Perfectionist Syndrome

[scooby_doobie]

Does anybody else suffer from this? I’ve been tracking guitars all day, but I’ve done hardly any work. There’s probably nothing wrong with the performance, it probably sounds okay, but take after take I find something wrong with it and delete it and start again.

Perhaps it will sound okay once it is mixed properly with the other tracks. My confidence is fading and my rut is getting deeper.

Does anybody else suffer from this perfectionist syndrome?
How do you deal with it? How do you know when enough is enough and move on? How perfected does it really need to be?

Cheers!

[Murt]

Originally Posted by scooby_doobie

Does anybody else suffer from this? I’ve been tracking guitars all day, but I’ve done hardly any work. There’s probably nothing wrong with the performance, it probably sounds okay, but take after take I find something wrong with it and delete it and start again.

Perhaps it will sound okay once it is mixed properly with the other tracks. My confidence is fading and my rut is getting deeper.

Does anybody else suffer from this perfectionist syndrome?
How do you deal with it? How do you know when enough is enough and move on? How perfected does it really need to be?

Cheers!

You need to take regular breaks. Change to a different session - get some fresh air - leave it overnight - come back the next day and it will sound completely different. I've been guilty of over recording/over tweaking guitars, vox, bass, you name it. What I find best is to come back with fresh ears. If everything is perfect the track can start to sound sterile, it loses the human feel and you forget what sound you were trying to achieve in the first place. Also, listen to the guitars in the track - nobodys gonna hear them soloed but you. If they sit well in the track then they're done. If you've been tracking guitars all day you could be suffering from listening fatigue - TAKE A BREAK.

[Dorian Green]

Yeah, everything said above is very true.
Also there's a time you have to STOP.Even Big Mixing Eng would like to do and redo their mixes, but you can't really!
Beside you noone will notice the little mistakes....Human after all!

[Fastermouse]

Read this. It will help. If it sucks, it sucks, But... better done than perfect. Just listen.

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.p...&highlight=box

[Herkimer]

Assuming your issue is performance/execution and not tone, you can rely on digital editing to move this process along. Lay your track down and don't stop no matter what. Keep going if you make a mistake. Keep going even if you screw up the form. Just get through the darn thing.

Now have a listen back and analyze the track as a whole. If there are more things done correctly on it that not, keep it. If you totally screwed up the second verse transition but nailed everything else -that's a keeper for now. If you played the wrong chord in the bridge but nailed a really technical section - that's a keeper. Otherwise, record it again and don't stop just like before.

Once you've hit a keeper (and it should only take 2-3 passes) start to use you DAW to correct mistakes. This could be as simple as punching in to fix a bad chord. If could be a little more complex like copying and pasting a good verse from somewhere else in the song over a bad verse. It could be something more complex like pitch shifting a bad chord that has good timing. You could even employ elastic audio to correct minor timing issues.

The point is to get it down and then spend a little time fixing things rather than try to record the perfect take. In my experience, I've never nailed the perfect take - but I've cobbled together some really nice tracks with overdubs, TCE, elastic audio, copy and paste, and pitch shifting.

I think you'll find it's faster to overdub a 6 second transition break than re-record and entire 4 minute song. It's even faster to copy that transition break from somewhere else in the song and paste it over the one you screwed up. You just need to have nailed it once somewhere in the song.

I don't think the perfect take exists, does it?

[peppertree]

I think this is all wrapped up in your quest for acceptance, especially self-acceptance.

I don't think music is a particularly fruitful medium to apply towards that specific quest, because it is far too easy to compare our work to the very best in history.

Maybe try cooking or something which is fairly hard to duplicate the best of en masse.

Otherwise find some way to get over yourself and enjoy what you can do.

[Murt]

Originally Posted by peppertree

Maybe try cooking or something

True, but you could still end up in a situation where you have to comp all the best bits together. If you're trying to create the perfect casserole in one go it could end up being very messy and expensive and in the end you could still suffer from over-cooking fatigue.

[peppertree]

The nice thing about cooking as your medium for self-acceptance is that pure hunger alone forces you to finish something daily.

[joshman86]

A true artist is never "done" with a project. They have to abandon it. lol

[sw rec]

There is, in fact, a fine line between going for the best and thinking it to death. I can't tell you how many mixes I thought were fine, but listened to them a year later and wondered what I was thinking!!! This is how we are constantly getting better.
But another case in point....my favorite studio guitarist is AMAZING. His FIRST take always blows me away, but he'll always want to do a few more. I would guess that 8 out of 10 times, I end up using the first thing he did. It was spontaneous, and not thought to death!
You can also over-do "perfect" and turn it into "Sterile" if you're not careful....