The handclaps are just to synthetic, you must track some real ones please, although I like the compositional idea it can give it a 'tribal' feel and the pipes are doing that well ... Real claps would put this song into a different 'class'. And the claps should be very dry, as if they surround Phoolan outside. If you did 'different claps' as one poster has already suggested, you could even move them around in the stereo field, which would give us the aural picture of them moving around her in a circle. Also, outside there would be no reverb on the tribes clapping.
The chant compositional idea is really cool, very effective, it really knits the whole piece together as one piece of musical fabric, and you effectively alter the reverb and delay on the chant throughout the piece.
At 1:08 if you have the resources to decrease the volume of 'this body's not for sale' this last time it repeats before the 2nd verse comes in, that would be very effective. It could serve as a listener's cue.
At 1:44, this little thumb drum with running 1/16th's, mix that back at the almost inaudible level, without some sort of carefully crafted groove based on the volume of each of the hits it's going to get frusterating for the listener.
At 2:12 IMHO what you are doing is really fantastic, I"m laughing, I'm grooving, but it's out of character for the piece ... lol ... you a nut i like to crack ...
Now I'm going to get very personal here.
When I was two years old it became clear to my mother and father that something was different about my speech so they took me to a speech pathologist. By the time I was three I had made some real progress, but I had some serious auditory discrepancies. I am NOT saying you have auditory discrepancies.
When they tested my hearing, I could hear the tones far below the audible level of anyone they had encountered. I could hear higher in pitch and lower in pitch than anyone they had ever tested, I could hear the quietest tones ... and they were mystified.
I had very acute hearing, but my brain could not synthesize what I was hearing into the speech that I needed to communicate. Maybe I was taking in to wide a spectrum of sound.
I used to love to stand near bird feeders ...
It took me a while to 'sort out' what I was hearing and put labels on it that were effective so that I could translate what I was hearing into good language production skills.
Now ... I cannot stop talking
, and I love to speak and sing in other languages, it fascinates me. What B. SABBATH does really appeals to me. What you do at 2:12 is pretty cool ... it's a 'no rules' type of music, an orgy of sound, and I like that, it actually makes a lot of sense to me !
As I listen over, and over, and over to Phoolan Devi, I'm enjoying that more and more. I wanna boogie with ya baby.
I have intonation problems when I sing and I really work harder on singing in tune than any other part of my music. My singing always sounds pleasing to me, until I listen back to it on a recording, and then my little world caves in
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I practice with a digital tuner, by singing gentle long tones into the digital tuner. When I do this, it is not as much an issue of trying to keep the little needle on center of the pitch, it is a practice in listening to myself. If the needle shows I am singing sharp, I listen to the tone as best as I can hear it, and work it gently and slowly by letting it rise infitessimally above and below the center pitch ... I examine it and what I am hearing my voice do.
Just like I know to substitute the word 'ja' for 'yes', in order to speak german, we all need a reference as to what is 'the pitch' when we are singing. But for some of us, that can be a complicated issue.
We are built a little bit like speakers. We have cavities in our body that resonate when we sing. If you peeled your lips over your head, and continued like a bannana until your head was inside-out and your vocal chords were sticking up totally exposed like some wierd flower on the end of a stalk, singing would sound like a duck call ... like a quacking duck ... a pinched ballon, there would be no resonance, but there would be a pitch and you could still 'sing in tune'.
When you put the head back over the vocal chords, the cavities in the head ring or resonate with your singing, they color the sound. When you sing into a digital tuner, the digital tuner hears very little of these 'resonant head overtones', it hears the exposed vocal chords, and that's what you really need to hear to sing in tune well.
Your ears are encased in and surrounded by a bunch of resonant material, and they hear not only those 'exposed' vocal chords but they hear all the other stuff also. You can 'learn' to listen to false information and ignore the actual chords, and when you learn that, your reference is hidden from you, it is intellectually hidden from you, the brain filters it out.
