Recording session nightmare

[BassFishingInAmerica]

Forget that! To subject me to that kind of torture takes money!

Exactly. They need to pay for the product. End of negotiations.

 

[bassbrad]

It has happened to me more than once, I am polite but honest no pitch correct magic @Sounz, I deliver them a demo as promised and do not re-negotiate. The one time i got a negative review from a client I attached the demo and the review was removed.

 

[hbarcat]

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.

This is a great post. I have some amount of experience recording vocals for others as well as myself, plus experience with editing, processing, mixing, etc.. Modern technology can do some amazing things with fixing or hiding mistakes and even replacing bad takes with good ones. But there has to be some foundation to work with.

BTW, I was curious so I followed up with my friend and he said they just paid for the raw tracks. He dumped them onto a flash drive and they left with just that.

Hopefully, they'll learn from the experience. Maybe the singer will use this as an opportunity to practice and become better, perhaps take some lessons and be better prepared to make decent recordings in the future.

 

[hbarcat]

Even if you did, I'd strongly advice against sharing them with others. That's extremely unprofessional on the part of the studio to be releasing another artists' music against their wishes, especially under the guise of shaming them for being bad at music.

I get it, the session sucked for him, but look on the bright side. It was only two hours, and they didn't go and book an entire weekend.

This is exactly right. There is no way my friend would even consider letting a client's tracks out to anyone and I would never ask. Grossly unethical and maybe illegal.

 

[Moose22]

Hopefully, they'll learn from the experience. Maybe the singer will use this as an opportunity to practice and become better, perhaps take some lessons and be better prepared to make decent recordings in the future.

You never know about this. I hope they did, but with his attitude I wonder.

I used to work with a lot of younger musicians, just recording them and making raw demos so they can get used to the process, work up ideas. The jump from singing in the car to playing and singing at an acoustic open mic is like one step on a mile long journey to being able to perform well on a studio recording. Even hearing yourself through phones or monitors the first time is hard to get used to.

Some of the folks never learned a thing. But some did. One girl, who is just an amazing person, heard herself through good gear that doesn't hide anything and immediately understood what I'd been telling her about her pitch, which was bad. No other way to say it. Her response was "Oh my god, I need to work on that!" Even if the recording was unusable, I felt good about that one.

 

[40Hz]

Hopefully, they'll learn from the experience. Maybe the singer will use this as an opportunity to practice and become better, perhaps take some lessons and be better prepared to make decent recordings in the future.

We can hope. But I'm not holding my breath. You've got one person feeding the anxieties and ego of another. Usually somethings got to break before it gets better.

In a way I feel for singers. They're stuck with what they've got. It's not like they can go out and buy a really good amp or axe, or just put more time into practice and better lessons and it'll yield great things. They're kinda like racehorses. And they're skittish, like all thoroughbreds.

Singers can make the best of what they've got and train up to be better than what they currently are. But there's very real limits that hard work and commitment won't necessarily overcome if you're a vocalist.

You can work to become a better racehorse. But there's no way that's going to make you a major stakes winner or set new records unless what it took was present all along. Same goes for singers.

Instrumentalists mostly work to learn new skills.

Vocalists mostly work towards discovering where their true limitations lie - and then learn how to work around and work towards making the most of what they do have once they know where those limits are.

 

[Ross W. Lovell]

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.

I own a lot of studio equipment, mostly analog and tape. My big deck is. Studer 2" 24 track. I also have a duffle bag with a Zoom digital multitrack some quality mics and an old Rev7 for effects, that i use myself for portability.

A good song with adequate players/singers will sound good on either rig.

A bad players/singers won't sound any better on the Studer than the Zoom.

I understand why we fire drummers..............the average drummer wants all their drums and cymbals covered with a variety of expensive mics, who somhow can't keep time even with a metronome.

