Hi all - this is my first time recording with my new microphone setup and I've been trying to making my triple bass ocarina sound less harsh (it sounds horrible on my phone mic). I didn't bother with reverb and only compressed the highest note I play by a small amount.
I was wondering if anyone had any tips for playing in time with a backing track - I feel like a metronome is not sufficient at times.
Hi @Nughm. Your mic setup sounds good to me now, certainly not harsh. A common cause of harsh sounds from ocarinas is due to the poor speaker quality in phones / laptops, and not an actual issue with the recording. As you are using headphones, that probably isn't an issue here.
Thee only thing that stands out to me in your performance are a few rhythmic 'trips' in the ascending scale runs, and such rhythmic trips are typically caused by needing to think 'which fingers do I need to move to perform this note sequence'. They can be addressed by practising those small parts slowly to a metronome, and then gradually speeding it up in increments of 10 to 20 bmp.
Could you provide any more details about what you are struggling with playing with backing tracks?
Mainly with tracks that I don't get off musescore (I can generate audio with metronome and play to that). I usually find it hard to play when they don't perfectly conform to a bpm and thus I can't simply generate a metronome track on audacity. I've tried adding some beats to cue in, but still it's difficult when it isn't the start of a passage or there isn't some bassline keeping the beat.
OK, so do you mean that you have trouble starting in time if the backing track has an introduction, or in the case of an instrumental interlude where you are not playing? Or do you also mean that you have difficulty staying in time if the music dynamically speeds up or slows down?
Mainly the third, but a bit of all to be honest.
The main advice that I can offer regarding keeping in time with music that dynamically changes tempo, is to find some recordings of performances that do this. Isolate a small section where the tempo changes and listen to it repeatedly, then once you start to feel at ease with what you're hearing, try clapping over it, in time with when each note starts. Once you can clap it, then try playing it.
This skill is more about developing an intuitive 'feel' for how to do it, by imitation, not a mechanical / logical understanding. By listening to and imitating a range of examples it starts to become subconscious.
You could also practice doing this practising over a midi track where you have programmed tempo changes, I presume musescore can do this. The result may / may not sound like what a human would do.
I'd say the same about knowing when you need to start playing, it's a matter of building an intuition for it, vs knowing how many beats to count. Music will often follow a predictable chord progression which one can learn to use to tell you subconsciously where in a piece of music you are. It is common for instance for sections to end in a 5 to 1 chord progression, called an authentic cadence.