Jump to content

Second attempt at an AC/DC song. Back In Black this time!

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

I had a tough time with this one as you can tell but checkout the portion I recorded and tell me how I did and hopefully how to do it better!

http://files.me.com/muskysnax/4bldd1.mp3

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sounds good man,

just out of sheer curiosity...any way you could re-record using same " vocal coordination" but singing through clenched teeth? a lot of Brian's distinct sound comes from the way he colors it with clenched and bared teeth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello, Snax!

Seems like we are both trying to achieve that famous Brian Johnsson sound. I must say you sounded very good in your clip especially in the "lower" notes. I am not a teacher so i can´t explain very weil, but to my ears the chorus didn´t sound as good as the beginning, and i think it was because you lost a little bit of distortion there. I have problem with this too in my clips, i try to hold back alot to just maintain the distortion in my voice but i am not there yet but hopefully it will come with practise. Keep up the good work, Snax, and you will soon have that perfect Brian Johnsson sound!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm on the same boat - trying to sing like Brian from time to time, or at least in a similar style of having continuous grit in the upper range - although I'm liking it more and more to use rasp sparingly, i.e. just on key words and phrases here and there, and it seems that most people prefer that type of singing over rasp-on ALL the time. But I'd still like to be able to have it always on because then I could cover AC/DC and GNR, as examples. I just don't think I quite there yet, but hopefully it will happen one day.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was going to say, and others beat me to it, that you do have something of a Brian Johnson vibe going on. This was a good recording. You sounded breathy at first. But, in the second half of the clip, you zipped up the chords a bit and sounded even stronger. I've noticed that you annunciate more clearly than Johnson. See if you can try it just a little "sloppy." Sometimes, that's the sound that is needed.

Dupree, of Quiet Riot, related how their producer on Metal Health wanted them to cover the Slade tune, "Come on, feel the noise." None of the band liked that song nor were they fans or inspired by Slade. So, they said, "we'll do it crappy." The song you hear was done live in studio, no double tracking, in the first take, with Dupree sounding as "dirty" as he could. Instant hit.

When I do "Highway to Hell," I can do it clean and get compared to Justin Hawkins. But I can do it sloppy and have a lot of fun with it, too.

Anyway, I think you're doing fine. I bet it would be astounding if you had some time in a studio with some decent mixing to shape and frame the voice. You have the range and timbre to do this style.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Snax, you always sing well. I think you're VERY close to really nailing that AC/DC vocal sound, you just need to practise more and more and you'll get it complete, I'm sure of it. But it would sound slightly better if the vocals were mixed a bit better. In that recording, you could start off by simply reducing the volume of the vocals a bit. It needs to blend in more with the backing track so it sounds like one whole song and more professional. I'm sure that if you did the same thing to Brian Johnson's voice, he's sound, well, slightly less professional. But he had Mutt Lange to make sure the sound was great ;) Awesome job, man, almost no people on this planet can sing like that, statistically.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right on about Mutt Lange. And you stated more clearly what I meant about getting his voice framed with the right mixing. In a studio, or even these days of computerized recording, there's an acoustically sensitive sound engineer who can vary the eq on a track as well as its prominence in the track. What most of us have is backing tracks and hopefully a halfway decent mic, except in my case of not even that, just me, a guitar, and a desk mic. Anyway, I can do some mixing with the software but any tack I create is limited by the mic.

Not so in a studio. Professional mics that use coils instead of piezoelectric diaphragms. 32 bit to 32 bit recording.

My copy of Audacity records and plays back at 32 bits with a sample rate of 41k. That's fairly decent quality. I can playback and think, "well, even I think that was okay." But it exports to a .wav file that is signed 16 bits. Then I have to save as a wmv in moviemaker in order to upload to youtube. So, a little is lost in each conversion, as opposed to being to simply record direct to computer and share that file. Well, modern recording equipment can at least either match the bitmap or at the least, maintain a high sample rate, as close to 41k as possible to catch as much of the data.

As for mics. The desk mic I have is a slight bigger version of the mic in my digital camera, the camera that is dwarfed by my hand. It is a condenser mic. it is an electrically charged semiconductor diaphraghm in conjunction with a capacitor (hence, condenser). Because it is physically connected to the circuit, it can't take much of a charge or do much at such a low level of power. In addition, it is physically small, less than 5 mm across, operating similar to a mic in a cell phone.

A pro mic will often have a voice coil set up. This is a large rubber, mylar, or paper diaphragm, sometimes up to 2 inches across, which is larger than 5 mm, that moves a magnet. This magnet moves back and forth inside the field effect of a coil of wire that is already carrying the current and voltage it needs to drive an amplifier stage. Bot the diaphragm and the magnet in coil have a larger range of response to both pitch and volume. What that means is that htey are less likely to distort or clip off bits of the input signal, as a condenser mic will.

There's a limit to how fast a condenser mic can vibrate and how deep. You get crackles and a flattening of the recorded signal.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm very familiar with studio recording and have been doing my own home recording for some time now. I threw together the mix very quickly to get some feedback on how I was doing vocally. Once I feel I have a better vocal laid down I'll mix things properly and add any automation and tweaking that may need to be done. That for me is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the process. I love tweaking compression settings and experimenting with stereo spacial enhancing effects etc.

