#sillybit

i spent too much time on this instrumental... it all went out of sync for a mysterious reason and i spent 4 more hours on this than planned.

anywho, this song starts with.... medieval chanting! and a big drone! let's make it a thing to bring medieval drones back on the radio because it might be one of my favourite instruments. this is just dry vocals with a cheap reverb for the idea. (actually this reverb is quite expensive irl)

hi so i guess we’re gonna do an exorcism after all…

This song is without doubt the darkest in my whole repertoire. It speaks for those who have been through abuse, harassment and survivors of psychological violence. It is not a happy song. It is not a supermarket song. It’s an exorcism song.

Singing this will be hard. The mixing is even more daunting. I will try my best.

I did a major alteration to the original. The original kinda spirals into madness at the end after the collapse of evil. Not anymore. Let’s just say this keyboard bit saves all, right at the end.

okay since i was sick i didn't work as much as i'd have liked but here are two bits.

the first one is a bit silly -- hello, falsettoBoy!

i noticed that recording the falsetto parts instead of just electronically shifting the pitches give a much fuller and organic feel to the high parts. (this is heavily heavily pitch corrected tho', my falsettoBoy is not that pitch accurate yet haha)

the second bit is... the whole song :) but only dry vocals and very cheap effects. i think there might some major clipping and stuff so don't blast it in your headphones xd (wait until i get all them pretty fx for that. or not. you can do what you want)

vessel is a bit of a special song. i love it. i think i once said i think it is the best moon prayer to have ever existed, but i am heavily biased.

nothing about this 'simple' song is simple. singing it on pitch is a nightmare (for me), the rhythms are difficult, the melodies change, etc.

here the first minute. as ever, just cheap effects and wip. oh yeah, and the intro is not complete (missing words: 'CHANGE', 'ARE', 'SHAPE', 'CLOSING', 'MOON-LIT SHAPES; maybe you can sing them :):):):))

i need this song in my life. just like the Eye of Ra.

not doing emotional singing again. too much work at clean up. i was just getting used to pitch-perfect robot voice, and now i had to deal with wobble pitch. but i think it will come out okay. maybe i'll rerecord some bits later, but let's see. it fits the song. i mean, who prays to the Sun and stays in emotional control?

i have never posted about the boring editing part that takes me literally hours. it's clean-up work. but it's also the reason i fell in love with making music and singing.

so, first, let's do a small cute simple sound sciency lesson.

What is sound?

sound is a wave: pressure changes in air. sounds simple, no? when you scream or hear a thick bass drop, you can sometimes feel the physical wave in your body.

however, the sound of a human voice is one of the most complex waves you can encounter; there are so many variables that influence the sound you make.

you make sound by pushing air past your vocal chords which are basically fleshy flappy things that vibrate in your throat. important note: you only actually make vowel sounds with the vocal chords! (AAA, EEE, IIII, etc.) consonants come later.

then the air travels through your throat into your mouth and nose cavity. there, the first pressure waves from the chords are modified by basically anything: your mouth shape, nose shape, throat shape, tongue position, etc. the position of your mouth modifies the sound that is pushed through and this is how you make consonants and words.

the air comes out. in real life situations, the sound wave you make travels everywhere and reverberates (is reflected) on objects around you. in the shower, for example, there is strong reverberation which creates this fullness/echo-like effect.

in digital situations (like for voice audio) this is different; a microphone captures essentially the main waves (if you are lucky). it cannot reproduce the real life environment, which is why a live singer always sounds better, more visceral, than on audio. the sound is literally more 'alive' because it 'adapts' to the real environment.

