First home studio recording - Advice welcomed

[PAPADON]

https://soundcloud.com/user-30287432...omery-complete

[keith.rogers]

What did you use to record this, and how/where was it recorded?

To my ear, the room intrudes quite a bit, which is fairly typical when you set up something at a distance to pick up both the guitar and vocal in a space that has some reflections that will also get picked up, i.e., it's either small or has a lot of hard surfaces, or both.

There are a lot of ways to skin this cat, so it's good to know where you are starting, and what you might be able to fix/change, rather than suggesting to do this or that, e.g., what I've done, which might not be reasonable, and might not sound any good to you, anyway!

P.S. That comment on your track has a scammer whiff about it - I'd ignore it, but that's me...

[jim1960]

There's a lot going on there.

1. The room noise is a problem. Not sure if that's coming from poor quality gear or from something ambient, but it's harsh and a bit ear-piercing.
2. As keith.rogers pointed out, you're getting a lot of reflections and it's causing a reverb that isn't really working for you.
3. Lastly, you sang a lot of flat notes when modulating upwards.

So how to deal with it all.

1. I don't know where the room noise comes from so I can't really make any suggestions other than identify the source, then either shut the noise off or move to another place in the house that's much less noisy.
2. The reflections issue can be dealt with by building yourself some gobos and create a room-within-a-room to stop those reflections from bouncing all over the place and hitting the mic.
3. There are various ways to address the flat notes. If you record your guitar and vocal tracks separately, you can tune the vocals with various plugins (Auto-Tune, Melodyne, etc.). If you can't manage recording separately, spend some time practicing singing. What you're doing is a fairly common issue with untrained singers and it can be corrected in fairly short time. The biggest issue is being aware of it when you're doing it. It might help to sing in front of a tuner with a built in microphone and observe the differences when you're reaching for a higher note. But the voice is like any other instrument in that you have to practice to get better.

Here's a DYI video on building gobos. There are a lot of these kinds of videos on YouTube but I dislike most of them because they all use a solid perimeter frame and that lessens the effectiveness of the gobo.

[runamuck]

I suggest getting a book on recording techniques and then come back here once you have basic knowledge for refinements.

[TBman]

On my standard issue 5.1 Logitech surround sound computer speakers it sounds decent, just the vocals are a little hollow sounding, but that adds to the "raw vibe" of the tune.

However, when I put on my headphones and bypass my computer's sound card by using my focusrite, much of the vibe is replaced by harshness.

So the playing is fine, the vocals are fine, the tune is fine, you just need a "softer" room to record in, imo.