Singing upwards helps you mentally. But when you lift your head to change the length of your vocal cords. Making it techically harder to hit high notes.
Clean Vocals
- Thread starter jimwilbourne
- Start date
ahjteam
Anssi Tenhunen
Producing is both easy and hard. I have noticed that if you just listen and focus on stuff, you can spot what is wrong or bothering you. Be SUPER anal about things. You might not be able to fix things or to know how to fix things, but it's usually easy to spot what is the problem. It's like a big puzzle game. Figuring out the problem is 50% solving the problem, figuring out how to fix it is the 30%, and executing the fix is the last 10%.
For example if you listen to a song, then you listen to it, spot that this one note is flat (like it's A when it's supposed to be B), that is 50% of the job. Listen, try to spot _if_ something is not right and figure out what is the problem. Then you have a few choices like re-do it, use earlier take of the same part or autotune it etc. Then you just have to execute them. Time consuming wise it may not distribute equally as executing might take more time, but in problem solving terms, it should go down in equal matter.
For example I am producing and recording a promo cd for this a bit less experienced metal band in the near future. The basic pieces are okay considering that the guys are only 17-18 years old, but the basic stuff like timing, arrangement and stuff like that need some fine tuning. Stuff like that usually comes with time, but I'll try to make the record sound as good as possible in as short period as possible.
For pre-pro I've been giving some really easy basic level coaching tips for the growling guy. Even tho I am not a professional singer myself, I can still spot the problems and usually give suggestions how to try to fix them. If you have a good relationship with the singer, coaching them becomes really so much easier.
The growler guy has really big lungs as he also plays tuba and played soccer for good 10 years or so, so he has really good stamina and his voice is really powerful, but he had 3 problems: first was articulation and second was phrasing (both of these can be easily fixed), but for the third problem he needed some guidance. The thing is that he tensioned his abs too much (I think it's called diaphragm in English what I mean?) and it makes him sound really pokey and it creates these plosive to transients that sounds like a big no-no in my opinion.
We took out a promo letter that was laying around, chose some words from it and recorded a small clip of his vocals on top of one of the backing tracks I made to notice possible problems and monitor progress. Then we listened to some stuff for reference (Lamb of god and stuff like that), I helped him with phrasing and articulation (we went to dictionary.com for reference on the problematic words) and I asked him to do it with less abs crunch and recorded another sample. And his voice started to sound more smoother.
Here is a before clip and here is the after clip (the plosives in the after clip comes from the bad mic technique with the hand held mic we used, but listen to the vocal performance). It's still not 100% there yet, but it's a good start. This session literally took no more than 10-15 minutes. Then I told him to go practice some more with their own material and possibly fix the stuff so we don't need to use both of our time with it
tempe
Captain Midnight
Ahjteam that was a fantastic post thank you.
I 100% agree that locating the problem is the most difficult part, and then having a quick easy solution. Vocals for me is my absolute weakest point as I am not a vocalist by any stretch of my imagination, I have 0 experience singing or growling apart from when I'm alone in my car! I find it difficult to work on harmonies with vocalists as I can hear them in my head, but cannot for the life of me articulate them. I'm going to try the antares harmony engine technique Joey mentioned though.
I'm definitely going to take note of a few things you said and put them into practice, I need to get my vocal recordings happening!
Another thing people don't really mention is just developing the patience to get things right in the tracking stage, I can think of so many occasions where I have just opted to attempt to fix something later (particularly when tracking guitars), and have just felt that if I spent the extra time everything would have been that much better.
I feel that the best cure for this is as has been mentioned is tracking all the drums, editing then alternating instruments as this keeps everyone fresher for longer. I've yet to put this into practice though, will give it a go on my next project!
I 100% agree that locating the problem is the most difficult part, and then having a quick easy solution. Vocals for me is my absolute weakest point as I am not a vocalist by any stretch of my imagination, I have 0 experience singing or growling apart from when I'm alone in my car! I find it difficult to work on harmonies with vocalists as I can hear them in my head, but cannot for the life of me articulate them. I'm going to try the antares harmony engine technique Joey mentioned though.
I'm definitely going to take note of a few things you said and put them into practice, I need to get my vocal recordings happening!
Another thing people don't really mention is just developing the patience to get things right in the tracking stage, I can think of so many occasions where I have just opted to attempt to fix something later (particularly when tracking guitars), and have just felt that if I spent the extra time everything would have been that much better.
I feel that the best cure for this is as has been mentioned is tracking all the drums, editing then alternating instruments as this keeps everyone fresher for longer. I've yet to put this into practice though, will give it a go on my next project!
