what is going on in your musical life

I do not believe "how happy you are with a song you write" is a valid measure of success

I mean, I write lots of songs for myself and I sell records to myself and I go to all my own shows and license these songs to commercials selling myself to myself

Really? I mean, fair enough, it's not a good measure of success if your aim is to make a living writing music, but it's perfectly valid if your aim is just to write good songs. 'Success' is not a monolithic thing.

The production conversation is interesting because I tend to have this feeling like a lack of production sheen has maybe held my material back in the past from reaching more people, but at the same time I know there are albums that I love and that also have tons of fans that don't sound objectively outstanding either. It's like I can think lo-fi is a cool aesthetic except when it applies to my material, when it doesn't sound like an aesthetic choice as much as just mediocrity. Although I guess there's still good and bad aesthetics as far as production goes even among lo-fi stuff, or "less than super hi-fi" stuff.

But with vocals too I often find myself being able to accept and even enjoy a lot of roughness from other singers, but when it's my own performance it makes me cringe if it's not right on because I feel like it just doesn't work. Maybe it's psychological, or maybe it's just a stylistic mismatch or something.

If that's your measure, then there are plenty of artists who are now canonical who never "did well" in their lifetime.

I have a whole song about this idea on the album I'm recording now, it's called "Vincent van Gogh." Titular lyric: "It worked for Nick Drake and for Edgar A. Poe / Franz Schubert, John Toole, and Vincent van Gogh." Of course I'm not really convinced yet and haven't figured out how to not be miserable about not being more successful.

fgti is operating in a different musical world from most of the rest of us here

The form suits the content, man.

^^^this. i think i get away with a lot of things in my own recordings (noise, hiss, etc) because it's part of the aesthetic that would never fly if it was supposed to be a polished pop or rock record. it's also a lot easier to make a good sounding record when you're working with a lot of samples vs a lot of live instruments, imo.

Damn xposts, I was going to make a hilarious aside about 'Edgar Allan Poff'.

ha crut well on one hand I feel like "why don't more people aim high and write songs with listeners in mind instead of seeing songwriting as a kind of therapy?" and on the other hand I'm like "remember I approached music-making with enthusiasm and joy? oh yeah that was when it was a hobby"

*"remember when I approached..."

Steve otm about vocal takes. It's super important that singers work with somebody to help them through their own psychodrama.

Why don't we take this onto a production-specific thread instead of unfairly obscuring Neanderthal's awesome turn as Pilate

not all listeners want the same thing tho! I make music with the listener in mind but in my case "the listener" is a relatively small group of people who probably have different standards of form & fidelity than you & your audience. I would like to make a more "accessible" record though. I just have a lot of aesthetic hangups that I have to figure out my way through before I can get there.

Steve otm about vocal takes. It's super important that singers work with somebody to help them through their own psychodrama.

oh man, OTM; one reason why I don't sing that much on ILX pre-cover submissions is because I usually don't want to go through the ten day death spiral of "oh that sounds all right/JESUS CHRIST I AM TERRIBLE/well it's not that big a deal/I SHOULD NEVER SING SOLO EVER AGAIN/I need a voice teacher/I FUCKING NEED A VOICE TEACHER"

Yeah and I mean I am totally into a lot of music with rough singing, but in my mind that stuff registers as cool or non-chalant or rock and roll or something, but when I hear myself sounding rough it just comes across as awful.

But I think there might be something to the type of melody and musical context that affects how this works as well, and like the type of stuff I write just wants to sound pretty. I dunno but I have to go record vocals in a few hours and I'm nervous.

xp lol your singing is awesome btw

oh man, OTM; one reason why I don't sing that much on ILX pre-cover submissions is because I usually don't want to go through the ten day death spiral of "oh that sounds all right/JESUS CHRIST I AM TERRIBLE/well it's not that big a deal/I SHOULD NEVER SING SOLO EVER AGAIN/I need a voice teacher/I FUCKING NEED A VOICE TEACHER"

― Bitch Fantastic (DJP), Wednesday, October 9, 2013 11:13 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

co-signed - I HATE recording. my pitch is solid when I sing live because it's a fluid, connected performance, and even if a bad note slips, oh well, it'll slip into the night and be forgotten.

Recording actually rewires my technique - I've watched video of me singing during a recording and I have these tics that negatively impact that sound that I don't do when I sing live, and it's because I'm too overanxious, too overthinking each individual note. I also feel caged being forced to sing in a tiny room into a mounted microphone; too restricting! So I tend to make more mistakes, sing flat on recordings where I normally wouldn't. I've scrapped projects I worked on for hours in anger and told myself I should never sing again many many times.

and one time I was depressed for a week because my last two recordings had come out whiny, nasal, and tinny, and I was convinced I'd lost all of my talent, only to record myself with the shitty computer built-in mic on the same song and hear an entirely different sound. The stupid cheapo mic had scooped out all of the great frequencies and had made me sound like I was lead singer for Sunny Day Real Estate.

IMO the only way I'll ever record vocals well is if someone tapes me without me knowing.

btw thank you for your comments DJP and Go1db3rg :)

I kind of have a dumb joke, whenever anybody asks me to listen to their unfinished record for comments, I always tell them without even listening to re-sing the entire thing. 'Cause why not? You can re-sing an album in a day. And it's not like you're losing your old takes.

not all listeners want the same thing tho! I make music with the listener in mind but in my case "the listener" is a relatively small group of people who probably have different standards of form & fidelity than you & your audience.

You are already distinguishing between "songs for self" and "songs for an audience" so we are in agreement, regardless of the difference between your audience (your friends) and my audience (my in-laws)

I kind of have a dumb joke, whenever anybody asks me to listen to their unfinished record for comments, I always tell them without even listening to re-sing the entire thing. 'Cause why not? You can re-sing an album in a day. And it's not like you're losing your old takes.