 

[pcake]

i've known people who had only sung with bands and clubs tended to add a hint of something to their voice. the first time they recorded, they were truly devastated. they couldn't believe how their voice sounded with no band and dry - some, like the singer in the OP's first post, literally didn't believe they were hearing their voice. they believed something was wrong with the equipment, and that tended to throw them so much they had trouble recording. and if they haven't sung through a compressor mic, it picks up a lot more noise, so there's that.

the first time i heard my voice, i had sung at a few shows in first grade (for parents at school) and i heard my voice with a band or with other singers and through the PA. since i was interested in singing, my dad recorded my voice with his reel to reel. omg! i cried and cried. i really loved to sing, but i didn't want to sing if i sounded bad. of course, i didn't sound bad - just not like i expected. and my mom calmed me by telling me most people who sing are upset when they first hear their voice. i did get over it in time...

 

[okcrum]

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.

You can pick out the ones who haven't sung enough in a studio. They tend to sing flat when they wear headphones.

 

[Jimmy4string]

Tim can look on the bright side. At least Axl Rose wasnt there

 

[brianrost]

It wasn't until I started dabbling in recording that I realized I'm not as amazing as I had previously thought. Playback is a cruel mistress.

+1,000,000

It wasn't until I started recording that I realized why famous artists always say in interviews that they never listen to their records. All I can hear is the mistakes.

 

[L Anthony]

This thread so reminded me of this...

 

[Cliff Colton]

 

[Cave Puppy]

 

[Medicine Man]

I find it works both ways. Sometimes I listen back a couple weeks later and find something I liked that I didn't realize I did so well.

Then I start to sing and... well, lets just say it can be quite humbling. And then I'll start picking at my timing, which seems good when I'm playing but rubs wrong when listening from outside. But it makes a really good way to find what you need to work on. If you can take the indignity of brutal self evaluation, at least.

I've had that happen a bunch of times on live recordings. Improv stuff I thought was weak at the gig sounds sick on the playback. Studio not so much.

 

[Hahaha]

I would consider that rude and unprofessional. Not defending the band bailing on him though.

I read somewhere that the engineer that recorded The Shaggs was rolling around on the floor behind the console laughing as they recorded one of their songs.

My most unprofessional experience in a studio was when I had to bring my 3 1/2 year old son to a session after my babysitter bailed at the last minute. I had to read a chart for the session, and as soon as the tape was rolling my son started pulling on my pant leg repeating "Dad! Dad! Dad!" He continued doing this through the entire song as I ignored him. I actually got through the take with no mistakes. When I took my headphones off the engineer said "Maybe you should have brought some coloring books".

 

[redwingxix]

There appears to be an expectation in the music business that everything is free. Play for free, record for free, listen for free.

I'm going to call my water company today and tell them I don't like the water so I can get it for free. #forfree

You live in Michigan, too?


Another thing with vocals is that your ears hear your voice differently when it is not coming out of your own body simply due to your ears not being connected to the source of the sound. Is it possible that she had never heard her own recorded singing voice before?

I know my voice sounds completely different when i hear it played back from than when I hear myself talk or sing. It's terrible and I sound like I've had a severe head cold since puberty hit.

 

[hbarcat]

I've had that happen a bunch of times on live recordings. Improv stuff I thought was weak at the gig sounds sick on the playback. Studio not so much.

One thing I learned is that a performance that works live might sound bad in the studio and vice versa. That goes for instruments as well as voice.

You can get away with taking chances and showboating on stage and the audience won't notice mistakes or sloppy techniques as long as it's entertaining.

In the studio, you need to be more conservative and strive for precision and accuracy.

 

[LBS-bass]

There appears to be an expectation in the music business that everything is free. Play for free, record for free, listen for free.

I'm going to call my water company today and tell them I don't like the water so I can get it for free. #forfree

You don't live in California, do you? Water metering here is only now becoming a thing. We've had free water as long as I've lived here. I'm told meters are coming to my area, but they haven't yet installed one.

 

[LBS-bass]

It makes you wonder how many radio hits these days are done by non-singers.

I would guess a fair number. Time in the studio is money, and the big studios know they can tweak just about any voice into something that sounds palatable, even if it sounds robotic. The robotic voice sound generated by extreme settings on autotune is now trendy. You can put anyone in the booth, tweak it up that way, and get tracks with minimal time and effort that people will buy (stream, download, whatever these days).

So what the producers look for now is a marketable look rather than vocal talent.

You still have people out there with amazing talent, though. It's just harder to determine who they are.