One thing I've always wanted to do, in addition to practicing voice over and "gitting gud" at doing narration and the like, is to record music. I grew up singing in church and doing fine arts performances and thoroughly enjoyed doing so, always have. Once I started attending my current church, I started being able to get recordings of my performances and tried uploading them to YouTube over the last several years. Sadly, the quality of the mix was never that great and I only ever got to do one take of any given performance. So, if the mix sucked, there wasn't much I could do about it. Plus, once you had it recorded, the vocals were mixed into the backing track on the final recording so once it was done, it was done.
Well, not anymore! Thank goodness for good recording equipment and a very quiet room. Not sound treated yet, of course, but someday I'll get there.
The song itself is one that I first became aware of when I was in highschool. It had been performed at church by our choir director, my brother, and another tenor from church. Loved it from the first time I heard it. Then, at camp one year we performed it and were conducted by none other than the songwriter himself. Finally, one year for fine-arts competition in Murfreesboro, TN, we performed it and placed third (if memory serves correctly). Anyway, I think I've only ever performed it at my current church once probably about fifteen years ago or so around the time I first started attending. I had plans to perform it again back in 2020, but then the pandemic hit and messed all that up.
After getting my equipment recently, I had been thinking about re-recording many of the songs I've done over the years (all covers of course), and it dawned on me that I still had this one collecting digital dust on the hard drive. What better excuse to mess around with the ole microphone than to record myself singing three parts at the same time? If you ever need to sing with someone you blend perfectly with, sing with yourself!
Anyway, I got the recording done and played around with the EQ in Audacity to try and mix out certain frequencies that could mess with the vocals. I'm not sure if I should have done it with all three vocals running at once or done them separately. I figured since it was my own voice, the same EQ should work for me no matter which part I was singing. Granted, the song itself is TTB and the bass line isn't particularly low anyway. So I just EQ'd based on the bass line. Unsurprisingly, the bands and frequencies were pretty much identical to what I already had set up for regular voice over stuff.
The hardest part was getting the mix right. Initially, the backing track was just deafening compared to the vocals. Layering the vocals on top of each other helped, but I still had to reduce the backing track by about 5db to balance it out. From there, it was a process of going through and balancing each track so that you could hear the individual parts, trying to avoid having any one line of music drown out the other. After listening to it about a bajillion times, I think I got it down. Fun process to learn and I can't wait to do it again!
Anyway, the message of the song itself is top notch, especially when you relate it to the doctrine of sanctification, something I know I fail at constantly. However, if we really did take seriously the idea of drawing close to God and keeping His presence in mind, we would do a much better job of watching our own actions and letting Him guide us instead of trying to do things on our own.
I hope you appreciate the song and the message therein.
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