Preventing Click Bleed-Through

It can be difficult to record an acoustic instrument without getting bleed-through from the metronome in Cubase. Here are a few tricks you can try to prevent bleed-through yet still record the guitar playing in time during solo acoustic moments in the arrangement.

• First, record a “scratch” guitar track with a metronome. Once you’ve recorded the scratch guitar part, silence the metronome and record the second guitar part using the scratch guitar as a timing reference. This may not be as accurate timing-wise, but it will most likely greatly decrease the chances of having any click bleed-through on your track.

• Create your own click track by using a MIDI track and a VST instrument with a sound that will blend better if it bleeds through during a guitar performance. You can even create pauses where there could be bleed-through and change the audio level for each click so that it’s still audible but less likely to bleed through to the guitar track.

• Use a visual metronome as opposed to an audible metronome. By selecting MIDI Click within the metronome setup, selecting a MIDI output (any you have listed), and deselecting the audio click, you can create a flashing metronome using the MIDI output indicator on the transport. This requires that the guitar player watch the computer screen during recording.

There are several other, more complicated ways to handle click bleed-through that involve more equipment, but the bottom line is that if there’s a will, there’s a way. Unfortunately, Cubase has not integrated a great visual metronome (such as one with numbers or a flashing light), but this may be something Steinberg develops in the future.

Even if a click makes its way to the final recording, there are ways to silence it using digital editing. I will discuss digital editing in more detail in Chapter 8, “Basic Editing.”