I want a t-Shirt that says 'Aint too proud to autotune' :-)

Howdy Folks. Good day in the studio today. Today featured Quality Assurance (reviewing all current vocal takes for suspect parts) followed by Emergency Lyrics over lunch (thank you caffeine) and then additional recording.

The objective of the review today was to find any vocals that needed redoing before we have to return our borrowed super-duper microphone (borrowed glory anyone?) Thanks Rick!

Whilst we were making the list of songs to review, Paul suggested we do a sample take of Hard Times, using a new melody idea for the main vocals. Lyrics would be useful as well,  I suppose, so as we broke for lunch, the boys left me and my trusty pencil in search of a conclusion (within an hour) for something that had eluded me for 6 months.

Duly, I went and purchased a coffee, borrowed two pieces of paper from Paul and took my chances.

I finished Hard Times by the end of a Chicken Sandwich and a coffee.

Ok, a Chicken Sandwich, a coffee and a cup of tea.

Two cups of tea.

Maybe I could tweak it just a bit more there...

Ahem.

Once I had enough to go with, we tried the first vocal attempt on Hard Times, which was all going swimmingly up until mid second verse when I discovered I was short two lines...oh crap, sorry guys, hang on for a tick. Scribble, scribble, yep, good to go. :-)

I'd like to point out that this is even with us being organised. Oh well, necessity is the mother of lyricism or something like that. We've had the song for 6 months, I have tried 3 different vocal melodies, didn't like any of them and all of a sudden, get the final idea on Sunday. No worries. All I had to do was finish the lyrics :-) ARGH!!

I think we may have got it. Stay tuned.

Next, I was dying to try out some ideas on a Low Octave Harmonica for Even In A Lifetime.

Hohner's Thunderbird brand do a Low G Harmonica, and, as a fan of the low F, I was curious as to how these sounded. They also do a Low Low F but that's just too frightening to contemplate.

You would need lungs like bellows.

While listening to the harmonica in 'Even in a lifetime' I was reminded of the Lazy Sunday Afternoon Sax sound, perhaps thinking of Us and Them (Floyd). I decided to try and make Harp sound like a Sax by playing the solo phrase into the computer, and using Audacity to pitch correct it down to a lower octave. Hmmmmm....interesting.

Duly, on Friday I located and ordered a Low G harp which, thanks to the wonderful Trish at Kurt Jacobs, arrived yesterday, so off I went to the studio with the Low G to see how low I could go.

The Low G is spectacularly tough to bend on the first two holes and I am going to have a bunch of fun coming to terms with this instrument, but we got a few takes of the idea and it met with the approval of The Peanut Gallery (Pete and Paul).

After that, it was time to revisit the vocals and decide between Tweaks, Tuning, Replacement or Acceptance.

Now, returning to my opening line...whilst reviewing the vocal takes, we had a discussion about what constitutes a good vocal.

The consensus was that the hard-to-define emotive reaction you have to a performance is the key.

As part of the review process, I stated my parameters: Performance, pitch, timing.

My list of worries included:  The attack on the final phrase of feel so blue, (easy, we nudged it 100 miliseconds, ye gods, that's getting finicky); the pitching on the intro to She Keeps You Moving On (wobbly) and the first lines of the chorus in Road Rise (flat? Wobbly? WTF?).

In the first takes of Road Rise, I had a tendency to pronounced the I in 'Rise'  as a long AAH (Raaaas), which sent it slightly flat...or, I was just flat...and we had to look at whether to rerecord (time and effort) or AutoTune.

To fix one note was pretty simple and faster than re-recording the whole take. To show me what it would sound like,  Pete demonstrated the auto tune function and I marvelled at how out of pitch I was everywhere.

He laughed and said 'Mate, thats the human voice'.

The human voice, and language, is full of pitch changes (just ask Mandarin Speakers), so sometimes its not about the absolute pitch, but the relative sound of the voice.

This isnt to say god awful warbling on bad notes is to be desired, but to remove every imperfection leaves you with a robotic sound with no human emotion . That's ok for some types of music, so no judgement there, but we had to consider whether the existing takes were acceptable (yes), would they be improved by minute adjustment (yes but you couldn't tell much difference so what is the point) or whether we would redo them.

As we got through the rest of the stuff pretty quickly and given that the alternate microphone we were using was giving Pete a different frequency response, we decided to give Road Rise another bash.

For some reason (coffee?), I was in a chipper mood and that helped me to obey one of the Singer Commandments - Thou Shalt Lift Thy Zygomatics - the muscles around the sinuses and face change the sound. That helps you to keep good tone and reduce nasality. Thats why you can hear the difference in the sound of someone singing whilst smiling - to check what I am talking about, listen to Rocky Raccoon by the Beatles, you can hear where Paul McCartney is smiling in the song.

Anyway, I had a bright smile, it made my tone sharper, the two notes that we were worried about suddenly pitched true as I made an effort to make the 'I" vowel sound, rather than the 'Ah',  but more importantly, the rest of the song had a fuller, more cheerful vocal. After that first take, the boys turned on the mixing room mike and requested  'More like that please'. So although we got a good result from that approach (ie: sing it better...wow...brilliant thinking!), I ain't too proud to consider fixing stuff ups with the vocal equivalent of Liquid Paper, it makes time and effort sense. anyway, 'nuff said. On with the recordings! 

We tried a few different approaches on the front of She Keeps U Moving On, Same Old Blues and...gasp...horror...Light In The Distance. I was keen to try the Low G harmonica on it and hey presto! It got weird! Weird is good!

Next week, two more of the Southern Belles will be going into the studio, followed a few days later by Fettler for some Fiddle, and then Theo for some Drums and then...its time to start mixing. I think the Boys want to do some more guitar tweaks, heavens knows I'd like to tweak the harp playing (for ever and ever, amen) but no matter which way you look at it, we're on the downhill run towards completion of this thing.

Hurrah!