Warble GAK *thud* II: Attack of the Nasopharynx
Man, this singing business is complicated.
I mean, I've sung off and on for a large part of my life, usually with a guitar, hardly ever into a microphone of any kind, and never in a "Creative Output" type situation. By that I mean for a project, a specific piece of work, where I have to stand in front of a popscreened mic and actually produce something with a certain sound, quality level, and all the right notes in it.
As it turns out, the notes weren't the problem last night. It was the tone. Again, a head voice issue: I couldn't get the singing out of my chest and the middle of my throat. There's a certain resonance in my skull that I can feel when my head voice is in play, and it took me three takes to figure out that it wasn't.
It's a bit of a pain to record vocals in the apartment. I've got a real microphone, a sensitive, a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser. It hears everything. So, before I record, I have to close the windows, turn off the ceiling fan, the refrigerator, and the air filter, take my shoes off so that I don't toe-tap on the floor while I'm singing, and throw Bob into the bedroom. Even then, the room itself isn't the best, acoustically. The bare walls (one of which is entirely covered with mirrors) and pergo floors create a tight reverb, almost like a plate. Which actually sounds kind of cool, but it means that I don't have clean vocals to start with, so any processing I do is always plate reverb + whatever else I'm adding.
If I got much longer mic and headphone cords, I could record in the bedroom, which has carpeting. But I know from a previous neighbor that sound carries well through one wall of the room, and I wouldn't want to subject anyone to that. The other alternative is to use the closet. For now, I think I'll just deal with the reverb.
Chapter four is done and out to the group, all 2,000 meandering words of it. It's an interesting process. I think everyone else in the group has a significant chunk of their project written, between 100-200 pages, or even a full manuscript. I'm writing live, without a net, a brand-new chunk every week, with a minimum of polish or revision. I've decided to treat it like a magazine serial, with a very small readership. Dickens wrote his stuff that way...and I don't really like Dickens all that much, so it's kind of ironic that I've adopted his method. Of course, he actually was writing magazine serials, and got paid to do it by the word. I'm just trying to keep people interested from week to week and remain coherent, plotwise. I'll see what the verdict is this Sunday. I'm a little concerned that I'm starting to flounder a bit. Plus, it's always somewhat more nerve-wracking to submit things that aren't polished, that lack grace notes and eyebrows. But if there's a solid structure in place, I can add the filigree later.
Now, I need to...do things with my Saturday. Must...spend...money...on storage unit.
