Yet another revision of my depressing Christmas song. The lyrics are getting close to final. The musical arrangement, however, is in flux (if you don't have the old one around you'll notice they sound nothing alike, other than the fact that the lyrics are about 80% the same). This is the first time through for the new arrangement, you'll notice a few flubs here and there. This is pretty much a clean take except for a teensy bit of compression and EQ on the vocals and massive reverb on the lead guitar track. I think it has promise but needs to be played through a couple dozen times then do a drum track and a clean take of the rhythm guitar track on top of that, at which point I can layer on vocals and lead guitar and anything else I want to put on there.
Only other news is that I switched microphones yet again in my continual quest to find a microphone that sounds good with my crappy vocals. This one is a Behringer condenser microphone usually used to mike drums, with a two-layer puff filter in front of it (otherwise all you'd hear would be "pufff... puff... puff..."). Given that my voice is almost a percussive instrument, I thought it was worth trying. Sounds better than that crappy SM58 that the previous take used, anyhow...
- Badtux the Songwriting Penguin
Dude, from what I can hear, the vocals are not that crappy. Understanding the vocals over the music is very difficult, though. I understood very few of the words, but your voice and style isn't bad.
ReplyDeleteI have allot of trouble recording my voice because of loud breathing problems. I find condenser mics really highlight the problem. Puff filters help and I’ve even gone to the extent of trimming what I could of it off the wave in post. Most of it doesn’t show up in the final mix unless it’s a quiet acoustic song. Loud pops do though and the puff filters help there. Although I’ve also worked on vocal breathing exercises, I don’t think that at my age much is going to change so I just do the best I can and enjoy.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to hearing the final product. Enjoy the journey.
Nunya: Hmm, I can hear my vocals fine, but I can definitely pop them up more in the mix if others have trouble hearing them. As for the sound of my voice, I don't like it. I can at least sing in tune (if that's what I'm trying to do), which is more than a lot of people, but I need to work on singing from lower down so I don't sound like Bob Dylan with a head cold.
ReplyDeleteTW: This, alas, is likely as good as it gets until next year, because I'm about to go on vacation far away from my gear. Regarding loud breathing problems, I developed some vocal technique with dynamic cardoid mikes to minimize that -- basically sing just above the mike so that the wind from my mouth goes over it, and when breathing out during quiet periods turn my head slightly so the wind from my nose went somewhere other than into the mike -- but with the condenser mike the puff filter is a necessity. This particular condenser mike has a foam filter on its front, but that doesn't do too much.