Singing, Recording, Audio, and the "Final" Product

Singing, Recording, and the Audio

If there had not been such tight time constraints, one of the things I would have changed the most, worked on more, and tried to improve would be 1) My anemic singing 2) My guitar playing and 3) More time on the lyrics. The singing component of the project was without a doubt the aspect that I had the most trouble with. In fact, listening to the various recorded fragments of the song was a humbling process because I had to hear the ignominious tones of my voice over and over again. I don’t know about you, but hearing a recorded version of my voice is a jarring experience. I hate the sound of my voice and it makes me stomach turn just hearing it. If I had more time, I would have met with a voice teacher and worked a lot more on the vocals. That is my main regret about the project. Learning, listening to, studying/reading, and, just generally, absorbing the rich, textured, and brilliant folk/blues tradition was a definite highlight of the project for me.

In terms of the recording, I recorded dozens, if not more, versions of fragments of the song, and, if I am going to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t happy with any of them. I was able to borrow and use a very basic analogue 4-track recording device and I experimented with using a demo version of Pro-Tools, which is one of the standard recording devices/programs for recording musicians in our contemporary time. The problem is that the digital recording devices do not have the warmth, the fatness, and the scope of sound that the analogue recording devices do. In the end, I used the four-track and then uploaded the various fragments/recordings to my computer. Here is one fragment of the song I recorded:

Link: https://soundcloud.com/jun-lee-36/voice00041