I apologise in advance that most of what is written below is of limited
interest (if at all) to anyone but myself. That said ....
A few nights ago, I started recording vocals for the new "Maeve's song". As
I
wrote1 at the beginning of the month,
it looks like I am going to transpose the song up a key so that I can
sing the verses, then transpose my vocals down a key. Similarly, I may
have to transpose the bridge down a key to let me sing the high notes. I prepared new, partial, backing tracks to sing against and sang the
verses several times until I had a good performance.
When I came to mix this in the multi-track recorder software, I had
problems with the word "I" that unfortunately appears several times in the
lyric and always at the beginning of a line. There were 'computer pops' that
are very annoying and very amateur (these are due to
clipping); I thought that I would fix this by compressing that one syllable or by
changing volumes but I couldn't get rid of them ... until I tried removing
the standard compressor on the vocal track. The pops disappeared and the
sound improved, except for the fact that all my attempts at removing the
clipping had created very uneven volumes. The third verse seems to have been
clean of such problems. Maybe I should cease using a compressor as a default
effect in future recordings.
So yesterday I set about rerecording the first two verses: again this took
several passes until I achieved the sound that I desired. I then dropped the
pitch of the vocal by two semitones so as to be in the correct key. Once I
was satisfied with this, I worked on singing the bridge (lowered by two
semitones). I had severe problems in pitching the first line - it seems that
there was a subliminal cue that was sending the wrong signal. Eventually I
sang the first line of the bridge over the third line, cut that part out
then pasted it over the messed up first line of another take. Thank God for
digital scissors.
Now I had all the vocals set up so all that was left to do was balance the
volumes (understatement). All in all, I think that I made twenty mixes, each
time improving something. Most of these improvements were balancing the
volume of phrases within a verse as well as adjusting equalisation settings.
At one stage I noticed that I was always applying spot compression to four
'hot spots' in the mixed file, even though those spots seemed to be
unproblematic in the source files. I noted down these syllables (e.g. in the
first verse, "I had to start") then compressed them in the sources.
Final mixes from this point on were much easier.
Eventually I produced a mix that seemed to be as good as I could get; I
left this to 'mature' overnight. I had a feeling that this song was quieter
than the others that I had recorded so far this year, but when I listened
again this morning with fresh airs, the volume is equivalent. There is still
one phrase that is slightly quieter than its neighbours, but I don't think
that I'm going to change this. I'll listen over the coming days and if it
annoys me in another week, then I'll change (yet again) the volume of that
phrase.
Interal links
[1] 1932
This day in history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 850 | Florence log 3 - Take it easy | Holiday, Florence, Italy | |
| 1217 | Arriving at Andros (Greece 1) | Holiday, Andros, Greece | |
| 1318 | Heatwave | Israel, Weather | |
| 1502 | Yesterday's sky | Weather | |
| 1761 | In silence | Song writing |
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