Captain Ego
New member
Well I'm off to the country visiting the GF's fammy again for a week.
One of the biggest problem I have with home-recorded vocal takes is that I never seem to get the quiet that I need. When anyone is home, or a neighbor nearby in his yard.. I have a serious psychological hangup about singing out in my "big" voice while a track is playing in my headphones. I really do love feeling completely isolated as I work on things. It's unnerving to sing the same phrase 5 different ways, playing with vocal technique as I experiment, knowing that my nosey neighbor is listening in and chuckling... this isn't like stage fright, I have no problem if the music behind it is audible, but singing really loud when I'm not sure of exactly how I'm singing yet, over and over again - is just not something I ever feel comfortable with people listening in to.
I dunno, like working out naked with bystanders or something.
So, back to the country, and a battery powered recorder... I thought I would take advantage of the battery power and go waaaay off into the woods as a convenient excuse to avoid the tedium of all the kiddies at the week-long family affair. There may be very distant highway noise, but I do have two gain settings on the recorder's built in mic, one meant for close micing so that might help. I close mic when I sing anyway.
I have never recorded outside of a room environment, letting the room have its sound as part of the overall track and I worry it might come off as very dead sounding as there wont be anything really reflecting.
Has anyone tried doing vocal takes off in the great outdoors?
I was wondering if maybe there's some settings I could make to the preamp, the compressor, and/or equalizer before hand to prepare for the outsideness of the environment?
(all the stuff, pre/comp/EQ,etc, is built in, one of those gimick-laden handheld do-it-all things) It tracks directly from the in-line internal effects, there is no insert option to test out the settings over a dry track, so I worry it will just be wasted time if it will all come out sounding dead.
One of the biggest problem I have with home-recorded vocal takes is that I never seem to get the quiet that I need. When anyone is home, or a neighbor nearby in his yard.. I have a serious psychological hangup about singing out in my "big" voice while a track is playing in my headphones. I really do love feeling completely isolated as I work on things. It's unnerving to sing the same phrase 5 different ways, playing with vocal technique as I experiment, knowing that my nosey neighbor is listening in and chuckling... this isn't like stage fright, I have no problem if the music behind it is audible, but singing really loud when I'm not sure of exactly how I'm singing yet, over and over again - is just not something I ever feel comfortable with people listening in to.
I dunno, like working out naked with bystanders or something.
So, back to the country, and a battery powered recorder... I thought I would take advantage of the battery power and go waaaay off into the woods as a convenient excuse to avoid the tedium of all the kiddies at the week-long family affair. There may be very distant highway noise, but I do have two gain settings on the recorder's built in mic, one meant for close micing so that might help. I close mic when I sing anyway.
I have never recorded outside of a room environment, letting the room have its sound as part of the overall track and I worry it might come off as very dead sounding as there wont be anything really reflecting.
Has anyone tried doing vocal takes off in the great outdoors?
I was wondering if maybe there's some settings I could make to the preamp, the compressor, and/or equalizer before hand to prepare for the outsideness of the environment?
(all the stuff, pre/comp/EQ,etc, is built in, one of those gimick-laden handheld do-it-all things) It tracks directly from the in-line internal effects, there is no insert option to test out the settings over a dry track, so I worry it will just be wasted time if it will all come out sounding dead.
