I was recording a new single. It’s a straightforward weird folk arrangement with a single guitar and vocals. Once the gear was all setup, I needed two or three attempts to dial in the sound that I was hoping to achieve. The first official take felt really good but upon inspection, there were a lot of p-pops in the vocals. The technical term for this problem is a plosive. I had many plosives. I adjusted the microphone angle and tried to be more disciplined with how I was annunciating the words. Eight tries later, I had a relatively clean recording. The problem is that the clean and polished track didn’t have the same energy as the very first time through. It’s so hard to balance these artistic expectations. Is it best to have less vibe and a clean recording or tons of energy and a messy recording? It is also easy to fall into a trap where you continuously convince yourself that it will be perfect with one more try. It will never be perfect but where is that magical line? We want an engaging performance combined with the best technical recording that we can possibly capture. Typically I just keep recording until I get sick of the song and then just roll with the best iteration. Hopefully when I listen to the recording tomorrow, it will be better than I expect.
