Recording session nightmare

I would scrap the session... no charge, but they don't get to keep the tapes.

 

Kudos to his professionalism. Those guys would have had to face the harsh reality of the studio even worse in a higher-scale recording environment, I assume.

And producer/boyfriend? So mich for objectivity. Ah well, it's their money innit.

 

The truth sometimes stings. We're there any prior home recordings where she sounded significantly better?

No, I would not return any money. If you burn a steak, you don't get money back from the butcher department.

 

love it

there's a difference from being in your car or shower to studio booth or stage...

in a live setting, i've witnessed people who are supposed to be "a great singer", but had no idea how to sing into a microphone, couldn't understand monitoring, were totally thrown by stage volumes – etc.

a lot of it is experience, but bad pitch / timing is something else!

 

any chance of hearing the horrible voice?

 

I too, kinda wanna hear it

 

Nearly everyone who has a small studio has encountered this. But talented or not their money is the same color. An old friend of mine told me he had booked time to record his duo. I said nothing, knowing that the primary ingredient for a good recording was woefully absent. Seeing him months later I inquired how the session went. Several hundreds of dollars were spent and nothing usable resulted. Unlike the diva in the OP, he knew where the problem lay.

 

Further proof that no good deed ever goes unpunished.

Predictable however. Lack of experience and professionalism on the part of a performer combined with an overprotective SO “producer” lurking in the wings is a classic prescription for disaster in a studio setting.

And first time recording in a professional studio is always an educational (and generally very humbling) experience no matter how good you or your sweetie may think you are.

 

Tim should have used autotune. I wonder if that's what the producer/boyfriend wanted, but just didn't know the right vocabulary to ask for it? "She sings in tune at the other studio!"

 

This.

Many people haven't actually heard themselves perform properly, and don't realise how much they've been making their friends suffer. I can be an eye-opener alright.

 

You may have nailed part of her issue. But she also had bad mic technique and wasn’t careful about extraneous noises either. Autotune won’t help her with any of that.

I think she may also have never been in front of a top drawer vocal mic going into a SOA mic preamp before. No place to hide any gaffes singing into a setup like that.

 

I think they got video...

 

Running a studio is no fun.

A friend of mine, a drummer who owned a small studio where I was cutting a band demo, was amazed when our drummer tuned up his heads. He told me his regular clients never did and he was always fixing the awful tone in the mix. He also told me a story of a death metal band that showed up for vocal overdubs. As he was dialing in the mikes as the track played they started singing those low guttural sounds and he began laughing. They stopped singing, stared at him through the glass and walked out of the studio and never came back, nor did they ever pay him!

Another friend, a bassist who specialized in live recordings, had worked on an album for a band where he spent about 100 hours doing edits on the upright bass tracks because of bad timing, poor intonation and clams. The result was incredible, it made the band sound much better than they actually were. My friend billed by the hour and the bass tracks ended up being about 90% of the bill.

 

Compression and a good noise gate will, though.

 

I have another recording session horror story - I was laying down a bass track for my band at the time at an excellent, small studio here in town, paid for by the BL. I knew previously the other members were bringing their SOs, kind of making it like a party. I was dreading that as the drummer and his new GF were very handsy and kissy ALL THE TIME. I tried to track at the same time as the drummer but he couldn't concentrate on his part with me playing along (??? WTH? One reason I quit). I tracked after him in the control room while everyone was talking and blabbing so I gave the big SHHHHHHH! They thought I was joking but I wasn't. I was totally distracted by all the folks there. During my tracking I kept hearing lip smacking and wooing noises so I turn around and not 3 feet behind me, in two different office chairs, were the drummer and his girlfriend, her legs propped up on his, phones in hand, kissing and laughing ... I have no qualms at all about PDAs but not IN THE ******* RECORDING STUDIO!! I quit shortly after that. The studio engineer/owner asked me, while we were enjoying a post session doobie, why I was off my game and I told him in no uncertain terms how much all the people at the session and the ******* PDA put me way off.

 

I expect this is correct. There are a handful of tools that are available nowadays to make a poor singer sound better, but it's hard to make a really awful singer sound really good.

 

That all depends. At least based on my own experiences.

Compression helps with levels. Up to a point. But it can also boost unwanted noises. And heavily compressed vocals usually don’t sound that great. So there’s only so much compression you’ll generally want to use anyway.

Noise gates can help when you’re not singing. But they won’t block noises you make while you are.

Best bet is to do it as right as possible on the raw track and not rely on magic boxes to fix what’s avoidable, assuming they even can. I mean sure, with today’s gear virtually anything is probably fixable after the fact. But it takes gear and time. And in a studio that means money.

Like we say in the IT world: Don’t expect major miracles unless you’re prepared to pay for them.