So you want to make an album? (part 9)
KeithHandy posted in Producing, So You Want... on April 3rd, 2007
Installment 9: Don’t worry that it’s not good enough (yeah, right).
I tried to record my vocals using the same setup I used to record everything else: plugging a microphone into the cassette portastudio that I was only using as a mixer, and singing along to one DAT tape while recording the mix to the other DAT tape. I had a digital reverb, and I figured as long as I was careful setting the level, and did a decent performance, everything would be okay.
This is when I started to learn how difficult it was, at least with my voice, which I was still very self-conscious of and hadn’t fallen in love with yet, to get a vocal to “sit in a mix”. By that I mean “sound like it’s part of everything”, and not some voice that isn’t supposed to be there, superimposed over the top of canned, pre-existing music, like half-assed karaoke.
Even if I was careful, the level was still all over the place. Certain syllables would “spike” out over the top of the music while others would be hard to hear over the backing music. I wasn’t prepared to spend yet another few hundred dollars on a decent rack-mount type studio-quality compressor, so I looked into cheaper options: I found a compressor guitar pedal for only about $40 or $50 and, against the advice of the sales clerk, brought it home, optimistic that I could wring some usefulness out of it. It didn’t seem to do much, though, apart from adding noise. To be quite honest I doubt it would even have worked particularly well for guitars.
All this — combined with the fact that, in general, I really wanted much more power to mix and fuss with my vocals after singing them, when my ears would be free — led me to a sobering admission: I could get by, struggling with my insanity-inducing ping pong setup, up to a point… but that point had been reached and passed.
Mike Pinto had been excitedly telling me about the Fostex R8 he’d just purchased, which recorded eight tracks to quarter-inch tape at 15 ips, had noise reduction, and just plain looked cool. I was welcome to spend a few evenings using it in his converted basement. He’d actually built a little “studio area”, walled off from a separate control room, with a window in the middle — though it was far from soundproof. I could, if I wanted, copy what I had so far to two tracks on the R8 and use the six remaining tracks to freely play around with vocals (and a few other final-hour acoustic things).
Of course, then my project would no longer be “digital”. I worried about the pristine clarity I might lose. I had to think long and hard about this potential sacrifice, until the words of wisdom had fully taken shape in my quiet center: “Fuck digital.”
Listening back to the stereo backing tracks that I’d just transferred from my poor little DAT tapes to the first two tracks on my fresh new reels sitting on Mike’s R8, I was surprised. It didn’t sound horrible at all; in fact, it sounded quite good. There was hope.
I let Mike play engineer/co-producer, call out suggestions, and run the tape machine for most of my vocal sessions (it was, after all, his house and his equipment), but it felt kind of silly and unnecessary going back and forth between the two little rooms. I think it also felt a little strange letting him into the rather personal world in my lyrics, but I took it as a compliment when he told me the songs were getting stuck in his head. Being in someone else’s home also brought with it some of the time constraint factor normally associated with “real” studios; although money wasn’t going down the drain, I was self-conscious and didn’t want to impose too much, so I didn’t do more than two or three takes of anything.
Hyper-concerned about my inability to sing perfectly in tune, I devised a tedious poor-man’s method of pitch fixing: I brought home special “practice mixes” on a cassette, with all the music in the left and all the vocals in the right, and experimented with riding a pitch shifting effect (on a rack unit I’d also borrowed from Mike) on the voice. I painstakingly wrote down the amount of adjustment that sounded best to me for every word and syllable, then took the rack unit back to his studio and ran the original vocal tracks through that effect, while “playing” the knob, to an empty track. The pitch shifting gave the voice an unnatural “metallic” quality that I thought was cool at first, but eventually regretted, and most of the original, unprocessed vocal tracks have long since been erased over.
Although I did manage to mix down all the songs in Mike’s basement (mixed back to DAT tapes, of course), about a year passed before I was able to have a batch of professional-looking cassettes run off for the people. (I’m not sure what my exact rationale was for doing cassettes instead of CDs; maybe I thought CD players were still not ubiquitous enough.)
A lot happened in that year, most notably that I moved to Rochester with Jeff to be closer to the other musicians we were hanging out with, and try to get a strange organization we called “The Renaissance Society” off the ground. We also had a few false starts with a experimental band we called “Mind Mogger” — mostly strange, dark and dissonant improvisation, which we referred to as “mogging”.
Despite my re-involvement with Jeff, he was kept separate from Open the Window, and I sensed he generally wasn’t interested in what I was doing on my own. I was embarrased to still be toying with what I’d already mixed, trying to EQ it just right and create perfect crossfades between the songs (which would be so easy today).
Next: Letting go of the baby.
