Behind the Scenes: #16 The Vocal Overdubs
A Peek Behind the Curtain: A Solopreneur Produces an Album Recording
We’ve reached the final stage in recording the tracks: doing the vocal overdubs. These are the vocal tracks that will be added to the instrumental tracks. Once all of the tracks for all instruments and voices are laid, or recorded, we’ve truly begun the recording process, which is much more than recording the sound.
Now that I had edited the instrumental tracks, it was time to record the vocals.
Doing vocal overdubs is not the most comfortable process for me, as I mentioned in the last segment, since I have to fit my singing to a previously recorded instrumental track, rather than singing freely, knowing that the instrumentalists will follow me, as they do in performance. This restricts my artistry a bit. I assume that I’ll become more comfortable with that process over time.
Recording overdubs to a previously recorded instrumental track, rather than recording the vocals live at the same time the instrumentals are being recorded, means that I don’t have to sing in the isolation booth, which is a great relief to me. First, I’m a bit (okay, a lot) claustrophobic, so being in a closet-sized room is not particularly comfortable. In addition, I have a large vocal instrument, and singing in a small space makes me feel that I have to scale my sound down, which is something I don’t want to do. Third, I don’t get the feedback or reverberation in the sound in an isolation booth that I get in a larger, more resonant room. I want to be able to sing freely and expressively, and that’s something I do much more easily in an open studio than in the booth.
To do the vocals, I had to become accustomed to singing with the instrumentals coming through headphones, rather than hearing them live. This might seem like a small thing, but it really does change how the brain and the ears process the sound. I have for years performed live and acoustically, so getting used to the electronic way of making music is a major change.
I had two songs to record and needed to fit my overdubs into one hour of recording time. I chose to alternate laying tracks for one song with the other song so that I didn’t do all of one song when I was fresh and the other song when I was tired. I recorded a couple of takes of Come Rain or Come Shine, then a couple of takes of Stormy Weather, then took a very short break. After that I laid another full track of each song. Then I did chose just a few measures from each song for which I wanted to be sure that I’d gotten what I wanted, or which was a tricky or difficult spot.
Once I was finished, the recording engineer asked if I wanted to hear the tracks. I once again declined, since listening to myself is uncomfortable, and I wanted to do that in privacy at a time I could listen to them while wearing my producer hat rather than my singer hat. I can be more objective and less self-judgmental when I’m approaching the listening as a producer’s job rather than as a musical artist.
So now all the recording for this segment of the project was done!
Up next: the Vocal Edits.
A new installment of Behind the Scenes is published every Tuesday, except on the first Tuesday of the month, when a general post is published.
If you like my Substack, you just might like ELENA’S NEWSLETTER. It comes to you monthly, it’s free, and it’s geared towards creatives in all genres. Take a look and sign up here: www.elenagreco.com/news.