Snax

It's the fact that the chorus is in a range of high notes which for me are still a bit wobbly to control. I felt an immediate improvement though when I did some deep breathing and stretching of my ribcage etc between takes. I'm a newbie when it comes to technique and in time I'll try to work with a vocal coach to try and perfect my problem areas.

Believe me Ron, I take advice from everyone here and I'm just one of many talented singers here in the forums. The vocal range of the chorus is in new territory for me and I'm still getting used to controlling it. Before the tonsils came out this year I couldn't possibly have sung this song. Now the damage from my surgery is slowly but surely healing and I have to learn very fine coordinations. I'll get there and all the amazing folks here are helping motivate me to do as good as I'm able.

I really love this song and no one will ever sing is awesomely as Heart but here's what I have recorded thus far. That high chorus is something I still need a lot of work on to be able to keep on pitch. I'm going to make a point of doing breathing exercises before I attempt to sing anything. I always get inspired to record myself but rarely if ever warm up properly first which shows in the recordings.

Here's a portion of the song so far... https://files.me.com/muskysnax/6gry3o.mp3

I'm more than happy to mix anyone here's music if they trust me to do so. I get tired hearing my own singing after a while! lol

Much appreciated and the same can be said about your voice too Jimmy. :)

Here's the "enhanced" version of your recording Ron. I'm sorry I couldn't do any better than this but the missing frequencies caused by the mic didn't give me much to work with. I warmed your vocals a little with some EQ and then added some delay and reverb both with warm EQ and the highs rolled off completely. It helped a lot but the result isn't quite what I was hoping for.

https://files.me.com/muskysnax/wosf8y.mp3

Loved it!!!! You have such a unique style and sense of phrasing. Thanks so much for sharing!

It's great that you know not to blow too much air over your vocal folds. That is something that I did for years and it really caused a lot of problems.

I'm sorry to hear about your acid reflux problem in the past. Building a voice takes time and if you can speak cleanly without any audible problems then you should be able to sing that way also. In theory of course!

I have been doing a vocal trick lately before recording that has really surprised me with its effect. I reach my arms towards the sky and really push my finger tips and my arms as far out as I can while breathing in deeply a few times then relax. I repeat this about 5 times before recording a section of a song and the result is that your support will feel effortless! i'm going to make a point of doing this several times a day to stretch my sides and lung capacity during normal breathing. It really does make a difference! Then you just sing like normal and the sensation is different like you just were lifting weights and then put them down and just lifted your arms.

Ron, I can completely sympathize with you my friend. these are tough times for many of us. I'm very blessed to have a wonderful girlfriend who owns the home we live in and is giving me the chance to grow my business. Never stop recording no matter what the equipment Ron. We all learn from each others posts and I'm certainly no exception.

Regarding recording, it is a strange animal to be sure Ron! What you think you know about frequencies etc go out the window once you get down to the nitty gritty! I had to stop using my brain and start using my EARS which for me is a challenge. I have begun to better understand masking effects of other instruments and that it isn't necessary to keep all the true frequencies of your voice in a recording along with music since the backing tracks will also require some of those to be heard clearly.

One thing I've been doing lately is notching the frequencies in the backing tracks that my voice is needing to cut through the mix with. It actually helps a lot to get the vocals to be heard over the background without just lowering the entire backing tracks volume. This changes from song to song and style to style. I mentioned in my prior post that it sounded like you had a lot of presence in the 3 khz range in the recording and when I checked it out on my laptop I was bang on. You learn after a while what frequencies are usually the dominant ones. The low mids are the trickier ones since human hearing is not as fine tuned to these frequencies like they are in the high mids. Thank evolution for that! lol Studio engineers are so unappreciated for the talents that they have. It is SO easy to make a recording sound bad and there is such a fine line between sounding incredible and powerful and sounding overhyped and fatiguing.

No doubt you are making some good improvements Ron! It is so frustrating that your mic is limiting the true tone of your voice. The frequencies right around 2 or 3 khz are so prominent that is takes away from the actual performance. It's not your fault of course but with a better mic that can capture your full tones your performances will no doubt sound 100% better to the listener.

