Finished this a little early but “finished” mostly = “abandoned” in this instance. As we mentioned previously I gave myself a head start on this song to focus on learning & experimenting with vocal stuff and ughhhhh it’s so hard. Recording vocals: hard. Editing vocals: hard. Mixing vocals?: hard. Also, singing?: HARD. My voice is all over the map on this one, sorry in advance to offend anyone’s ears. I’ve always sort of had an identity as a singer – I was in choir, I was in bands all through high school & college – but I guess after ~20 years of not really singing you don’t just pick up where you left off, turns out. It’s fine, who cares. With more practice I can get better at singing. But I am struggling to imagine today a world where continuing practice mixing vocals enables me to understand it any better. I watched a lottt of youtube videos, I did all kinds of different edits, all kinds of experimentation. And it’s like FINE but it’s not AMAZING.
I will say though, even if I’m still frustrated, I can tell my ear is improving. I can hear things in the mixes that I definitely wouldn’t/didn’t hear a year ago when I first started messing around with Garageband. Also focusing deeply on how Sound/Voice stuff works is helping me hear things I hadn’t noticed previously in music I listen to. Yesterday I listened to a Harry Styles song that I’ve listened to hundreds of times and noticed for the first time something happening with the vocals that I want to try to duplicate in the future.
What else. Overall this came out fine, there’s more I could fiddle with, but I want to move on to something else. Notes for the future if I decide to do more with this song: different key, different drums, something instead of hand claps during the chorus.
Also I’m noticing a lot of weird/annoying sonic artifacts that Garageband inserts into music, and I’m not sure if it’s something I’m doing wrong, or something about how Garageband works/sucks. Certain sounds, certain effects, certain settings have a tendency to stick around longer than you want them to in the mix, unless you’re very intentional about it. (Example: I had an echo effect on one line that I wanted to fade out very quickly. But even with the volume and the echo effect turned down to zero, you could still hear the echo quietly in the mix way longer than expected.) idk!
podcast changelog: New mixing on the intro. Also new order of operations on mixing the file that I think I like better than the previous way. Wow interesting, tell me more.
song errata: The intro was originally 8 measures longer and I was going to do something with guitar at the beginning but decided eh who cares and just shortened the song. I’ll mess around with guitar a different week.