With practice and hard work, you can zero in on those 'pure vocal chord pitches', you can pick them out of the chaos of all the reverberation going on in your head.
Also, it is not only the cavities that reverberate, it is your teeth, which color the highest of the frequencies and the bones in your head which will color the mid-range. Ancient man often used the human skull for a drum, and yes, it does have a skin tightly stretched over the 'drum head', so the analogy is clearly here.
Get a digital tuner and sing long tones, this will help your tremendously.
Your ear is also bombared with many external influences as well as what is going on internally that can trick the brain into changing the reference and thus your brain will be fed inaccurate pitch information. It is not that you are unable to produce sounds that are the pitches you want them to be, it is that you are having difficulty sifting through all the sounds you are hearing, and using the accurate relations of those sounds to finally produce the sound you want.
And this phenomenon in your singing is very, very slight, but I know you can sense it, and some of us can hear it.
And it is an extremely complicated process. Sometimes, no amount of practice will 'fix this' if you are not practicing with the proper tools. Your computer, just as it has given you the tools to produce this really cool musical work, it has some tools to assist you in learning to use your voice in a more western and rigidly pitched manner.
Great opera stars are revered and idolized for a reason, and yes, some of them can do it 'easily', it comes natural to them. For some of us, even simple speech itself is hard work, much less the incredibly complicated act of 'singing'.
Remember, Beethoven was deaf as a doornail, and he sang horribly out of tune and you rarely see that in print, but it is true. Beethoven sang badly out of tune all his life, and that is why he was so driven to produce his huge symphonies, chamber music and all sorts of stuff, some believe, in compensation for his inability to make his singing machinery work like he wanted. Beethoven chose a fixed pitch instrument, the piano for a reason ... By the time Beethoven started to 'go mad', Beethoven believed the great singers were 'beneath him' and he was very arrogant with the great singers ... because he could not hear them, thus he had no respect for them ... or anybody else at his latest stages in life.
What Beethoven heard in his mind was always perfectly in tune, and that is not true for everyone. ya see, when I peeled Beethoven's lips over his head, well ... I jumped into his brain for a while
!
But Beethoven did not have a digital tuner.
I know a deaf person, a completely deaf person, that sings in tune in a local choir, and sings well.
How do they do it ? Hard work, and yes, they trained with a tuner, an orb-strobe tuner, the old fashioned kind we saw in the orchestra and band room in school. They look into and listen internally to cues in their own body, and they take cues from the skin and bone vibrations, and the vibrations they feel in their heads ... but they must have a reference, and that reference for most of us is our unaided ear. The digital tuner can substitute for the ear until you build up a 'translation base'. This deaf person I am telling you about claims she can see the orb-strobe tuner while singing with the choir, like a hallucination ... hear that B. SABBATH ... it's good shit !
I think if you got a tuner and did this you would have a 'EUREKA' with your voice, I think you would have an epiphany of understanding with your vocal machinery and I really urge you to do this. But I think you already have a digital tuner buddy ...
Helen Ready is a great example of this, Helen didn't always sing in tune either, it took her years and years of listening to herself after recording herself in the studio to realize what to do with her body to sing better in tune, and I think that is part of what you are doing with your recordings.
You can speed this up dramatically by working with a digital tuner. You can 'go to 2:12' now by using the digital tuner.
There are some good digital tuners you can download ... your laptop has one probably in the software you record in ... and it's all alone ... sad and lonely ... you can be it's friend.
This section that ends at 3:15, you come out of it really cool ... like 'breaking the placenta' I love it ...
You could make a fantastic music video out of this.
I don't wanna meet Phoolan in a dark alley !
You MUST remember while you are reading my prattle, that I am extremely critical and highly analytical of pitch in general, anytime I hear anything it comes under my scrutiny, because those are the very crutches, the tools, that I hear with and I am constantly seeking to reinforce my 'translation base' myself.
My overcritical and overanalytical ear is a product of my own weaknesses.
Good luck with your practice.
Phoolan is a WINNER composition.
