voice

On Producing Your Own Vocals

/ Adriane / 2 Comments

First of all, let me just say that it is never recommended.

The truth is, the producer hat and the vocalist hat are essentially at odds with each other. Just because you can do each one separately, doesn’t mean it will go smoothly when you try to do them together. The producer is the critical ear, the filter. Your producer brain wants to say no, do it better, that is not good enough. The producer brain is quite discerning. Then there is the performing brain — that is the part that must stay open. The performing brain must be supported, encouraged. There are no mistakes. The performance requires feelings, openness, vulnerabilty and safety.

Can you see how those things are nearly opposite? Stay too accepting, and you’ll never get that good take. Stay too critical, and you’ll never get that good take.

So, with this in mind, I am going to try to disclose some of my conclusions after sweating it out like crazy:

  1. Record first, edit later. Don’t think about editing on recording day, one hat at a time.
  2. Get ‘present’ – that stands to reason for any performance task. Be accepting. Too much desire for a perfect take almost guarantees a lack of results.
  3. Try taking on different characters. Who are you? Can you be someone else? This can help you get unstuck and give you some juice.
  4. Learn how to tell when you have enough good takes. Cover your bases, but don’t treat your voice like a sweatshop. You can always do pickups later.
  5. Pretend you are editing someone else’s voice. This is not you. Someone else hired you to do their hit song, and they happen to sound an awful lot like you.
  6. Learn to hear for microscopic details in a performance: breaths, little scoops, funny clicks or warbles. They will seem huge after 300 listens.
  7. Use autotune, don’t abuse it (unless you really want to.) It’s a great tool, which you can use to massage sneaky little words like “the” or “a” which people generally sing less accurately.
  8. Remember that a recorded performance is very different than a live performance. So don’t be shy about take looping.
  9. Don’t be afraid to screw up. In your home studio, time is free. Do it, and re-do it. Your morale may falter, but none of the time is wasted.
  10. Pat yourself on the back. Nobody else in the room to do it, and besides, no one is looking so you won’t look funny.

To Debut or Not to Debut

/ Adriane / Leave a comment

A while back, it was suggested to me that I market my new release as a debut release. This makes sense in a lot of ways. It’s been some time since my first album Adrift and now that I’ve changed my artist name, I could be starting afresh if I wanted to. The other major change is that I’ve started including more songwriting/structure in my work, so I really considered it.

I decided not to present it as my first solo release however… and here is some of my reasoning.

First of all, out of sincerity. To say that Morning Glow was a my first solo effort would be, well, not true. I did put out a prior album, and it was reasonably well received. While Adrift was different from Morning Glow, if you listen to both there is a clear progression from one to the other. They share a similar flavour. If you draw a line between two points, you get, well a line. The line points somewhere, hints at where you’re headed. It might be more impressive to say I started where I am now, but it isn’t true. I’ve come a long way. In this day and age of prepackaged starlets (who are also fab in their own way), sincerity is as good as any other asset.

Secondly, I don’t want to deny the struggle. It’s a waste not to learn from the struggle. I really feel proud of this new release, which is a really weird and unfamiliar sensation. It actually took me me an assload of work, faulty starts, and body fluids in the form of blood/sweat/tears. I don’t want to pretend that this just snuck out of nowhere. I had a vision of the album I wanted to create, but I didn’t have the skills, time, or knowledge for how to conquer that mountain. I bit off way more than I could chew, and then kept chewing. And chewing. After really sweating it out, I eventually made some good inroads. In the end, I had Morning Glow.

So while Morning Glow is a rebirth of sorts, it isn’t a true artist debut. But is the debut of my voice, my songwriting, and a new direction. So at least there’s that.