Overcoming nervousness (PART 1)

It’s fifteen minutes before your scheduled time to sing. Your palms become sweaty. Your throat tightens up and gets dry. Your lips flex uncontrollably. Your whole body shakes in a convulsive manner. When you finally stand up to sing, you open your mouth, but no sound comes out!  Then, when you eventually get the sounds out, you forget all your lyrics.

What we just described is a singer overcome by an acute bout of nervousness. All of us have been nervous to some degree, either BEFORE we sing or DURING the performance.

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Record Any Vocals Lately? Read This.

Audio engineering and production is an art and one of the most technically demanding areas of the art is vocal recording. Vocal performance recording - on a general level - is taught in recording and engineering programs of most colleges and universities, around New York and California. I learned some useful information from the Institute of Audio Research, however what I am about to share with you came from painstaking hours in the school of hard- knocks.

The human voice is naturally forward and present to our hearing system. And the equal loudness contours show us that we hear the human voice three to four times louder than the greater part of the human hearing spectrum.

This is important because in a musical production, the human voice not only tells the story of the song, by communicating the emotions and sentiment through language and other expressions, but it naturally wants to be heard above all else because of its frequency range. To get the best sounding vocal recording, a producer or engineer must start with the vocal performance.

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