A friend in SA wanted to hear my last concert performance, so I recorded it on one of those little digital recorder thingummies. I was quite surprised by how much the recorders distort the voice. It sounds brassier, and just all round louder than it really was (though, tony, you'd be proud - relatively untrained though my voice is, I too can outsing an orchestra... snigger).

Do any of you ever record yourself? What kind of recorder do you use?

Oh, and if anyone does want to hear how the Dido sounded, considerably lower than writ, let me know and I'll email it to you.

J

Yes I own one of those digital thingys, and have made successful recordings on them. Post recording editing is important particularly graphic equalisation, you can boost the bass a little, trim down the treble and keep the middle tones rather truer. It's worth experimenting.

Meerkat if you PM me, I'll give you my email address, always interested in hearing other singers performances. (Unlike my feelings about talent show tenors you'll get a very sympathetic hearing)

Sure, jo, that would be nice - I'll pm you in a sec.

My digital recording seems to have gone the other way - the bass is heavy, and the trebles almost squashed out completely. You can hear that it's done the same thing to the fairly good concert grand piano that's accompanying me. It's quite strange - my mum says I sound like a male tenor! It seems to have lost the subtlety a lot.

I did a recording for a friend of his version of a carol using his studio and a software product called Sonar
He had a proper booth with mike and it took us 6 hours because the vocal sound kept overloading the software This was for a 3 minute item

Unless you are using a full blown recording studio with engineers constantly monitoriing the sound levels you have to do a lot of editing to obtain the most lifelike results

Set up an edirol properly and adjust the levels and you'll get a passable result. I alway record at the best quality I can so that once I've editied it the result is at CD qulaity, and can be squashed into an MP3 file too.

I don't normally have to do much in the way of editing say a little trimming further adjustment of the levels and applying a graphic equaliser curve to it.


It's a great little device that I'm extremely fond of.