Having nothing better to do this morning, I decided to record vocals for my cover of Van der Graaf Generator's "Darkness". The first and third verses went well enough but I had several problems with the second verse, requiring several takes. I then 'comped' the vocal track and put it through the pitch corrector. The original song is in the key of E; this was too high for me so I dropped my version down to C. Whilst some parts were easier to sing, I found myself having to reach for the C# an octave above middle C. I just about got there (and of course the pitch correction software helped) but those high notes have no power.
Whilst mixing the song, I decided to make a change in the music track: this has a flute on the right hand side and a French horn on the left. During the instrumental solo, I thought it would be a good idea to exchange the instruments' stereo placement, which required a little mixer automation.
The vocal, as always, sounded too polite (partially due to the high notes). It sounded good in mono so I didn't use my usual technique of recording in stereo and delaying one side by 50-60 milliseconds. In order to get parts of the vocal sounding more evil, I copied the vocal track to a new file, silenced the parts which I didn't need, converted the file into stereo, added a little delay on one channel and then flanged the track. The idea of the above is to thicken the vocal track at specific parts, adding a little distortion. The result is interesting but not exactly what I was looking for.
I uploaded the track to the Internet; it can be downloaded here.
After listening a few more times to the track, I came to the unavoidable conclusion that the song is still pitched too high. I transposed the song down another three semitones (it's now in A) and created a new music track. I'll listen and get acquainted with it before trying to rerecord the vocals.
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