Verses are a great place to experiment with dynamics. How quietly can you sing? Another thing as well is how low can you sing? Particularly very fashionable now, female vocals to be a lot lower than they ever used to be in a right, right down the bottom of the range of a female singer, which don’t hear, you know, didn’t use to get that so much anymore. Of course, it then allows you to go to so many more places in your choruses. yeah, so a bit of inspiration, there in terms of moving forward with some, with a more modern type of vocal, delivery.
That’s the word I was after delivery. And of course that’s gonna come for your, from your vocals. and, and here’s the other thing as well. How many times a week do I get people telling me, oh, I’m not really a singer. And how many times a week do I have to break the news to people? Would you better step up and become a singer? Then you’ve gotta be able to carry your songs, even if it’s to, you know, to work towards having somebody else sing ’em eventually.
and I have to say that more modern spoken, more intimate delivery suits, you know, that suits a writer who’s not too confident about their voice. ’cause they don’t have to sing out in this, you know, sort of very performy way. Don’t have to worry about singing. Hi. You can just sing like this and care with the song like this. Sing really into the mic. Just make sure it’s rhythmic. Just make sure it’s rhythmic. Â sorry David.
Yes, it’s in your head. It’s gonna be in my head all night now too. speaking of one song that gets in your head, we’re gonna go to move to another one that gets in your head.  The title of tonight’s  seminar, webinar masterclass, whatever you wanna call it,  is getting started with a vocal chain. And what’s that? I hear you ask? Well, again,  with my, thoughts on what are the most useful things for everybody to know as we go along?
I had lots of questions about when are we gonna do EQ and compression and more advanced things like that. So, so what I thought is we’re going to, we’re gonna touch on those things tonight, but I’m gonna do an introduction to them rather than getting so heavily into it. Because  in many ways, as a writer, yes, you can go into those things in depth. we will say we will spend more time on it. but there are lots of videos out there if you really want to get in, in deep dive, if you like, into all kinds of effects.
but the most important, I think, thing for you guys to know about is to try. And once you’ve recorded those vocals for your song, be it your own vocals or somebody else’s vocals,  just the beginnings of how to set up a vocal chain. And, and that’s what we refer to in the industry as a series of effects effectively, that  make your vocal stand out sound like more like a record. what I’ve written down here, what is a vocal chain? The thing that makes a vocal on a record, sound like a record.
It’s a combination of effects that combine together, make the vocal stand nice and proud  to carry the song in the best way possible. Okay? So the different type, various millions of different types of EQs, reverbs, compressions, all these kind of things. and every vocal is gonna be different. Every vocal list, it’s gonna have a different combinations, different makes, you know, hardware, vintagey type things,  new sparkly ones that just exist in the computer.
And, you know, a great place for us to start is Logic’s great stock set already of things which, ’cause you’ve purchased logic, you don’t have to go out and buy anything else necessarily. It’s all sitting there waiting for you to experiment with. so what I’ve done is I’ve done a little, a sobering thing. I I, that that, bad habits cover that I did just the piano thing a few weeks ago. I thought the focal sounded so terrible, so a little while ago I thought, oh, I’ll just record a better version.
And I’ll tell you what, it didn’t come out any much better to be frank. and it was interesting because it reminded me that  it’s important for you to carry a song, a songwriter, but inevitably there are gonna be songs, some songs, as a writer, you’re going to sort of, I i I would say pull off and others, which you aren’t. and I’ve found that I’ve got a very particular kind of voice and I like to try and convey the sort of the atmosphere, the sense of passion or power or the journey of the song.
