Saturday, December 20, 2008

Correcting my wrong learned vocal notes. Xeno sings some Beatles, etc. for ya.

apguitartunergI've been singing for many years, and I enjoy it, but I  usually don't like to hear my voice. Too nasally and my pitches are off at times.

The "nase" is genetic, but I'm just now working on hitting my pitches correctly in terms of absolute pitch.

This weekend I recorded me singing a bunch of songs so I can use the free Windows AP Guitar tuner software to find out if I'm consistently flat or sharp on certain notes.

Just working on "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, for example, I notice that when singing a capella, when I get to the word "bad"  (in "Hey Jude, don't make it bad", which is a "G" note) what sounds "right" to me, is actually 15 cents flat. Hmm!

If I correct the pitch using the tuner as a bio-feedback device, it does sound more "positive" to my ear, less sad. Interesting.

Recall that in between any two adjacent notes there are 100 cents and humans can detect differences of about 7 cents. Therefore, if I'm 15 cents flat, people could definitely tell on some level.

Just for fun I've uploaded 16 cover songs-- just me and a guitar (box on the left)--as the "BEFORE photo" and then post the corrected ones after my accuracy has improved. (Free Windows WMA to MP3 converter here, but virus software complained about it.)

My tone wavers as I sing, more than I'd like, not from natural vibrato, but from what seems to be knots and bumps in the path of my outgoing breath. One factor is my heartbeat but there is something else too, some warble I experience when trying to blow a smooth steady stream of air. Have any of you singers fixed this kind of problem?

Listening to my Christmas song examples, I definitely want less Glissando than I have now. Pitches these days can be corrected to be perfect in the studio. This gives that robotic sound that is very popular on the radio these days. The more robotic it sounds, in fact, the worse the actual singer's pitch was in the studio and the more they had to correct the notes with software.

The songs I've posted are raw, just me and a guitar, uncorrected, sung into a little hand held Olympus DS-30 Digital Voice Recorder, converted to MP3, and uploaded.

1 comment:

Perfect Pitch Pill? « Xenophilia (True Strange Stuff) said...

[...] posted about perfect pitch previously: correcting wrong learned notes, paul mccartney making girls scream, absolute pitch [...]