When you first started recording, you probably just stuck a microphone in front of your face and began to sing. You started to obsess about the way your voice sounded, your pitch, your phrasing, all the imperfections that you hear. And you started to feel like you couldn’t get the vocal to sit right in the mix.
It was too intimate, too personal, and you were distracted by it. So you started to do things to it. You EQ’d it.
You made it crunchy. You dimed all those high frequencies. And then you found compressors listed in some influencer’s vocal chain, and you obsessed over vocal chains.
Until you discovered double tracking. And you realized if you could get two performances tight enough, it would almost sound like one. Almost.
And for a while, you were pleased with the way it smoothed out those imperfections. Until one day, you discovered the doubling was creating a distance between you and the listener. You’d been wooed by its ability to smooth things over.
But you’d lost sight of the fact it wasn’t personal anymore. It wasn’t vulnerable. And that was the day you realized a lot of the other stuff you were doing wasn’t helping either.
So you went back and focused on the performance. And pretty soon, you were just sticking a microphone in front of your face again and realizing your track was hitting a lot closer.
