sticks and stones -vox help

[Ferryman_1957]

Glenn, this is a fantastic track! Great feel to it, the echo guitars are just perfect, your singing is spot on and it's a great song. Very well done indeed!

I'm listening on mp3 headphones plugged into my PC with a poor quality soundcard and the vox don't sound bad at all to me. Just try some of the ideas folks have suggested amd master through multiple soutput sources so you get it sounding ok on more than one.

Cheers,

Nigel

[launched]

I like the vox, too, and the song itself is smokin'! This is great stuff - I don't get to hear what you are doing too much (Not a lot of posts from you lately) so it's quite a treat.

Very good, bro!

Later,

Mark

[AndyR]

I really like this one - great song and backing.

I can hear what you're worrying about on the vocal - and it would be bugging me as well if it was my recording - but I have to admit I quite like the sound as it is

I think you might have identified one of the main problems - the room has its own ambience that you don't want. I've not used the MBR's own mic that much yet, but when I have done for putting a guide vocal down, I seem to get a "boxy" sort of tone - I suspect it might be like people say, get a bit closer to it when singing to get more performance and less of the room.

On the EQ front, different instruments have a lower and upper "harmonic" that it's useful to play with. Boosting the lower harmonic slightly (+2 or possibly +4 db) adds "punch" to a performance, boosting the upper harmonic adds clarity or brightness (I think this is sometimes referred to as "air" as well).

For vocals, the ball-park frequencies for these are:

Low Harmonic: 5 kHz
High Harmonic: 10 kHz

(EDIT: Just remembered something I learnt about using A<>B looping on my last MBR project - it was a bit of a "duh!" moment... so maybe other people haven't figured it out either. I'm still getting to grips with stuff like compression, eq, etc, so I need to be able "hear" what the effect is doing. Try setting up an A<>B loop over a piece of vocal that particularly shows what you're trying to fix, set it to repeat, and then play with the effect(s) until you find what you want or until you get exhausted! I'd maybe set up an EQ to boost at 10kHz first, but push the boost a lot so I can hear it, then I'd move the frequency around a bit to see how it changes, when I've got what I think might be the right frequency, I lower the boost to +2 or so and then try turning the effect on/off to see what it's doing... etc. All the while, the passage I'm testing on is repeating away. When I think I've got what I want, I turn the repeat off and test the whole track...)

And good stuff on tuning the delay to the tempo. By theory, it should be done to all time-related effects, but delays especially (unless you specifically want to go across the rhythm, and even then I suspect it's best if it does it according to some deliberate relationship - but don't quote me on that!).

If anyone else is wondering about this, a while back I came across the following, and it's on a post-it near my kit (next to the calculator to figure it out!):

To get quarter notes (crochets): Divide 60,000 (the number of milliseconds in a minute) by your song's tempo.

So if your song is at 120 bpm, 60,000 / 120 = 500 ... set your delay to 500ms to get an echo on every quarter beat.

If you want faster, eg eights (quavers) divide by 2 to get 250ms
If you want slower, eg half (minims) multiply by 2 to get 1000ms

[Glenn Mitchell]

Great stuff Andy. Thanks. I like the A/B loop idea for testing.
I checked out your AR Music link.
This forum is lucky to have your advice and talents. I hope you stick around.

[Groundy]

OTD Birthday Bump,
Nice one Glenn from 8 years ago .
How time flies.

Alex