What are your thoughts on this? Is cheating? Is it just another tool for an artist to achieve his/her artistic vision?
To give an example: suppose an instrumentalist released a track with some really cool solos, but achieved the solos by splicing clips together, adding tremolo to sustained notes, correcting the timing so each note was right on beat (or off-beat by just the right amount), artificially speeding up the playing, and so on? To the point where what you hear in the finished product is something that the instrumentalist has never actually played and would not be able to play live?
Here's why I ask: on all my older tracks (up to about 2011), whenever I needed to record a guitar or whistle part, I'd practice it until I could play it the way I wanted it to sound. This typically took days, weeks, sometimes a month or more. And sometimes I'd just give up and end up not finishing the track.
Two things have changed since then: 1) I have a 40 hour/week job, and 2) I have a roommate who's an excellent producer. So for any flashy guitar part I want to have in my tracks, I can either spend a month or more practicing the part, or I can spend half an hour recording multiple takes at slower speeds and be done with it.
Lately (ie for the last year or so) I've been doing the latter.
But I'm sort of torn about the whole idea of manipulating my recordings like this. On the one hand, it's really great to be able to get some of these ideas to work that I've never been able to actually play. On the other hand, based on feedback I've gotten, a lot of the people who like my tracks particularly like my guitar playing, and this sort of feels like I'm being dishonest to anybody who is a fan of my guitar playing.
What think you all?