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!
ptaly I like your voice. I am not a liar:) Have you ever considered sending you vocal only track to a friend? I think it would be kinda fun. If it comes back good, you could ask exactly what was done with it. You also could just include a vox track right here for bashing?? Just don’t get yourself all wound up. When you get old like me, it’s all good.
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…
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
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…
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.