Bouncing Tracks

Remember the simple acoustic song you composed and recorded? It only took up three tracks of the four you have available to you. Track One contains your acoustic guitar; Track Two your vocals; and Track Three some harmonica playing. You’ve stepped away from it for a few days to let it settle and now here it is again, piping loudly through your headphones.

But something is missing you think. What is it? You thought it sounded pretty good when you first recorded it. You had practiced the song until your fingers bled. So what’s the problem? Then it hits you ...

More instruments.

While your song has stood up well after detaching yourself from it for a few days, you can hear other instruments in the background. Instruments you have yet to record. You can hear a bass floating beneath the melody, and isn’t that the sound of bongos beating their way to the surface? But you only have one track left to record them on. What now?

Time to practice the subtle art of “bouncing” tracks. Be forewarned – it’s not for the squeamish. A bad bounce can put you right back to the starting board and a total reconstruction of the song you thought you were close to wrapping up.

The idea is a simple one. To free up another track you just need to combine two of the tracks already recorded by “bouncing” them to a third. Let’s look at your song. There are many ways we could do this, and many combinations we can make as the song grows and evolves, but we’ll keep it simple. Let’s take tracks One and Three. These contain your guitar and harmonica respectively. We’ll now move them together to Track Four. Don’t do it too fast. This takes time. First, adjust the settings of your recorder so that Track Four is ready to record only what is on tracks One and Three (refer to your manual for this as different recorders may require different settings). The trick here is to listen. Adjust the levels to where you like them before actually bouncing them to Track Four. Once they’ve been bounced you will be recording over them, and if you don’t like how they sound together on Track Four it will be too late. Once your happy with the levels then do it – hit RECORD.

There. Simple enough? Let’s see. Listen to the combined tracks on Track Four to see how it sounds. If you don’t approve then do it again. If you do approve then congratulations! You now have Tracks One and Three open to record. Your vocals are on Track Two and your guitar with harmonica are together on Track Four. Feel free to add the bass and bongos at your leisure.

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