Recording Continued (Bringing It All Together)

Having recorded both the guitar and vocals for my song, I was both relieved and happy when hearing it back (despite my detest for my own voice) as I finally had something I was proud of and wanted people to listen to (as opposed to the Soundcloud version which was recorded using my laptop, not quite the same).

Then came the the more technical side of the process which involved adding the effects and mixing/altering things to get it sounding as clean as professional as possible.

-Starting with the vocals, first reverb was added to give it more of a 'smoothness; and 'ambience' to suit the song, as opposed to the vocals sounding 'dry' and a bit lacking.

-Then the EQ which is a spectrum that shows the frequency in voice was looked at. It's where you can cut off the low noises (background noises) and also the very high pitched sounds (which there weren't any), however it also brings up the bits that are hard to hear to round off the piece, using a good mic means you don't have to do much with that (with was made apparent because not much needed to be done).

- Finally, the same copy and paste that was done for the guitar part, was also used for the vocals as there were bit's that I didn't like.

The guitar editing was similar to the vocals with the EQ to bring up the the quieter parts of it however there were a few other things that were used.

- One plug in that was used is a compressor which is important for a guitar - specifically when being picked as it evens out the dynamics. You can set thresholds to to louden quite notes and visa versa, which again, rounds out the piece, making it cleaner.

- Fades were also used on both the guitar and the vocals to give it a nice intro to the song and to nicely fade out with the guitar part. Also, it got rid of the background noise on the tracks, the few seconds before I started playing/singing.

Finally, to complete the recording, the two tracks were exported then imported back in as a stereo track (combining both the guitar and vocals into one track), and the maximiser was used to give it more 'power', which meant that the idea was to get the levels as close to 0 as possible without it clipping, one thing that is done in professional studios to make it as loud as possible overall.

When it was finally done I listened to it back and was really proud of what I had managed to achieve (with some help). It was nice to see something become more 'real' and I honestly did enjoy it, even the part about playing in front of one person as it's still some form of performance, therefore help with the confidence part of performing.