Sound is Spectral

your produced sound wave is super complex like I said before. it is not a simple 'wave' like ~~~~~~. a wave like that is called a sine wave and actually sounds like a long and annoying microwave 'ding'.

your voice is more of an extremely chaotic wave that is actually made up of millions of mini sine-like waves. the final result looks like below:

you can see it's a wave, but it's made up of many many smaller waves. and these are not regular. this is about 20 milliseconds of an 'A' sound (very small fragment of human sound)

bigger waves -> lower frequency, more 'heavy'. think: bass, rumble, low voice

smaller waves -> higher frequency, more 'bright'. think: crystalline, bright, high pitched voice

below you see a spectral view of sound, the 2nd post-chorus of alien tower. a spectral view of sound (simple explanation) is something that allows you to see all the details of your produced sound wave.

UNEDITED SPECTRUM:

EDITED SPECTRUM:

a spectrogram 'breaks down' that chaotic wave into all the sine-like waves that are in it. this requires complicated math that i don't understand lol (Fourier wave transform equations).

on the bottom are the lower frequencies and on the top are the higher frequencies. the horizontal axis is just time (so, first sound -> last sound). the brighter orange the wave, the 'louder' it was present in the sound.

just look at the beauty of this. just contemplate.

zoom in. see how fucking beautiful a human voice is. this is mine, but yours looks exactly similar to this. you make millions of waves that come together as a unified sound.

some things to notice:

the bottom part is more yellow/orange (im colourblind). i have a relatively heavy voice, but all voices are thicker towards the bottom, even female voices. this is nice -- otherwise, we would all sound like screeching birds.

the upper part (purple/blue) is more calm. normal -- again, humans are not screeching ultrasonic birds. except -- there are some parts where there is like a 'pillar'. there is no pretty waves in these pillars. these are called sibilants -- your S, Z, CH, F, V, wet T, wet K ... sibilants are closer to random noise (white noise) than any other sounds humans make. just try to say "SSSSSS". now, you can now 'see' and 'feel' that chaotic randomness in your mouth -- magic :)

there are long stretched parts that look beautiful. inside these parts are waves. these are my vowel sounds. the waves inside are the changing pitch. when the wave goes up, i sing higher. the wobble inside the wave itself is 'vibrato' -- every human voice trembles a bit.

in the long stretched vowel parts, sometimes the shape changes abruptly. these are the consonants. you can actually 'read' this sound spectrum to know what i say. "from the Lake - to the River - to the Sky - I am - touched - by something strange - not gonna lie"

the edited version is much cleaner than the unedited. and it's brighter overall because I made it louder.

Now listen to the (edited version) of this spectrum. (no autotune and false note trigger warning :p)

What I edited out in this bit:

i removed noise -> the general cloud of 'noise' visible in the silences becomes pitch black

i removed breaths in this song -> those puffy lower clouds before/between/after words

i removed clicks -> those vertical bright stripes randomly appearing everywhere

there were no gargles here, but these are hardest to see -> like a spotty cloud hidden in the upper parts, usually at the beginning of a sound.

i removed the room's rumble of my fridge and ventilation system (yeah, home studio vibes) -> the long orange stripe at the very bottom.

i removed my room's reverb and pauses between words -> you can see 'tails' or smears of my vowels into nothing. some bleed into the sibilants which is why there are these strange black rectangles.

I think I am a bit of perfectionist when it comes to clean-up. i know many use 1-click tools to remove all the things above. i prefer to do it by hand. then i have 100% control over every micro sound. also, i don't have a studio, so I am forced to be less lazy when it comes to editing. i don't think many people manually edit out the reverb in their takes.

editing is the very first step after recording in my workflow. after this comes Melodyne, which i already showed you guys many times. Melodyne is advanced software that can tighten and shape those waves inside the vowel sounds.

i hope you made it till here and liked this lesson! this is why i love singing/music. because it's just physics becoming poetry -- right at the boundary of science and magic.

guys look at my melodyne it's so fucking flat hahaha omfg. i think i am truly becoming ai. some notes are barely touched and 0 artifacts ;) UwU

so i might fail some days, but i get up and sing a bit better each take ;) #sogaybuttrue

this is what it sounds like. just fresh instruments + me dry voicy. i also gave you guys 1/4 of the song again for your entertainment.