"Child in Time" - An Amazing Scream Performance! - Robert Lunte

[Owen Korzec]

Having Facebook open while exporting probably shouldn't affect sound quality. Just generally not a good idea. More likely, as a recording engineer I've found it is possible for the natural human voice to sound auto tuned on occasion. I recall having a singer ask me to either let him redo a take or have me edit it cause one note had a glitchy sounding shift of pitch that sounded like autotune, but they were a punk band and did not want that sound in there even though it was just a natural fluke

I'd have to listen to hear what rob is saying...can't right now but my wild guess is just a natural loss of legato and alignment of pitch.

[Robert Lunte]

Believe it or not, if it was auto-tuned.... I personally, really don't care. He did a good job.

[jonathangraham]

You must have better system than me Owen, as having anything open for me when using the sequencer causes problems, you will see even from the vids I upload that an upgrade is badly needed

Any artificial sound to the A5 i think is just coming from a the limiter plugin. My volume at the end was quite unexpected and the mic definitely clipped, in fact you can really hear that the last one is the best as i stepped back a bit from the mic but you end up hearing more of the room.

I enjoyed the overall feel of it however, so just went with it. :cool:

Anything your not so keen on Robert? any small tips or pointers please?

[MDEW]

Sounded great Jonathan.

The odd sound effect is because your voice only came through on one side. and the echo or reverb came through on the other. At least that is what I heard through my headphones.

As far as your voice I did not hear anything that needs improvement But I am just an amateur.

[jonathangraham]

Thank you for listening and commenting MDEW.

[Owen Korzec]

MDEW is right...it is a rather odd mix. Put the vocal in the center, (almost) always. Effects in stereo on mono, not just on one side, again almost always. There are no rules in mixing but there are standards and vocal up the center is a big one

I didn't hear anything autotuney about the high a's whatsoever...

Maybe Rob is thinking pitch shifted? Indeed when you sing that high it may sound like a bit like the chipmunk effect since the vocal tract has to narrow and move the formants higher so much

My critique on yours jonathan would actually just be it simply sounds too close to the original. Same notes same tone same timing, generally. You could have made it your own more. Of course for a DP tribute band people would love it but if your objective was to establish your own identity in this cover you could have done better on that IMO. Ina technical level fantastic job though.

[ronws]

Welcome to the A5 club, Jonathon. I still think it sounded good.

[gno]

Nice job Jonathan. You nailed Ian's tone and attitude in the verses. And the high notes are excellent.

[Owen Korzec]

You must have better system than me Owen, as having anything open for me when using the sequencer causes problems, you will see even from the vids I upload that an upgrade is badly needed

Oh it causes problems but i don't know how it would affect an export...I don't think the same things show up when exporting. But still...best practice is to keep other programs closed, so do it.

Definitely not the reason for the sound of the a5 though

[jonathangraham]

Definitely not the reason for the sound of the a5 though

Owen, Your not one of these people who think we didn't really land on the moon are you? j/k Thanks for your comment.

Since it's come up a few times and to dispel any potential accusations (not that there is really anything that unusual about forcing your voice up to A5) here is my acapella vocal track only from the CIT recording. Warts and all lol.

No EQ, Comp, Limiter or even Reverb so nowhere to hide.

As I had stated before, on the final section the mic was clipping and I think it is quite clearly audible but you can also see from the waveform that that is the case.

Thanks again Ron.

Geno, i cant wait to hear yours ive not heard a recording of yours i don't like buddy.

[MDEW]

Exporting or converting can cause unseen audio problems. Even some that make no sense.

I had one program that I had to export the file instead of just save. every time I would export the files to MP3 they would be muddy and the effects would change. I started exporting as a wave and used a seprate converter program to convert to MP3 and then things were fine.

for those that read this before, it should make more sense now. My computer keeps moving words on me when I type.

[ronws]

Even I, in my limited computer-savvy understanding, know why that happens. mp3 is a data compression format, not totally unlike zip file compression programs. When a file is encoded to mp3, it does not save the entire file you started with but the most dominant or data heavy chunks. So, mp3 is known as a data-loss format. However, it is easily portable and exportable and the world abounds with devices that decode mp3.

So, you have a problem at two places. The mp3 encoder and what it missed in compressing data to a smaller file. And the mp3 decoder of whatever player. And, unlike "all men" in the US Constitution, not all mp3 encoders and decoders are created equal.

So, I like to use math models for my understanding. mp3 encoding is like differential caculus. It takes the importance aspects of the area under a curve and distills to a slope equation.

MP3 decoding is like integral calculus, where you try find the root equation that your current equation is derivative of. And there is always an unknown whole integer constant that is unknown and labeled C.

Before I put ya'll to sleep, an mp3 decoder is trying to guess at the smaller values that were lost in mp3 encoding. It's trying to find C. I showed these equations in another thread, the short form solution for differential calculus and the short form for integral calculus. But it doesn't matter, really.

My book on Audacity points out that you should save your working or source files as wav or even ogg files. They are larger but they are data rich and you don't lose anything until you export to MP3. Which means, if it doesn't sound right in MP3, you can go back and adjust some things that sound "wrong" in a wav format, but sound okay when shaved and skinned into MP3.

I'm with you, Jonathon. I don't use autotune, either. And I know some will say, "Well, that's obvious."

And actually, autotune is not a fix-it-all, per se. It will only pull a pitch to the nearest pitch it can generate, which may still be some ways away from that actual true pitch that is desired. You still have to sing with relative pitch to get it to be usable.

I stay away from autotune as a matter of pride. And, I don't know how to use it. :cool:

But I know that some sub-genres use it as a style of the music itself. Just as there is advertised here a mic that will make your voice sound like 40's radio. And in-line effects boxes that will compress and chorus your voice, creating an artifact that does not exist in real life. Don't have any of those, either.

As for my recording of CIT from last year, the backing track was generously shared by Robert. I recorded my vocal track. And Keith Goehner did the "mixing" for me.

If I did it again, I would mix it myself. If I fail, I fail on my own.