Rainhat – the band

Undecided

My latest song, Undecided, is now ready! Check it out and tell me what you think!

Undecided by Rainhat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

You can download the song for free and share it with anyone you like, but you may not use it for any kind of commercial purpose without my permission.

This song was fun, as it presented a new kind of challenge when I was recording it. During the chorus, there’s a part where the background vocals go “Ooo” in a three part harmony. The two lower ones were fine, but the top one was just a tiny bit above what my voice can actually do. The difficult part appears three times in the song, and I did ten or eleven takes but I just couldn’t hit those high notes in tune three times in a row. I got it somewhat OK once or twice, but I never managed to nail it the third time. But I didn’t want to leave it out, since the harmony didn’t sound as good without it. So what to do?

Some creative editing. I took the one part where I got the part right once and copied the first section where the high notes appear. Then I pasted it into the harmony in the other two sections. Since it’s only a small “ooo” part of the top voice that I couldn’t do, it doesn’t affect the lyrics. So what you actually hear is the exact same clip three times, but you can’t tell unless you’re listening very, very carefully. Then you might notice that the vibrato sounds very similar every time at the very end of the harmony part… I wouldn’t be able to sing that part live. But then again, I wouldn’t be able to sing a three part harmony background with myself anyway, so it’s not a problem. If I perform the full version of this song live, I’ll just have to get a good background singer to do it.

This was a very small and simple edit compared to what goes on when the professionals are producing a song with some famous band. Those two words in the lead vocals didn’t sound good? Do them again, and edit them into the song afterwards. I doubt that there are very many songs out there that aren’t made up of a gazillion short clips edited into a whole that sounds great. A good song can literally be all the best 3 second snippets from dozens and dozens of takes, all glued together.