Well... it's been a challenge and a half... but today I finally ticked that big box marked 'Ben's vocals'!
I gave my last vocal performance for the album this evening. I'm really pleased with this one in particular, because it's a very difficult track to sing:
- Lots of long phrases with loads of words sung in quick succession
- Not very many places to breathe
- A difficult lyric to get out clearly and intelligibly
- Quite an uninteresting vocal if sung wrong, so it requires maximum effort at all times to keep the moods shifting and the vibe going
- Almost every line ends with the same (incredibly difficult) vowel sound
- Loads of evil pitch jumps in there, whole tone scales and octave leaps
- The whole thing is pitched a good bit too high for me to sing comfortably!
- I'd already tried to record it before and failed miserably.
But today I nailed it. The key? About 4 months of practise!
Not all the tracks have been so difficult though. There were two in particular that were just so easy to sing that I nailed it in the 'demo' vocal take for both of them. And there's another particular track where the vocals are not central, so they didn't need to be so carefully prepared.
There was one bastard track that required waiting until exactly the right moment before I could sing it. A real emotional beating. Not one you can just do on a work night when you've got a couple of free hours. It took weeks before the right moment arose. After recording it, I didn't even listen back to it. I just knew that the perfect moment had been captured. It took 2 days before I could bear to approach it again. And... well... I... yeah.
I, Yeah!
Other than that, there are a couple of duets on there, which needed a fair amount of work beforehand to make sure I wasn't going to embarrass myself in front of a 'real' singer!
And that's about it really!
Now all that's left for us to do is carry on paring down the 'to do' list, and wait for the fourchoircles recordings to start trickling in.....
