doing a good take is stellar. Likewise, the feel of an under-rehearsed group with no chops can be pretty poor.

I'll do a take as cleanly as we can and if we need to punch in a little, we'll just drop in once or twice. If we need to do it a lot, I'll probably get them to do takes of the verses/choruses they're goofing up without having them go into the next section. But unless the song is structurally so dense we need to break up the sections (i.e the vocalist overlaps over sections a lot) I'd never assume we're going to punch section by section from the get-go.

well, it's not always about the talent, unless you think Whitney Houston and Marvin Gaye aren't talented? haha, they were both punch machines! The thought was "this is forever", get it exactly the way you want it! I think Whitney would do almost every line of every song that way. I always found punching is more easily gotten away with by people with great time, and great short term musical memory.

Comping is a standard recording method. As has been said here, great artists do it. For me, I will comp a guitar solo not so much to cover mistakes, but to capture the "best" cumulative feel over the sections of a solo break. On rhythm guitar tracks, I try to get a good performance. So, it depends. There is video of Michael Jackson on YT singing take after take of single phrases, and he was so good they all sound identical. They may have intended to layer his voice, but whatever the result, I bet it was assembled as a big comp.

It depends, doesn't it.

Where I've landed is I usually end up keeping the one full take that had the feeling I wanted, flaws and all.

I track by myself a lot, so I have no issue with comping something like a bass line because my bass playing is barely adequate, but I find I rarely need to.

Ultimately, I do what sounds better and don't judge how. It is usually the better vibe vocal take I keep, but I would comp a phrase or two if I had to, luckily, I haven't had to lately. Both my pitch correction programs seem to create artifacts, so I don't use them. I haven't tried Melodyne yet though, and wouldn't mind fixing a note or two occasionally, especially if it's THE take.

there's an old cannonball adderley album where they have multiple takes of the same tune. i was always unsure of why the 2nd and 3rd takes sounded weird. turns out the 3rd take was the result of taking his solo from take 2, and laying it on top of the band's performance on take 1 or somethin' like that. This was back in the late 1950's, so just imagine how they did that before click tracks and DAWs...

Recognizing that sometimes a customer will want a certain extremely polished sound, especially with pop music, I still know what I personally like.

Would be good to get Bob's input on this, because those Motown recordings are "pop" but sound very alive. Didn't they just overdub strings and vocals?

I think it's best to do several takes of a song with as many live parts as possible. Then depending on complexity, carefully splice the best sections together, much like you would with tape. If you edit too much, you mess with the momentum of the performance. And if you don't notice a problem with this, then perhaps the song isn't being performed well enough in the first place!

The best musicians need only a few takes and not 15, but sometimes you really nail the bridge or the intro, or the verse dynamics, or whatever. Though you have to balance that with what's going to work when spliced together, due to tempo fluctuations in the transition.

As I understand it, the Beatles in their early days and some great recordings on DG, EMI and Decca were cut similarly, but movement by movement with 4-5 takes. You did have the bar by bar thing though too, but you can often hear the bad tape splices anyway, which went along with the spot-miking craziness in the 70s that creeps up today.

Then you overdub vocals if the band is too loud to do them live in the room and resist the phrase by phrase comping as much as possible. And headphones can really mess with some singers' performances, so you use monitors for them. But still, the sectional thing works provided the takes are from the same session, and the mic hasn't moved, and so on. But of course with some melodies, there will be one note that's just hard to land, so you do that over and over.

Anyway, this is just my own view, I hate music that sounds canned. I'd rather take mistakes and preserve the life of the performance. Just cut the songs that don't work out.

One of my favorite ideas about music comes from the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He repeats this saying a lot, but here's an example:

"For me, security and beauty and not compatible. When you seek beauty, you have to forget security, and you have to go to the rim of catastrophe. There you find the beauty. If a musician makes a mistake, a crack, because he risks everything to get the most beautiful thing and he fails, then I thank him for this failure because it is only with this risk you can get the beauty, the real beauty. The real beauty is not available at all. If you seek security, you should make another profession."

I punch in all the time because I'm always screwing up here and there. That said, I don't waste much time punching in either. Never ever worry about getting things perfect. I personally don't even like to listen to perfect music. Imperfections however slight even with great players is much more real feeling to me.

Go back and listen to some old Hall and Oats for a good example of this. Darrel Hall has one of the best voices I've heard yet his vocals aren't perfect and I'm glad they aren't. They are perfectly imperfect.

I agree . You know the Beatles were not really that good technically on their instruments and voices . And how about Black Sabbath . 

But its still some of the best music EVER . 

I don't like perfect music . Thats why I really don't listen to any music that was made when DAWs were around . Everything I listen to is pretty much pre 1995 .

I just find the thread of the sung melody often gets lost. The natural build up or down. Like a good verse performance will have a flow as the singer lands on an inflection they like and builds from there, and likewise each chorus will have a certain intensity. Once you start messing with comped phrases too much, you often lose the natural expression, but it all depends on the material. 

To my mind, you don't want each verse or chorus sung the same way at all, and a good singer will really work at the performance each take or give up for the day. Ideally they've performed the song live many times and have the confidence, but they are still fresh for the day, like McCartney did to an extreme with Oh! Darling.

Then again, a few singers can just nail a brand new melody and lyrics in two takes.


The specific quote from Harnoncourt comes from his criticism of American orchestras as being too perfectionist, always worrying about fucking up. But his point is that musical expression involves risks.


A highly skilled musician knows the part perfectly and won't make mistakes easily, but takes performance risks for the sake of expression. That goes for a violin solo but also a drummer playing in a band. They know when to go for it, like a spontaneous fill which might screw up the rhythm section. Same with singer leaning on a phrase (sometimes it sounds stupid) and so on. But you figure out what works and what doesn't and hopefully get better at it.

One of my bands more popular songs from a good long while ago was recorded so horribly I often cringe when someone mentions they listened to it. Using a couple of shure sm7s and 57s through a mackie board the gear was also nothing glorious. One of the acoustics was from the 1920s and couldnt stay in tune in E so we dropped it to D and had the other guitars drop accordingly. The guitar played like butter though. We were obsessed with recording the entire album in one take as we felt punching in stole the 'essence' of the song (yeah its bs but we were young and arrogant and dumb) and 3 of the songs that were used were from one day. I had let a friend record us in his basement (I was actually interning in a studio at the time) that had probably the worst acoustics one could ask for. There was very little editing afterwards and hardly any effects other than a little compression here and there. All in all it was pretty far from ideal and the recordings really came out rough.
But...
Man can you feel the passion. The heart. Young. Pissed. Broken hearted. Dangerous. It all came through. I'll never forget that feeling at the end of one of the songs when the other guitarists solo is wrapping it up and we all end on the same note never looking at one another but just feeling our way through, and knowing we nailed it.
Its why I still record bands.
One of the reasons I still play music.
I punch in all the time nowadays when recording myself, clients, friends, etc...I'm far more clinical cause it makes it more tight. And tight usually sounds alright. Thats also what 99% of clients want.
I think Pink Floyds "Dark side..." was recorded over the course of a year or two and was really a compilation of punches. One would never know as it sounds completely seamless. Its also gone platinum several times over.