It's interesting to note that when I record myself singing like Rob Halford or Brian Johnson, I have to EQ my voice quite differently for each or it sounds like hell! I'm going to take your recording and see what I can do on my Logic Pro 9 software to let your voice blend a little better with the backing tracks. Great singing and a marked improvement from prior efforts. Keep rocking dude!!!

Update: I tried tinkering with the recording but there wasn't much I could do with the voice already mixed with the music unfortunately.

The second one was better than the first from what I could hear. It sounds like you are on the right track but the question is how does it FEEL to you after singing like that? I have been working on grit and distortion also and some days it seems easy and other days my voice just wants to stay clear as a bell! The best advice I have and I have given before is to frost be able to sing all the notes with a strong clean tone. Then begin adding your grit to the point where you can ease off and go clean again if you wanted.

So far it has been working for me but I'm just a singer and not a coach so take my advice with that in mind.

Yeah, I've already had a dose of the gigging musician type of existence and I'm much more content having people I love and trust around me. My singing now is mostly for my own satisfaction but I will go out and do some karaoke soon. I used to own and operate a karaoke company when I lived in Ottawa which was a lot of fun. Nothing like instant gratification and cold beer! ;)

Great job on a very tough vocal! Ritchie Kotzen in blessed with an incredible voice besides being amazing on guitar, bass and drums! Nothing I can add to what's been suggested and I think you did a fantastic rendition!!! Keep 'em coming. :)

Thanks Steven! If I lived closer to my old band mates I'm sure we'd be playing some gigs by now. They have been wanting to reform but the distance is just to much to commit to anything too serious. It's a 2.5 hour drive each way and i'm very busy growing my fishing lure business.

Hmmm...I wonder how Brian Johnson or Rob Halford would have sung this... ;)

So good!!! Maybe it's start to write your own songs! Killer voice. Seems you have a total control of your voice!

I WISH! lol I hear some parts where I could have had more control or sang better etc. I'm a stickler for details. I do like the very opening line and then it sort of gets worse from there! Ha,ha,ha!

Wow, thanks so much everyone!

This is such a nice little song written by the late Ray Gillen, singer of the group Badlands.

Hope you like my rendition... https://files.me.com/muskysnax/bs3kz1.mp3

In the Song Remains The Same video concert his pants were obscene!!! I mean, I'm a guy and very straight but even I couldn't stop looking! LMAO!

Ah well, someone had to make being a frontman cool and he sure stepped things up a few notches didn't he?

And let's not forget that Plant was the man for who'm the term "Cock Rock" was coined! lol

Well said Ron. I guess if I have to settle for only sounding like Rob Halford I'll just have to live with it.

Damn Plant was good in his prime!!!

The only thing that is noticeable for me is when you trail off some lyrics or use less power it becomes very thin and slightly pitchy.

Great observation and absolutely correct. Things I need to work on for sure. This song and the song High Wire I also posted are really tough ones because they are both super high powerful vocals the whole way through. No dynamics really just balls to the wall power!

Without the Robert Plant tone though, Black Dog remains just a pup! ;)

Not much to critique.. nice tight rockin tune. well done.

Snax...

I have a question for you.

I dont want to hijack this thread. But can you explain what you did to that file to "remaster" and "snaxify" it? I always struggle to get enough power into any recordings i do.

Thanks.

Here's a link to the Sonnox Oxford plugins that I used. These demo videos answer a lot of your questions... http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugins/tutorial-videos.htm

The Inflator and Limiter in particular I use during final mixing and mastering. They add punch like nothing else I've heard.

Thanks guys. A lot of the takes were unusable due to my scratchy throat and I had little control over certain frequencies which isn't normal for me now. I guess the finished result does sound alright and I hid the one really thin sounding note with a lot of effects and a volume fade.

That part is the line "We both could have died then and theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere..." The word "there" was in that range of a few notes that I can normally sing very clear and strong but yesterday it felt as though I had stepped back in time and was singing with my pre-tonsillectomy voice again.

By the way, I have been using a lot of EQ on my vocal tracks to get them to sound more like the production on those early Judas Priest recordings. They really used to roll off the bass in his voice around the low mids on down and boost the mids around 1.5 - 3 khz to get his voice to cut through the guitars. It helps with the illusion of me sounding like Halford. My full untreated voice doesn't have the same sound and would get lost in the mix more easily.