But I can’t always, my tone isn’t always right. Â So it’s still really important for me to get a great guide vocal down for any other vocalist. and I’ll try and get that passion at et cetera. but across in a guide vocal, but I won’t, I won’t end up then necessarily going to there with some songs, particularly more pop songs. I don’t have a pop voice. And it reminded me as I sung this song, Â my voice singing this song, really.
however, for the purpose of the demonstration, it’s okay. Now I’m gonna turn the messages off ’cause they are distracting me a little bit. Alison just mentioned, have you mentioned the logic template for ocean eyes using Billy’s vocal strip? Â Interesting to use that too for close vocals, as you mentioned. Yes, you’re right there, there, there is a, an logic template for ocean eyes, so you can see what he did. Obviously Finnis Phineas uses logic, doesn’t he? Yeah. right. Then we turn off the messages.
there we go.  And, just going to, minimize the, participants. Oh, we’ve got some, just as I look  glad to say David Hoff Brand’s loving the sessions. That’s brilliant. And we’ve got Robert from Brazil. Lovely to see you. now then, so  what I’m gonna do is a basic starting point. We’re going to look at adding  EQ  compressor and some kind of reverb and delay to your either guy vocal or proper vocal for that matter.
and I’m just gonna share the screen and we’ll have a little look into  Logic. Oh, hang on, where are you?  Screen share. There we go.  Kapow. There we go. Hi there. Cleaned, cleaned it up a little bit. So we’re just looking at something relatively  simple.
yeah, so,  okay, so here, as you can see, I’ve got, my, well, here’s my MIDI piano.  In fact, while I’m here, I’m gonna do something  which you might find quite useful ’cause I forgot to do it before we started. So it will start off with a completely unrelated tip, but it’s quite cool. So I’ve got a MIDI instrument here playing. This is case of the piano. And you can tell if I, if I sort of stop stopping and starting around  every time you,  every, sometimes it doesn’t trigger the pedal, okay?
There are various things that don’t quite work with it. Okay? So what I’m gonna do is, and also this can be very useful if you’ve got a lot of instruments playing, lots of midi notes maybe, or lots of things going on. And the computer starts to struggle a bit. You can do a thing called freezing. I’m going to control, hold down control and click  here  on, on the track. And I’m gonna go down to  configure track header components.
And these are all the things that you’re gonna see. The ones with the tick are the ones that you can see on the tracks. You’ve got mute, solo record, et cetera, et cetera. And I’ve got one here called Freeze.  And I’m gonna click freeze and that makes this little  snowflake appear. Okay? And I’m gonna click that Snowflake on the piano track.  You might lose me for a second.  Oh, I forgot what to do. and I’m gonna just gonna press play.  Ah,  bit of a rookie error there.
I’ve got a very long  session, which I don’t need to have at all. I’m gonna go to the end of my session. Take this little arrow up here and  I’m gonna drag it backwards. ’cause I don’t need 201 bars,  which in this case you might think it doesn’t matter.
But because I’ve just frozen that, what I’ve basically done is  I’ve, made a sort of temporary audio file, I think is a good way of looking at it, of this piano.  So now it’s not, actually, I can’t play the piano as an instrument. it’s sitting there as a temporary audio file, all right? it’s frozen in resource, it’s not playing the instrument. and it’s freed up a bit of, processing power of the computer. And it’s also meant that the pedal is sort of, now, it’s not going to not trigger and sound a bit n so that’s just a little trick.
You can do that with multiple tracks all at the same time. You know, you might be like recording vocals and whatnot  and, just want to freeze the other instruments. So  all that midi is not sort of firing away, and you can get a nice, clear, present vocal performance or audio performance.  Okay? So that’s the piano sorted out. Let’s go to this. Now I’ve called it New Vox, which, let’s just have a quick listen.  You can see how terrible it actually sounds  Every time you come around.
You know, I can’t say no. So out of tune, Christ,  Every time the sun goes down, I’ll let you take control. I can feel the paradise before my world. Clothes  Quite a hard song to sing, Actually. And tonight had some fan. Wonderful. There we go.
Okay. one thing I did think as well, just to to tell you about is I sort of got past, I don’t feel embarrassed about singing. I don’t care what it sounds like at all. It’s, this is for the purpose of demonstration, but it really helps when I’m in with artists or whatever, there’s a certain freedom to singing. I have to say, sometimes I’m in with people and I actually think I’m freer as a singer, than they are, even though they’re the singers. But it’s really important creatively to be like that because, it makes them feel comfortable.
