u/NDVGuy

I’m trying to go for a pretty distorted effect on the vocal tone for a shoegaze-y track. I’m running some vocals into a Decapitator followed by a Vallahala Vintage reverb and then blending in a clean copy with just some compression and room reverb at about a fifth of the volume of the distorted one. Vocals are just recorded with an SM57 and are pretty soft on their own.

It’s almost there, but the Decapitator just ends up sounding distorted in a really digital way when I have it at like 70% gain and beyond. I’ve tried seeing if I could EQ the more artificial ranges out but I’m either too bad at audio (definitely a possibility) or just need a different distortion.

Would appreciate any advice here. Thanks! 

Hey folks, I’m longtime musician with a not great ear and bad singing skills. I’ve been doing Sonofield daily for about a month along with some other singing and listening practices. I’ve got three stars on all of the “Sun” path (major scale ideas) in the “Degrees” tab of Sonofield.

I’ve gotten much better at recognizing and signing intervals, but I still really just don’t hear notes in my head. For example, if a note or chord is playing and I want to sing a major second over it, I can match the root and then jump to the major second pretty well, but just thinking of the major second and then singing it directly feels like total guesswork still.

I notice this when I do the ”Voice“ tab in Sonofield but also in general if I’m trying to sing a song or write vocal parts. This makes it really tough to sing live or with other people. It feels like even with the improvements I’ve made with my ear, it’s not totally helping me improve at what I want to do with music.

Any thoughts on this issue? Are there things to practice to get better here? Would appreciate any advice, thanks!

Hey folks, I‘ve played music casually and in bands for a long time but have always been terrible at singing and had a weak ear in general. I’m solid at theory and composition but just awful with hearing pitch haha.

I think I kind of have a two-part problem, where I have a lot of trouble hearing notes and melodies correctly and then also have a lot of trouble making my voice go right to the pitch that I’m hearing in my head.

I‘ll hear a melody and then immediately not really be able to recreate it, oftentimes not even getting the general shape right. If I’ve listened to a song for many years it’s a bit easier, which makes me think my bad ear just makes me super slow to pick things up and distinguish pitches properly.

I actually took vocal lessons for about four years as well and while I definitely made some slow progress, I still have basically no singing abilities unless I’ve extensively studied a song’s melody, and even then it sounds much worse than average. In hindsight, my instructor was a little untrained and kind of just winging it, but I still feel like my abilities were the limiting factor.

What would be the right path forward for me? I’d love to improve at singing enough to be able to sing on tracks that I write and would like to have a more solid ear in general. I mostly make indie/shoegaze type music so I really don’t even need to be super agile and dynamic, just able to reliably hit notes and write interesting melodies. I can’t find any instructors in my area. I’ve been messing with the Sonofield app but haven’t used it long enough to know if it’s helping (although it does feel at least somewhat useful). I’ve heard that the FET app is good as well but haven’t tried it.

Would love to hear any thoughts from more experience people here! Thanks in advance.