The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey guys. I'm working on a song for "Baby, Be Quiet" and I've been told that I should mix my vocals.

I can't say I'm good at mixing. Can/will anyone help?

What do you mean - mix? Like put it in a track over the music?

Where are you in Oregon? And Jolly Roger asked the other question I had, so, ummm, yeah. Welcome to songfight.

Minor suggestion: raising the levels of your vocal track may help it stand out from the music. Or recording multiple vocal tracks of the same thing. The Help & How To forum has many helpful suggestions for improving your takes.

But use the search feature first to see if your question(s) have been answered before starting a new thread. And if you feel driven to start a new thread in there, make the title as descriptive and clear as space allows.

/public service announcement

Rabid Garfunkel wrote: Minor suggestion: raising the levels of your vocal track may help it stand out from the music.

Brilliant!

Well what I usually do is just get the music, record the vocals and put them together but I have no idea how to make it sound more clean or polished. As it is now, unless I have a great recording, the vocals usually end up sounding somewhat muddy.

I'm assuming that's just a mic problem though?

I'm in Ashland, going to Southern Oregon University.

g4meboy is doing as fightmaster suggested, and asking for help mixing his vocals, in order to help his chances in the fight-- his lyrics are funny, his music's not atrocious, but you can't hear the words and certainly don't want to listen to them if they're muddy.

if anybody has some spare cycles to help the newbie, you will get positive songfight karma. it may seem worthless...

I love challenges. Maybe you can post the music and vox in this thread, or just PM them to those interested in helping.
Or are you more looking for advice to learn on your own. In which case, info on equipment, mic and the mixing program that you are using would be great to help direct you a bit.

I may be way out to lunch, but your muddiness sounds like the same problem I had when I was using a shite mic. I was able to fix it up (a bit) by tweaking the eq before the sound went into my recording program. If you can, pull out some bass and low mids. Alternatively, spend some time messing with it in your (DAW?). Or, if you feel really adventurous, you could send me some tracks to mix. I haven't had a good songfight idea in forever, and I'm bored. No warranty, though. I'm definitely not claiming to know what I'm doing. I'm sure JB will warn you about associating with my kind, but don't pay any attention.

OK, after hearing your tune, I can hear pretty much what you need to do. As Signboy said, the sound quality can be EQd, and some filters and FX can blend it with the music. Get me the separate vocal and music tracks and I'll give you a mix to show you what I mean.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Brilliant!

But then, I'd only heard the über compressed version on his myspace page. Dunno what tools he has to work with, which DAW, &c., &c. A tight, short delay would bring out some of the vox, but yeah pulling back the mids/bass would help.

Also, moving the mouth away from the mike and verbalizing (rapping? freestyling?) louder from the gut will give more sound to work with.

Ashland, huh? Don't know anyone down there to hook you up with for face to face help. Sorry, homey.

That's fine. I'm trying my best to network so I'll find someone at somepoint.

Yeah it's rapping. I just started a new style which is disjoint rhythm/rhyming. It was the first impression I got of MC Frontalot and it sounded interesting.

As for tools. I'm honestlly not sure what exactly I'm using. All I know is that it records. I'd love to take your advice for the delay, daw, bass n all that, but since I'm not exactly how everything works yet (I've been toying around with a few programs so I don't know which one to use yet) it's not going as well. I have a weird learning curve I spose.

Thanks for all the advice though everyone. It's good to know that you guys are helpful and not just writing me off which people have done before.

On an entirely different subject, one of the things that I really like about songfight is that it's free of banner ads. We get bombarded with advertising from all quarters these days, it seems, and it drives me mad. I blame reading Stand On Zanzibar for making me so sensitive to it, but really it's always bugged me. So it's a relief that my favourite online community is a safe haven for my delicate, ad-overloaded sensitivies.

Imagine my despair when I see that people are starting to put banner ads in their message board signatures. What is the world coming to when artists can't even talk to each other about creating music without brazenly pimping something-or-other?

Here is a post from a thread about vocals:

http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtop ... 3094#93094

There is more good info in that thread. If your vocals are muddy, you should back off the mic a bit and cut the bass in your software, and use compression and reverb to help get the vox to blend into the mix.

Gameboy, PM sent. I didn't want to post the remix in this thread because it's your entry for next weeks fight.

#1. I had to add some background sounds EQd to specific levels to hide some terrible background noise from your tracks that I couldn't remove without taking away from your samples.

#2. EQd the vox and gave the chorus vox a different sound to break up the song a bit. I fattened up the vox just a smidgen. I had to hold myself back on beefing up the vox because I know you guys like that nasally pen protector tone.

#3. Added a few low tone percussions to give the song some bass tones because after removing the bass from the vox, there were no low tones under around 2k hz. But I tried to keep it as close to your original song as passable.

Future advice:
For God sake get a better mic
For God sake, get better quality music samples

Other than that, I can see how your culture might like this song. Good job and good luck in the fight.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:#1. I had to add some background sounds EQd to specific levels to hide some terrible background noise from your tracks that I couldn't remove without taking away from your samples.

Can you elaborate on this?

roymond wrote:

Billy's Little Trip wrote:#1. I had to add some background sounds EQd to specific levels to hide some terrible background noise from your tracks that I couldn't remove without taking away from your samples.

Can you elaborate on this?

He sent me two tracks, vox and music. Both tracks had a really bad air/snowy sound at multiple levels, but the sounds around 5k hz were hard to deal with and as I tried to improve the track quality, those 5k tones became more noticeable. Everything I tried to get rid of those tones seemed to kill the music in the track, so I created some "white noise" for lack of a better word (because I don't know what to call it), to cancel out the bad sound. So I used a couple different instruments to do it. I started with a triangle, tapping at a fast tempo and EQd it and added some ambiance until it masked the bad sound. Then to make it not look like I was trying to "cover" anything up, I did the same thing with a couple other instruments that the brain associates with tones in the 5k range, like a shaker, etc, so I wasn't just using one instrument to mask the crap tones.

After reading what I just wrote here, it sounds all scientific. But basically I just fucked with stuff until my ears were happier than they were when I started.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing the results.

Well, don't expect too much, Roy, it is still pretty rough.