Recording cringe
Dear Beginning Singer,
You love to write songs or you love to sing songs and then you sometimes feel so good doing it that you want to record it and maybe even share it— and then you listen back on the record and you wonder who the heck you’re hearing through the speaker when you hit playback. You cringe. You start to question yourself. Maybe your face even gets a little flush with embarrassment. Lemme tell ya, we’ve all been there.
Recording can be one of the most useful tools in getting another perspective on how our singing is going. Sometimes we are focused on the lyrics, melody, breathing, tone, or something else entirely that we don’t always hear and catch every little nuance in our sound. But when you are sitting quietly ready to listen to yourself on playback, suddenly you’ve got supersonic ears! Annoying right, lol. Welcome to the process.
Here are a few things to remember when you are using the recording as a tool to improve your singing! So let’s get into it. No one and I means no one can truly hear the absolute output of their sound in any room that they’re singing in. It’s scientifically impossible. When you sing, the air that is being filtered through your chest, throat, mouth, and head is vibrating in the acoustic space inside your body. Your ears then are perceiving the effect of the sound you created in the room you are singing in and the sound inside of your body’s acoustic spaces. We sound so different played back through a recording because we get to listen without also hearing the sound inside of us a the same time. This is jarring for everyone. Absolutely everyone, at least, I have yet to meet a human being who heard themselves played back through a recording for the first time and didn’t feel completely caught off guard by it but maybe unicorns do exist.
That being said — you already have a predisposition to be caught off guard by your sound especially if you tend to be more critical of yourself. So the key is to familiarize yourself with the sound of your voice aka record yourself more. AH! I know that’s difficult if you have a hard time listening to yourself BUT if you want to use recording yourself as a tool to improve your singing, you’ve got to accept it and get past that initial discomfort.
Getting familiar with the sound of our voice can empower us to listen deeper to the sounds we are making. We can listen for the vowels we are choosing on certain words and how that’s affecting the overall tone for example the word love. We could sing it like L-ah-ve, L-oh-ve, or L-uh-ve. Vowels can really determine the tonal outcome of a word. This came in handy to me in the recording studio when I specifically hated the way I sang the word “heart”. There was something too twangy about it and the R sounded too strong. So I popped back into the booth and sang that line again to fix it. After that, I loved it. You can listen for when you’re breathing when you’re not breathing, or straining if it’s not easily detectable while you’re singing. Remember it’s all a part of the journey. I found it empowering to learn how to describe what I didn’t like about the way I was singing so I could then attempt to correct it. But then again, I am pretty quick to be hard on myself so feeling at ease with recording and hearing my voice played back isn’t always the easiest thing still. What matters the most is that you feel good when you sing.