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Monday 28 July 2014

12th Week - Your Sexy Provocation (377th Song)





After swallowing the EDx course called Vocal Recording Technology I felt like I could rule the world. This guy called Prince Charles Alexander, who must be a good vocal producer, explained a lot of tricks, mic techniques, mixing facts, etc in a very easy to understand way. On the last week he used a soul song to show how to put into practice all the concepts taught before. So my mood was very 'soul-ish', and I wanted to create a sexy song, with a lot of emotions, a guy suffering cause this girl is too sexy and drives him crazy. 

Recording

The song was made practically ITB (In The Box, concept that I'm using a lot lately), just voices and guitars were recorded. I called my friend Pipe to let me record voices in his house as he has a very dry recording room and a cool neumann mic 800 euros worth, I had to try that! It was a difficult one, I thought I would be able to sing it very quick but the lyrics were too difficult to me as I never practiced it before, plus there's a ad lib part that was very very difficult to improvise while reading a lot of words. Finally I did quite good, I ended just before my voice started to sound rough and damaged. I just regret of my pronunciation mistakes and a high pitch note at the end that I got too close to the mic and sounds awful. Also small pitch mistakes (at the beginning there's a big one). The guitars though were recorded directly through my interface. Drums were logic ones, bass Scarbee (again),

Mixing

I used orchestral virtual instruments such as castanets, chimes, triangle, strings section, even a clarinet. Also a shaker, a pad synth, two lead synths, a rhodes, bass, two guitars, drums, lead vocals, and 6 tracks of background vocals for the chorus; quite a lot of tracks that I had to work with. Were difficult to handle. My screen looked a bit messy, I think it's time to create a color code to assign to my tracks so I can move back and forth better in my mixes. Again I investigated a lot of compressing, it's quite addictive. So many possibilities. They are tiny tiny tweaks that change tiny tiny characteristics of the track that I'm compressing, I can feel that I'm behind of something great, but still using my intuition and learning a bit about it.  For mixers compressing is a massive thing and I can feel for the way they talk about it is really important and rewarding when you master it. Other thing that I really payed attention was EQ, I remember myself totally focus trying different equalizers, using all the filters, messing around with bandwidths, frequencies, gain, etc... during all night until the sunset. I'm quite proud of the results with voice. I don't know if they were my skill or the quality of mic or something but sounds very good, and I did a mix around that voice that works. My singing is a bit better too. Ah, I didn't mention, I used for the first time the waves Voice plugin for a massive pitchless note at the beginning, it's a bit made up now but u can feel a weird vibrato on it. That's a cool plugin, seems very similar to melodyne, but I couldn't get melodyne and I prefer this one rather than autotune. I also used this technique from the vocal production course consisting in panning 6 voices singing the same line the 3 to the left and 3 to the right. They are not very accurate in pitch and rhythm so they don't sound as cool as I wanted, Pipe did 2 of them. This guy in the course used this plugin called Revoice which is so great, it can transform a voice track to be more similar in pitch and rhythm that another one. I would love to get that one. I tried to download a free demo but unfortunately I need to download the iLok key which costs money so, at the end, not free at all.

Thoughts

It seems like I learned a lot from the EDx course, I hear how I did a big step and now my voices sound cooler. Let's see if it's matter of wisdom or that the Neumann mic was much better than me. Anyway, I was more committed and focus on the mix than ever before and I think I did a great job with the overall mix, and I think my mix supports the song better than the most of the times I mix. I'm very happy now, and I have to say that this song was made in honor of my girlfriend, so she can be proud of me now. Otherwise... nah, she'll be proud.

Enjoy it!

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