Lament

[bigaquarium]

Morning,

Here's the next one coming down the tracks. I cut out the vocals because I really axe-murdered them with the help of Melodyne, LOL. Will try and lay them back down tonight.

https://soundcloud.com/user-263279432/lament

- N

[jlouvar]

Way fun, I like the guitar towards the end... Did you finish the vocals tonight?

[bigaquarium]

Thanks! The left channel is just sort of open fourths and fifths and the right channel is just what I’d call “jazz octaves”... Sorta like playing a power chord but with the fifth muted. I’ve found them to have a real singing-like quality and add a nice countermelody/descant effect for lack of better words — use them quite a bit.

Didn’t have a chance to record last night, work went wayyyy late. Never enough time!

-N

[bigaquarium]

Evening,

Did a little bit of work on this one tonight, including the verse vocals. I'm not turning off the heat to get it quiet enough to do a passable job of it so that will have to wait till warmer weather!

Also trying a different singing voice this time, using that folksy drawl that people like to sing with even though they undoubtedly do not have a folksy drawl in real life.

https://soundcloud.com/user-263279432/lament-updated

On a slightly related note, my bass is a circa 2001 Soundgear SR300DX, and gotta say it sounds pretty darn good for a cheapie bass!

- N

[freightgod]

This is really coming along nicely!

[jlouvar]

Good job... Keep up the good work.

[bigaquarium]

Thanks!

At the outset I tried to take to heart what JL and Iann were saying about song length and structure. Hopefully that part is okay now.

The biggest problem is really with getting the vocal tone right, because it really spoils everything I do. I actually have a pretty loud voice but it comes across as harsh and telephonic a lot of times on my recordings. Would I be better off with a dynamic mic instead of the condenser? Also going to reduce the dry vocals down a bit; I’ve found that having the dry at 50 is not the same as having it at 100 even with the same ratio of wet reverb thrown in for both cases.

And another thing, I’ve noticed that Melodyne global pitch quantize is overkill for fixing a few off notes here and there and I’m going to stop using it that way. The blobs will be perfectly centered but the little line inside the blob seems to be messing the whole thing up. So for instance there are notes that I bend up into on purpose, and now they start on pitch and sound like they are being squeezed till they pop sharp presumably because of that little line. Irritating.

-N

[jlouvar]

I usually like large condenser mic's on vocals, but if you have a dynamic mic maybe try it and see what you think. Also maybe turn off snap and just move the individual vocal Melodyne blobs that need a little touching up instead of using global pitch quantize... PS: you have a nice voice.

[bigaquarium]

Thanks for the help! I have a zoom h2, maybe I’ll try that instead of the blue snowball and see how it goes. I could record it in my car for a silent environment too!

-N

[Ian Craig]

The second half sounds great, but I agree about the vocals messing it up. I suggest you need to EQ them right at least as well as using compression. If you want, you could send me the track without the vocal and send the vocal stem separately and I could work on it a bit and see how you could apply the right processing setup to the vocal track which might help you in future. The offer's there anyway. ... The lyric is class by the way

[bigaquarium]

Here is what I learned this evening... breath support, drop the back of the tongue, lift the soft palette, voila. Tried it on a different track and it worked really well, will try this one tomorrow or Thursday.

-N