Last week Viohazard's guitar teacher and the people who work in the shop where he has lessons asked (again ) if we could record Viohazard singing before his voice changes. He always finishes up his guitar lesson by singing a few songs to his teacher's accompaniment.

He does have a nice voice, and it would be nice to have a few songs. Sooo...who's done this, for pleasure, practice, or auditions?

Best to sing into a tape or MD recorder, or best to record straight to computer? Analog .wav files or digital straight from the start? Whaddaya use to edit and compile tracks on a PC??

I've used voice-recognition software when translating - is that kind of mic adequate, and if not, do you use a cardioid (unidirectional) mike as for instruments, or an omnidirectional mic?_

I don't expect anybody will have ALL the answers (go on, surprise me! ), but interested to hear how other people record themselves singing.

Well, I usually sing straight onto the pc using a microphone. I don't know if the quality will be good though, that depends on the software too, I find. I have a program called "magix music maker", that lets you record and then save the files as wav. or mp3. I would save them as mp3 files, because wav. is much larger and you can put lots of mp3 files onto a cd easily.

Hope this helps.

wav files are probably better quality... you need to experiment and see what suits your purposes, really!

QUOTE (sarah-flute @ Mar 4 2005, 09:41 PM)

wav files are probably better quality... you need to experiment and see what suits your purposes, really!

I agree that they probably are better quality, but the files are huge compared to mp3 files. It just depends on how much you want to record!

QUOTE (sarah-flute @ Mar 4 2005, 09:41 PM)

wav files are probably better quality... you need to experiment and see what suits your purposes, really!

I agree that they probably are better quality, but the files are huge compared to mp3 files. It just depends on how much you want to record!

Oops, didn't mean to post two! Computer said "this document contains no data", so I though it hadn't posted the first one, but it did, apparently!

Thanks for comments! I discovered that we could record and then edit voice using the freeware Audacity, and also combine voice with backing tracks imported from or composed on other software. I guess most people already knew this, but I didn't know that Audacity could record live sound.

Now the trick is to get rid of muffled or distorted sounds...anybody got any tricks on microphone use or placement - what causes consonants like "t" or "p" to sound thick or muffled in the recording? (I'd be happy to know this for recording language practice files as well as singing! )

Hope this thread is some use to others on the forum too...

t and p are both plosives - in English, anyhow! - so I think it's the fact that air is expelled when you say them that causes that muffled sound (this is purely from a layman's point of view, not pretending to be an expert!!) - I remember that when friends were recording for a cd they put a duster between the singer and her mike you will often see on tv programmes people with a sort of gauzy thing in front of the mike, I don't know but I think maybe that helps with such problems?