No, it's counterproductive perfectionism
I'm sitting here watching live performances on KEXP and seeing how they're using SM-58s and Sennheiser HD-280 PROs for vocals and monitoring respectively and I'm thinking...
I have a £580 Neumann TLM 102 microphone on my shopping list that I've been saving up for to record my vocals, because that's a "studio mic"
These performances sound perfectly fine and my vocals wouldn't exactly suck if I recorded them with my SM-58. And yet, I'm stalling, waiting until I can make it all "perfect". What a disease. It's not even like I'm putting that mic in a professional studio or through anything more than a Focusrite 4i4 in a tiny room I'll treat to the best of my amateur knowledge. And it's not like the mic itself is some unique fancy high-end thing or like mics can magically make your voice better (sometimes even a high-end one will literally be a bad fit for your particular voice)
I wish I could be one of those people who just do things and hope for the best. For once I wish I could just rip off the band-aid.
My perfectionism helped me excel academically but also almost miss deadlines. Now that I have no deadlines, I'm free to waste entire years of my life, and it is fucking terrifying.
I've changed the cups on those HD-280s twice since I started this album and I still haven't gotten around to recording the damn thing. My days are spent in limbo, doing all sorts of other things, from paid work to purely wasting time. Awful.
3 Comments
naught101@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 94d
Yes. Gear is never the solution.
Stop whinging and do what you know you've got to do. It'll sound good. If there are problems you can always re-record some parts.
jqubed@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 94d
I worked in broadcast television for a decade and did audio for several years. We always used the SM58 for vocals when we had music performances. It’s pretty hard to improve on it.
phant@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 94d
The "performance" is the single most important factor in making a good song/recording. It's hard to improve that with gear, engineering and mixing.
You could consider renting that mic for a day or so to see if it does what you want. Compare vocal takes between mics etc. There's a library near me that just got some SM7b's for onsite podcasting - keen to give them a try. Tho might be weird to sing in a library 😅