I used an old Shure SM 57 as it's the only mic I still have. I used to own a Rhode NT-2 but sold it along with a lot of other equipment years ago when I needed some money. I use Logic Pro 8 software by the way which kicks ass!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm very familiar with studio recording and have been doing my own home recording for some time now. I threw together the mix very quickly to get some feedback on how I was doing vocally. Once I feel I have a better vocal laid down I'll mix things properly and add any automation and tweaking that may need to be done. That for me is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the process. I love tweaking compression settings and experimenting with stereo spacial enhancing effects etc.

I used an old Shure SM 57 as it's the only mic I still have. I used to own a Rhode NT-2 but sold it along with a lot of other equipment years ago when I needed some money. I use Logic Pro 8 software by the way which kicks ass!

Well, you're at least a light year ahead of me in equipment. But I aim to gear up when I can.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I lowered the volume on the vocals and also added a little echo to better match the original song. hopefully this sounds a little better. I'll still sing it all again once I have had some more practice doing Brian's style.

http://files.me.com/muskysnax/6ovtiu.mp3

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I lowered the volume on the vocals and also added a little echo to better match the original song. hopefully this sounds a little better. I'll still sing it all again once I have had some more practice doing Brian's style.

http://files.me.com/muskysnax/6ovtiu.mp3

I think you nailed it. Much better pitch control because you had diaphragmic pressure matching the ends of the range you are in. Definitely the thing to do in varying the outputed volume in recording, rather than trying to pull back on your own physical volume. I couldn't hear any pitch or resonance problems at all and I think you were wise to stay in head voice, where you could control your resonance. The echo only helped. Some may think echo is a crutch. It is not. If you were off pitch, the echo would have highlighted that. Instead, it gave the fullness to your notes.

Don't worry if you sound just a smidge different than Johnson. That's a good thing. Jesse Dupree of Jackal has a similar sound and I could see, as a member of the buying public, buying your stuff.

Even for myself, I can't figure who I sound like. On my own song, "Time," I think I sound a little like Ronnie Van Zandt from .38 Special. On "Highway to Hell," I sometimes sound like a hick. I think that's from the way we pronounce the word "highway" in Texas. Speaking of which, I've been meaning to redo that song through Audacity to see if I can get a better version. You will find that I don't sound like either Brian Johnson or Bon Scott.

But I admire the tone or timbre you have built in these recordings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually I used the same vocal tracks as the first one but just tweaked some levels and added the bit of echo. Glad you think it sounded better though! I'm enjoying playing about with this new part of my voice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey Snax my man! I just listened to the track you posted, and you do have that brian sound going... But I know for sure you can do tons better than this, actualy im kindo dissappointed that you more or less tried to mimic brian's sound. Not that im against mimicing your favourite vocalists sounds, but I honestly prefer your voice to Brian's voice anyday of the week so im just selfish.

A great tip though on building your topvoice is singing songs and traiding words for a verytwanged quack, i think analog demonstrated this exercise in the middlerange somewhere on this forum. It also works wonders for the highrange. :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the comments Jens. for the AC/DC stuff you pretty much have to try to sound like either Brian or Bon or it just doesn't sound right. I love that raunchy sound of Brian Johnson a lot but it only works within the context of AC/DC's music really. He doesn't have the more "operatic" style of Dream Theatre or Judas Priest, Iron Maiden etc. I don't mind trying to mimic my favourite singers at this stage of my life since I no longer wish to pursue music as a career. Now it's just fun to let 'er rip and see what I can do!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the comments Jens. for the AC/DC stuff you pretty much have to try to sound like either Brian or Bon or it just doesn't sound right. I love that raunchy sound of Brian Johnson a lot but it only works within the context of AC/DC's music really. He doesn't have the more "operatic" style of Dream Theatre or Judas Priest, Iron Maiden etc. I don't mind trying to mimic my favourite singers at this stage of my life since I no longer wish to pursue music as a career. Now it's just fun to let 'er rip and see what I can do!

I wanted to highlight your point so that it doesn't get lost, accidently. The Bon Scott and Brian Johnson sound is an integral part of AC/DC. I have "Highway to Hell" as a ringtone on my cellphone. That being said, Bon Scott was not a trained singer and his range was limited, albeit in the high end. But the sound he had fit the unpolished sound that was needed. Brian Johnson actually accomplished more range but has struggled to stay in the tenor range. But he, too, has a tone that is more important than being a technically accurate singer.

I totally agree, Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson are better singers but their sound would not have fit AC/DC. Just as the sound of the original singer for Iron Maiden was a punk rock singer and not really suited for the neo-classical song construction of Glen Tipton and K.K. Downing. Bruce coming along was just what they needed.

And, yes, I believe in having fun. I wouldn't rule out music as a career for me, but it will be on my terms. So, I agree with you, this should always be for fun. As Ronnie James Dio said, "I get to do what I love to do, every single day. It doesn't get any better than that."

When I sing "Highway to Hell" and "Longway to the Top," I don't try to imitate the timbres of Scott or Johnson. I don't think I could, really. I concentrate on hitting the notes, usually with full volume, as I am often singing over my own guitar.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...