Guy, where are the vocals?

Right here

In the post before the last one, where I all but declared my love for music,

An Old Flame

it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that I’d share some sort of music composition or performance at some point. But instead, your mans is doing everything with a mic except singing. But I changed that this week, and finally I made my first cover. In this post, in addition to sharing the song, I’ll talk about the process as well. If you don’t have the time for that or just want to hear the song before getting through this, you can scroll right to the bottom of the page and hit play on the SoundCloud snippet.

Alright then, so, in my head, I always thought just get a mic, and we’re all good to go. It’s just singing, right? Light work. I’m no Giveon, but I don’t have a terrible voice either. Like the infinity gauntlet, I was going to combine all the skills (stones) I had acquired so far, knowledge of music theory, the use of Logic Pro, and my angelic vocals. I was ready to dominate it, let’s get it I said, with the hubris and enthusiasm of Thor. What followed was a series of very humbling events.

The Instrumentals

First I had to pick a song, and I picked Canada by Lauv, it’s a song I’ve been vibing to for a while now. I like the melody and the instrumentals. And the vocals are awesome, Lauv is quite the vocalist. The chord progression for the song is really simple. There are only 3 chords. Using the number system it’s 1, 5, & 4 in the key of A major. The keys in A major are A, B, C#, D, E, F#, and G#. So 1 would be A (A major Chord), 5 would be E(E major chord) and 4 would be the D(D major chord). The song sounds nice in key signature A but my voice, not so much. I might be able to pull it off but not without some strain. So after some playing around on the keyboard, I settled with the key signature E which it turns out is my comfort zone. The keys in E major are E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, and D#. So, 1 would be the E (E major Chord), 5 would be B(B major chord) and 4 would be A (A major chord). For the last chord instead of playing A major, I play what is known as a suspended chord or sus chord, A sus2. Like the name implies the chord sounds suspended or unresolved.

So we have our song and key signature, let’s record the instrumental. The original song has a tempo of 93 BPM. Since I wouldn’t be adding any drums and making more of an acoustic cover, I decided to go with a slower vibe and used a tempo of 80 BPM. I soon ran into my first issue. Given that I wasn’t going to play and sing at the same time, the instrumental had to match the tempo exactly, you can’t just freestyle on the keys, it would make for a terrible singing experience later.

When I played and recorded my keyboard into Logic Pro a couple of times, it was off. I either hit some keys too slow or too fast, and it wasn’t quite in sync with the metronome. After multiple tries and a lot of frustrated sighs, I had a light bulb moment. I played the chord progression once and simply used the piano editor in Logic Pro to make sure that each key was within the grid that matched the beats per minute of the song. Then I just looped the chords since it’s the same thing throughout the whole song. I should have done that from the beginning but we live and we learn. Despite the initial roadblock, I was pleased with the results.

Piano Editor in Logic Pro

The Vocals

Now for the moment of truth, time to record those majestic vocals. I hit record, and the count in sequence starts, when it stops, I begin to sing and quickly I start to experience some cognitive dissonance, the voice in my head and the voice coming out of my mouth were not in sync. There were several reasons for this. I had all of a sudden become more self-conscious than I anticipated, it’s one thing to sing in the comfort of your washroom and it’s another to have a mic put in front of you and hit record, it didn’t matter that I was the only one at home while making this recording, it still felt weird. Next, I couldn’t complete full sections of the song, I was constantly running out of breath, so imagine starting a section strong and then running out of gas before you complete it. With all of that going on simultaneously, I kept singing off tempo, I dragged a section too long or sang it too quickly. And when I do manage to maintain the right tempo, the vocals don’t sound good enough, it’s shaky and sounds like a quirky 5-year-old trying to perform a recital in front of the whole school while his crush sits in the first row.

I did so many takes that I was one take away from hating the song. In the end, I broke it down into smaller sections instead of singing whole sections at once. Using a technique known as punch-in punch-out recording, I was able to re-record individual parts I didn’t like over previous recordings. It still didn’t sound the way I had imagined it would, but I couldn’t do 1 more take I was done. That was just the first verse and the chorus.

Later that day I just got back home from an outing with the hommie, around midnight. I was going to head to bed, but the song had not left me all day, it was living rent-free in my head and hunting my subconscious. So I figured you know what, let’s knock out the second verse and the rest of the song. This time my voice sounded a little better and more confident, I knew the lyrics well and sang larger chunks of the song at a time, instead of what I did in the first section. It still wasn’t what I had in my head but it was an improvement over the first section. It felt smoother, more in sync with the beat, and fewer words were being slurred. I half thought of redoing the whole first section, but I didn’t have any more takes in me, then I thought about just deleting it but decided against that, if, for anything, it’ll serve as a reference for what not to do next time.

Once the lead vocals were done, it was time to add some adlibs. I had a lot more fun here because adlibs are much much smaller song sections, so I could do all the gymnastics I wanted to, without having to catch my breath.

The Mixing and Arrangement

Once all the recording was done, I applied one of the stock vocal effects to my vocals which uses equalization to remove low end & some high-end frequencies that are not needed, and compression to make sure the high parts of the audio are not too high compared to other parts of the audio and the lowest parts are not too low either. It also applied Tape delay and pedalboard to add reverb, giving it that echo effect you have in a concert hall. You could apply all of these individually and tweak them to your heart’s content. But I do not understand these enough just yet, to make any custom adjustments.

Logic Pro Workflow

If you’re an expert with Logic Pro or any DAW really or you just want to have some fun. Here’s a link to the stems, go nuts! If you do anything interesting with them, feel free to share it in the comments.

The arrangement was pretty straightforward, there isn’t a lot going on in this song. I just have two piano synths playing at the same time. One where I play just the chords mentioned earlier. The other plays at a reduced volume a rocking tone between key E and B with a sustained pedal, so the song doesn’t feel empty. The most interesting events in the song were at the 1:47 mark, where I dropped the instrumentals, and then at the 2:10 mark bringing back just the chords along with the adlibs from the beginning of the song, and finally at 2:33 bringing back the rocking piano sound and dropping the adlibs.

Thoughts

Despite the challenges, I enjoyed the process of putting the song together and got to learn a little bit about what it takes to make an arrangement. I’m mostly happy with the cover, it’s not perfect but if I waited for perfection, I’d probably never make this post. I will however be keeping my day job, as I do not have the skill set required to do this full-time. But this is interesting and fun enough that I’d keep at it. And with time I would imagine my skills will get close enough to the ideals I have in my head, I’d be able to sing full song sections without running out of breath, and the microphone would feel like an old friend, one I grew comfortable with over time, and my piano playing and composition would be much better as well.

The Song

You can listen to the song below if you haven’t already. If you feel inclined, let me know what you think in the comments. Hopefully, your listening experience is less challenging than my recording experience, until next time.