The Light of Day

The hardest vocal part in the world
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Old skool, Producing on January 1st, 2007

One “lost track” in particular from Through Forbidden Black Doors, called This Is Your Chance, didn’t make it to the ‘98 CD … most probably because no one could actually sing it.

It started out simple enough, with a nice chord progression and a clear-cut meter for the lyrics (which have never been revised, save maybe a word or two, since the 1988 draft), and apparently for lack of a better melody, according to the old-old sheet music I’m looking at now, just followed the original simple version of the rhythm guitar triplet part. I apparently wasn’t too committed to who exactly was supposed to be singing it, and hadn’t yet decided that it would be a chorus.

Fast forward a few years — early 90s — and I’m getting serious about recording the whole opera in my own studio. This Is Your Chance is still considered part of the running order, and by now I’ve decided it’s going to be a four-part choral arrangement, so I’m going to have to actually write those parts. The repetitive rhythm is a little too bare-bones and uninteresting, so I’ve decided to play with it, and then play with it some more when a friend of mine looks it over and complains that what I’ve written “doesn’t swing”.

I work this all out in the wee hours of the night on my trusty staff paper while working double-shifts at the Atlantic gas station in depressing East Rochester, when the customers are few and the hours are long. I stick with the “soprano/alto/tenor/baritone” format that got drilled into my head in college, but other than that, my solitary constraint is to avoid doubling.

I apparently also avoided any kind of repetition whatsoever, so all the individual parts are awkward to sing, each new phrase throwing a curve ball to the singer. It would be hard enough to nail just one of the four lines; doing all four was out of the question.

Time and time again I try different ways to get an acceptable performance on this excruciatingly difficult four-part vocal arrangement down on tape so people can actually hear it in context. I try speaking the whole part and then running it through a vocal unit that does vocoder-like effects, with a computer sequencer controlling its pitches. Sounds too robotic. I try whispering the parts and then running that through very short delays to give the impression of pitch. I try using Flinger in conjunction with Festival to speech-synthesize all four parts. I try to find live humans to sing it, only to send them running in terror from the demo and/or sheet music.

I’m not sure exactly when I decided to give it another shot just singing the damn thing (bumping the girlie parts down to a manlier octave, which will make some of the harmonies kind of dense and clustered-sounding), but certainly the transition from tape to software made it at least feasible, if still not easy, to break the task into small pieces and micro-edit to satisfaction. It is also among my most put-off of musical chores; if you had asked me at any point within the last few years what recording sub-project I was procrastinating on more than any other, this would be at the top of the list.

Taped next to my bed (a good place for it, I might add) is a short handwritten note to myself: “TAKE SLOW ACTION”. This is after decades of alternating between taking no action (in many areas of my life), and working myself into a frenzy to make up for it. No wonder I lament any inability to get into a sustainable flow state. The key lesson, of which I am in constant need of reminding, is: don’t worry about doing the whole thing, just do a little bit of it, at a relaxed pace. The roll will come later.

Thus came time to apply this lesson with regard to the dreaded This Is Your Chance harmonies. One evening my assignment was to simply copy a guide track (I used the speech-synthesized version as my guide) from the old computer to the new computer. Another evening it was to create the folder I’d be working in, and the Tracktion project file with the imported guide. Another it was to set up the microphone stand. Some of my small daily goals are saved as text messages on my cell phone, and I should keep doing that.

Here’s a great recommendation to anyone with a little bit of cold feet about recording: do a “crap take” right away. Just hit record and start singing. I did this with all four parts just so that I could hear a “worst case scenario” of what they would sound like together. And yeah, it was clunky, but I could get a hint of how it might sound once I took the time to nail all the notes, and that helped inspire me to get down to business.

It is still extremely difficult and time-consuming, lest you think otherwise, to record all these phrases at four different melodies apiece and then tweak all the tuning and timing of nearly every syllable. After seriously working on singing and editing for a whole weekend, I am, as of now, still less than half done. Enjoy it in all its under-construction paint-by-numbers imagine-the-missing-bits glory!