Recording your rehearsals (and actually listening back)

Every band thinks it sounds better than it does, and every band that records its rehearsals finds this out within a week. The recording is the cheapest teacher a band can hire, and most bands never press the button, or press it and never listen.

What recording is for

Not for posterity. For three specific jobs:

1. Hearing what the audience hears. From inside the band, the drummer hears the drums and the singer hears the monitor. The recording hears the balance, the tempo drift and the ending that fell apart.
2. Making the next agenda. The rehearsal agenda writes itself from the recording: the three sections that were worst are the three items for next week.
3. Homework for absent members. The person who missed the rehearsal listens to the run-through and learns the arrangement decisions from it.

Three set-ups, and which to use

The phone on a stand

Cost: nothing. Set-up: 30 seconds. Put the phone at the back of the room at chest height, pointing at the band, on a stand or leaning against a bottle, using the voice memo app. Turn off any "voice enhancement" or noise reduction in the app settings; it eats drums. The result is rough but honest: you hear balance, tempo, form and endings clearly. For 80% of what rehearsals need, this is enough.

Weakness: distortion when the band is loud. Move the phone further away, or into the corridor with the door ajar; oddly, that often gives a better balance.

A handheld recorder

Cost: 100 to 250 EUR for a stereo recorder with built-in mics. Set-up: 2 minutes. Set the gain so the loudest song peaks around minus 12 dB, use the limiter, put it in the same place as the phone. It handles loud rooms, records for hours on a card and makes files you can drop into any player. This is the right tool for a band that rehearses weekly.

Multitrack from the mixer

Cost: a mixer with a USB multitrack output (300 to 900 EUR) or a small interface; set-up 10 to 15 minutes once, then 2 minutes per rehearsal. Every input on its own track means you can solo the bass, mute the vocals to check the harmonies, or make a rough mix. It is the right choice for a band that also records demos or wants to check individual parts, and the wrong choice for a band that will spend the whole rehearsal setting it up. If you use in-ears with a digital mixer, you probably already have this.

A rule that saves a lot of money: start with the phone. Move to a recorder when you find you are listening back every week. Move to multitrack when you find yourself wishing you could hear one instrument alone.

Record everything, listen selectively

Press record at the start of the rehearsal and stop at the end. Do not start and stop per song; you will forget, and the song you forgot is the one you needed. Recorders and phones handle three hours easily.

Then, listening: not the whole rehearsal, and not in the room at the end of the night when everyone is tired and defensive. The next day, on your own, with headphones, the setlist in one hand and a note per song. Thirty minutes covers a two-hour rehearsal if you skip to the run-throughs and the sections you worked on.

What to listen for

Listen with a purpose, one question per pass:

• Tempo: does the song speed up between verse and chorus? Does the ending rush? Compare the first and last chorus with a metronome app.
• Balance: can you hear the vocal over the guitars? Is the bass a note or a rumble? Is the keyboard pad turning everything to soup?
• Form: did everyone go to the bridge at the same time? Was the ending the ending that was decided?
• Dynamics: is the quiet section actually quiet? Does the last chorus lift?
• Vocals: pitch on the long notes, timing of the harmonies against the lead, whether the words are audible.
• Transitions: what happened between songs? Twenty seconds of tuning and chat is twenty seconds of dead air at the gig.
• Endings and starts: count-ins that are heard by everyone, endings that stop together.

Do not listen for "was it good". Listen for "what is the one thing that would improve this song most".

Notes per song

The output of listening is one line per song, kept where the band can see it, not a paragraph nobody reads:

Song 7: chorus rushes 4 BPM, ending ragged (who cues?), keys too loud in verse 2. Next: ending with the whole band, chorus with click.

Three lines for the three worst songs make next week's agenda. A line for a song that was fine ("run once, keep") is also useful; it tells the band what to stop worrying about. Over a few months the notes show which songs keep coming back, and those are the songs to rate honestly and perhaps drop; see rating your repertoire.

Sharing the recording

Put the run-throughs where the band can find them: a shared folder, with files named by date and song. Trim a two-hour file into per-song clips only if someone will actually do it; otherwise share the whole file with timestamps in the notes ("song 7 at 1:12:30"). Absent members listen before the next rehearsal, and the singer works on the harmony part from the take, which is the point of remote preparation.

Agree that rehearsal recordings are private to the band. Nobody posts them, and nobody sends them to a client as a demo, however good the take. The rehearsal recording is a mirror, not a product.

Etiquette around the recording

• Nobody stops a run-through because "that will sound bad on the recording". The bad bit is the useful bit.
• Comments on a recording go to the band, not to one person by name in front of everyone. "The choruses rush" is a band note; "the drummer rushes" is a one-to-one conversation.
• The person who listens rotates, or is the musical director for the song. Listening is work; share it.

Do this today

1. Put a phone stand, or a recorder, in the rehearsal bag.
2. Record the next rehearsal from start to finish.
3. The next day, listen to the run-throughs only, 30 minutes, with the setlist and one line per song.
4. Send the three worst sections as next week's agenda.

Where expert.band helps

Attach the run-through to the song as a file attachment (files are stored in EU storage and open from a phone) or a link, and keep the one-line note in the song's notes so it is next to the key, tempo and structure the next time the song is rehearsed. Put the three items for next week in the rehearsal notes, and members see them with the time and place, and again in the reminder before the session.