BTW Pat, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Your voice is great - it has character an style…
… All those preening Idol wannabes, sensitive beardy breathy hipsters, strutting vibratoed glass breaking hard rock gods etc. etc out there can emote so earnestly they’re fit to burst, lugubriously rip their hearts out of their chest and engage in all manner of pitch-perfect theatric…
… but they’ll never have what you have, because yah just can’t fake it!
What an awesome burn! You go Andrew!! 
And yeah, authenticity wins most of the time…
Well thanks a lot Andrew, it’s so nicely offered that I cannot refuse! I’ll give it a try.
Wow, that’s quite a mouthful! But who said I’m not a beardy breathy etc… ah! For all you know, I’m Justin Bieber in disguise!!! 
Cool - I’ll set it up tonight when I get home from work.
…well, you’re definitely not a hipster, I know that!
There’s a few mistakes in the lyrics.
And Pink Floyd said it too:
I think that you may have taken my comment the wrong way. I’m not a gear snob…in fact I’m the exact opposite.
I might have. And glad to know you’re not a gear snob! 
I get that the motto is “get it right at the source” and I agree to a certain extent.
But when the source is your own voice and you don’t have any other available and the mics you have give you basically the same kind of sound, you have to do with it, and if it means eq/compression whatever, I don’t see what’s wrong with it…
My initial point was not that I necessarily use a lot BTW (or need to), just that it’s hard to be objective when it’s your own voice, which I believe is something a lot of us experience…
Hey Paul, who said you were a liar??? 
But I’m not getting wound up, don’t worry, I’m also too old for that!
This post was just a case of asking others how they deal with EQ-in their own voice, as I know it’s the worst part of mixing for me, I was wondering if I was alone in this case…
Can’t see it in Canada! 
Why don’t you upload stems and let me mix them. I’d be glad to mix 9 to 5.
I’d have to export everything from the session, which is always some process especially because of all the groups I’m using and how I’m using Superior Drummer internal mixer.
But I can do it at one point, if you insist, just don’t hold your breath too much
In the meantime, you can find a few multitracks from some of my songs here:
http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm#PatrickTalbot
Good for you that you have albums…but before i insist…Write down the lyrics in the appropriate thread for me to read.
Not sure it’s of much interest here, but you can find the lyrics on the soundcloud page:
https://soundcloud.com/patrick-talbot/9-to-5-barely-alive
Make a song like this one:
I will be your fan and be glad to mix it.
Long story short, the song needs to bring a resolution to the listener. Either give it a bit of optimistic flavor in the end, or be loyal to your 9 to 5 friend (yourself) just like pink floyd were at their “Shine on you crazy diamond”. I would say give it a more optimistic ending.
Possibly, I suppose I was in a bad mood when I wrote this one, and couldn’t resolve it that way.
Maybe why I suppose this one is better (in a similar vein, but with a better resolution):
https://soundcloud.com/patrick-talbot/close-your-eyes
The lyrics are also on the soundcloud page, if you’re curious…
EDIT: listening again, I think I would need to re-mix this one: Another case of bad vocal EQ decisions…
That being said, it’s 2 years old, so I think I improved since then…
Oh @ColdRoomStudio man, such BAD BAD ADVICE!.
If you distance yourself emotionally from what you’re singing, you rob the performance of ALL autheticity and you sound worse.
Ask any professional vocalist - particularly “cover” artists - what they need to do when singing someone else’s song and they will almost all tell you they need to find the emotional connection to the song in order to be able to do it justice.
Sheesh.
PS. Just for the record, Patrick, the vocals I’ve heard you do would always make the cut. Now that I know you do so much work on them, I’d like to hear the real you, the one where you don’t spend hours “putting it right”. Why? Because from what I hear, my guess is you sound fine without all that.
haha. Nothing wrong with your voice brudda. Like everyone of us, you can go find pro singers with almost that exact voice
Ive only heard that one clip, which sounds like a basic warm baritone voice. Some of that will be a heredity type of thing but some is technique. If you put more effort into it and do things like lift the soft palate, sing up in the “mask”, learn to sing up thru the vocal break into head voice etc, you can expand that basic vibe quite a bit
A basic baritonish voice like that can be great for rock. A lot of guys have that basic voice but then they just learn ways to push up into head voice and/or scream and its gets a great vibe, a’la David Coverdale, Geoff Tate, Chris Cornell, David Lee Roth. All Baritones who just learned to push up higher. They get a different sound than the Steve Perry, Brad Delp, Michael Sweet types who already have a high voice to start with