Sweet Child of Mine

[ronws]

I've recorded this song several times. This one and another one on my digital camera are probably the best I can manage with such puny equipment. This one I did with Audacity software. I tried different eq presets, like an inverted Columbia LP, a modified acoustic eq. I tried compression. Nothing sounded right. But, on this song, I run into the limitations of the equipment I have. The mic is a standard desk mic for computer. It is a tiny condenser mic made for speaking voices at normal volume in the mid to upper baritone range. It doesn't even capture my low notes, properly. When I do the bass part of this song, I am hitting the basement and you can barely hear it. So, both tracks are straight ahead just as the mic picked them up. I could explain in scientific detail the reasons for the limitation of a condenser mic and I would give someone's right arm to have a pro Shure 58 mic with the voice coil in it and I know the scientific reason that that is a better mic. However, I like doing this song. My current wife assures me it sounds fine, live. I have submitted this song to a Guns and Roses fan site I go to and not only are they harsh critics, they, more than anyone, are comparing it to the original and I have gotten good reviews from them. Still, I don't like the sound quality and it's not capturing the true sound that I make. When I sing at high pitch and volume, the condenser mic flattens in its response to pitch an volume, creating crackles, distortion, at times making me sound like falsetto when I can assure you I am not singing falsetto. In this arrangement, which I came up with a week and a half a go, there's only two places I use falsetto. On the one "Oooh ooh ooh ooh" and at the end with the last "of mine" where I change from full mixed voice to falsetto.

Some of the timing may be off. I am used to singing this song live while playing it on guitar and many of my lyric cues are based physically on what I am doing with the guitar. So, I've had to learn to hear the cues, rather than feel them. For me, most of this song is mixed voiced with only the highest parts being head voice. One reason the high parts sound louder is because of the solid resonance I have in head voice, as opposed to mixed voice, where I can "waste" some air, here and there.

Enough justifications. I am here to learn.

"Sweet Child of Mine" By Guns and Roses. Covered by me on a cheapie acoustic guitar I bought at the flea market in Kleburg, Texas for 40 dollars. I've got better guitars but this one was handy.

I could post, upon request, the other one that used the digital camera. But both seem on par with trying to capture a sound with a cell phone.