― you and me against the board (flamboyant goon tie included), Wednesday, October 9, 2013 11:40 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. can never have enough vocal takes. eventually after singing too much you get to the point of diminishing returns, but if they've been away from it for a while, you can get a fresh new take that improves a few areas.

^^^^ 100% agreed

i've always enjoyed this anecdote about "Together in Electric Dreams":

When Oakey recorded the song it was over very quickly, after the first full recording Moroder told Oakey that the first take was "good enough, as first time is always best". Oakey who thought he was just rehearsing insisted on doing another take. Moroder let him but to this day Oakey is convinced that Moroder still used the first take on the final production.

but obv not all of us are Phil Oakey

The thing about doing a ton of vocal takes is that then you have to go back and listen to them critically and decide which bits of which ones are keepers and that is the most agonizing part of the whole ordeal. But then maybe that's what I'm paying the producer to do and I should just ask him to just do it after I leave but that takes trust and I am kind of a control freak.

The thing about doing a ton of vocal takes is that then you have to go back and listen to them critically and decide which bits of which ones are keepers and that is the most agonizing part of the whole ordeal. But then maybe that's what I'm paying the producer to do and I should just ask him to just do it after I leave but that takes trust and I am kind of a control freak.

― St3ve Go1db3rg, Wednesday, October 9, 2013 12:13 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, it is a little bit like "Lens #1, or Lens #2" at the eye doctor's office. I think it is often best left to the producer, because what a singer considers the best take and what a listener considers the best may not be the same thing.

ha yeah, it's "oh man, I was really hooked in on take #3 and phonating like a beast" vs "take #4 sounds like you understand what the words you're singing mean"

haha yes. that's another reason I hate recording - first few takes and I'm all like Rocky while Gonna Fly Now is playing, feeling hte music, fourth and ongoing it's like "Christ, AGAIN?", and you can start hearing the difference.

and no matter who makes hte final decision or how much I liked the finished product prior to completing it, the moment I listen for the first time after it's done I hate it anyway.

it's weird, after the long process of writing, recording, mixing, and mastering has been done and i listen back to it, sometimes i feel like i can only hear it on a level of "these sounds are nice, it's nice to listen to nice sounds." it's a weird detachment that's so far removed from the anxiety involved when you still have to make decisions.

It's more or less impossible for me to hear one of my completed projects as a piece of music. It always sounds like a pile of components for a long long time. After maybe a couple of years there's enough distance for me to start hearing an album as actual music again.

Wow, so glad everyone has exactly the same experiences and hang ups as I do wrt singing on tracks. Flipping nightmare !

Wow, so glad everyone has exactly the same experiences and hang ups as I do wrt singing on tracks. Flipping nightmare ! Like, why can't I sing as well in front of a studio mic as when I'm cycling or doing the dishes?

Sorry about x2 posts

you'll get it on take #3

Best/worst part, when mixing, is when the engineer solos your vocal track to the amusement of all.

that was usually my favorite part because the engineer would then use any oddities/fluctuations in my take to point out to the guitarist where he'd played something wrong </insufferablevocalist>

xp bring it on, I don't care </shitvocalist>

lol xp

In the studio about to do vocal takes, pls keep me in your prayers

Four fun vocal tricks for DAWs that I learned via trial-and-error and use regularly:

- when comping together your vocal take, create a separate track with a pitch corrector on it and keep it muted. Select notes here and there that need correction, snip the regions, mute the original, unmute the corrected. I only ever use this a max of three times on any mix tho bc perfectly tuned vocals sound like balls

- record your vocals Elliott Smith/Eno style, double them up hard-panned left-and-right, then when you've got that perfect dual vocal sound, slap them into mono and leave 'em there

- I almost always pitch-shift all lead vocal takes up 5-10 cents because vocals sound good when they're sharp. If Alicia Keys ever tried this she'd be clean off the B-list and on to the A, imho.

- Never do one-can-on, one-can-off when you are doing takes. You will sing flat. Turn your monitored vocal level up until it's as loud as your head-reverberation.

I almost always pitch-shift all lead vocal takes up 5-10 cents because vocals sound good when they're sharp.

This is the second-most valuable thing I ever learned about singing in college (the most valuable being sightreading).

Having a director be all "sharp all day if you want to, but if you go flat I WILL CUT YOU" really, really helped my pitch

Yeah man it's the cyanide in the Celine Dion cocktail. Sing sharp and they'll wet their pants

accidentally made trip hop just now

accidental trip hop

stumbled hop

btw I'm really happy w/ all yr guys' singing advice ty

- I almost always pitch-shift all lead vocal takes up 5-10 cents because vocals sound good when they're sharp

whoa, definitely gonna try this.

i'm pretty wary of pitch-shifting tbh. digital artifacts tend to sound brash to me. i think i'd rather try to get a good take.

Yeah. At first it's like "bbbbut what about this Neumann I rented and the API preamp I borrowed, what about my precious, precious fidelity" but it sounds so good, I can't stop using it. The Logic Pitch Corrector with all the notes turned off set to +5 cents is a magic trick. No artifacts. I even cheat and use it when doing tape mixes it sounds so good to my ears

it's pretty easy to pitch-correct a bad note ever so slightly to where it's not noticeable. I prefer to just get good takes myself where I can, but if it's literally one or two notes where I shit the bed and the rest of the track is usable, I'd rather just tweak it slightly then bother with the effort of re-singing that two seconds, which out of context, often is annoying.

thta's also because I live in a house with two 30-something alpha males who are likely to knock on my door and go "WHY DO YOU KEEP SINGING 'I BLESS THE RAINS' OVER AND OVER AGAIN IS YOUR BRAIN STUCK ON LOOP?"