So today started off quite chaotically. I had booked to use the studio at university and had forgotten about it some 65 miles away in Kent where I'm staying at the moment. I felt quite bad about this because my lecturer was going to help me with some recording and mixing but I suppose I'll have to wait until I can get another booking and not forget it. The calendar app is a wonderful thing.
Anyway, today I've been working with vocals again. I came up with a vocal line today whilst I was walking to clear my head, and once the coffee had kicked in, I set up and recorded said vocal line in a blank session over nothing but a click track. My previously used strategy of recording over skeletal chords and addressing the instrumentation once the vocals were sufficiently mixed, was expanded upon on this occasion, removing instruments completely. This approach illuminated a number of things to me
When I had come up with the vocal line there were chords being conceived of in my head but they were not concrete or penned down in any way. So when it came to recording vocals over a blanks session, I later found out that the micro-tuning of my voice was about -50 cents off my desired scale, and even that scale changed at points in my recording, which I was unaware off because there was no backing track for me to follow. I then spent a significant amount of time making minute tuning adjustments to the individual notes, splitting them onto different tracks to try different autotune scale presets, eventually landing somewhere oscillating between a track in the key of B major and E flat minor, which, when I brought in instruments, was subjected to further transpositions and eventually became one B minor vocal track.
I had captured my idea down in its rawest most unprepared form, a vocal line in my head. Upon bringing it into the realm of harmony and tuning, much troubleshooting had to be done to create something palatable, and it became evidently clear that what popped into my head on that walk was far less fleshed out that my reaction of excitement and achievement to coming up with it suggested it might be. I was hearing what I wanted to hear and feeling what I wanted to feel, but it was imagined. I had recorded rough voice note ideas on my walk so as not to forget the idea, but this would have contained similar tuning problems to my initial attempt at studio recording.
My desire to create exactly what I was hearing in my head was semi successful, and I will continue to develop this track in the studio, perhaps with a more practical and pragmatic approach.
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