#claudience

animoré - everafter

Thank you @claudience for the 9-song EP!

If my friends haven't checked out Anything Box yet, you should.  They're a part of you!

Albums on iTunes:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/anything-box/id5006077

I awoke and told myself that I would track vocals to three songs this morning. One I awoke with in my mind, but wondered how the fuck I was going to sing it.. What mood did I have to put myself in to revisit those emotions? And the other is 169bpm. Both of them are screamers.. so why I decided on this beats me, even now as I recall it.. So I did the two screamers, and my voice was wrecked on the last one. It had to be. It's how I imagined it in my head.

The Bluebird and my tube preamp were pushed into thermionic distortion on purpose, and I used a heavy limiter to achieve an almost dynamic fuzz box effect on the voice. so certain words or phrases would be super clean and close, and others would go into distortion. It was challenging to know when to do it, but then again, the words themselves dictated this.

But what is it? What do they say? Do I agree? 

On one hand, we all get to a place of being 'lost' or feeling that certain inequities of life exist to torment us.. but it is, as all things, a passing thought, a feeling. An expression of what is in the moment. Songs are the oral and aural snapshot of these things. Almost like a photograph some would say. But no.

There is an interesting difference between a photograph and a song to preserve a moment. A photograph captures a moment in time, presently, and preserves it. Sure you can manipulate the photograph to create a new emotion from it, but the initial recording is imprinted.

A recorded song is different, in that the emotion that is being recorded, and the space from which it was written are two distant points. You felt something, so you wrote it down. That was point A. Then, you recorded it, and the mood, or the space you occupy in present time, must somehow connect to this initial feeling. That's point B. And this is where songs live or die. If no connection is found to bridge this distance, you have no song. The recording, even if technically perfect, falls short. Stranger still is that the present feeling does indeed connect, but is completely different, perhaps lighter or darker, and the connection creates something new.. then the recording succeeds. But what did you record?

Here's a great tip for vocalists. Before you record your takes, find the sweet spot in the microphone's Polar Pattern. Most manufacturers will give you this information from the actual recorded pattern. But others, more notably the lower priced condensers and such cannot afford to do this so you get an idea of what the pattern is in the pamphlet you get.

What you may not know is the "axis point" of this sweet spot. Most think it is directly in front of the microphone (as shown above). But did you know that the polar pattern may not be exactly in front of the microphone? Depending on how the capsule was placed in the mic, or slight variances in the capsule itself, that sweet spot may not be directly in front of the mic.

The blue overlay shows what I discovered to be my Bluebird's sweet spot, where the microphone seems to shine. And it is slightly off axis to the right. I discovered this through trial and error. And no, it does not mean my mic is defective in any way. It just means that the field is slightly off-axis. Having found this, I position the mic accordingly to get really good results.

So remember, before you do your next vocal take, sing slightly to the right or left of the mic and see if the sound pops out at you. If the sound diminishes from a slight off-axis tests, then your Mic's polar pattern is indeed perfectly center-aligned. If you hear something that pops just a little bit more on the right or left, you've just found that Microphone's 'sweet spot'.

It happened again. although this time I was more aware of the feeling of 'importance' as I awoke. The melody wasn't even in my head when my eyes opened, nor when I rolled out of bed.. It came as a hummed bass riff in my mind as I turned on the light in my room. Instantly.

I knew that it was good, but hesitated. I still have a cold, everything is aching from it, and in truth, all I wanted was to get to walking the dog and making coffee, not recording.. but that bass line..

So I turned everything on. And it simply wrote itself. Every part, every note, every little piece.. just .. happened...

The reason I'm writing this down, is because this has happened in the past of course, but very often I will hear a song we've recorded I'll wonder, 'I know I wrote that, but I cannot remember the process, how it came to be'. This is because sometimes I work so fast that I will not remember all the interim steps it took. Its almost as if working as a madman when one commits wholly to the moment.

But this time, the cold's wooziness gave me a way of observing myself as if from afar. It was fun watching it happen. Almost out of body. But I have a song to show for it. And a good one at that. And because the studio is now extremely conducive to the work, nearly 80% arranged before my first cup of coffee.