My last post for this thread.

Eddie, you keep referring to your 'foghorn' voice, etc. and how you want to change it via EQ.

I'm afraid that this is going to be quite impossible to do.

Here's an analogy to keep in mind:

When you receive a phone call from a close relative or friend, is there any doubt as to who the person is on the other end of the line?

Usually not. What is remarkable, is that the bandwidth of telephone audible transmission is much more narrow than what you have available with your recorded voice, but the mojo of the voice, it's character and nature comes through loud and clear in a telephone conversation - even with it's limited bandwidth, and sharp resonances and valleys, distortions from crappy speakers and mics, etc. Like old AM transistor radio frequency content but worse.

Your voice is your voice. You can EQ it till the cows come home and it will still sound like your voice.

I listened to your recordings and in most of them, you have a clean recording, with little evidence of room resonances showing up in them that EQ can help to fix. A little high-pass filtering would be all that is necessary to take some of the low end out for clarity in a few spots.

Think of the most popular, lasting bands that have been in pop-music in the last 40-50 years.

Beatles, Stones, Alabama, U2, Rascal Flatts, (insert your favorite here) etc. etc. etc. Have ANY of them, had a singer with a beautiful voice? I mean Tormé Velvet Fog quality. Some of the R&B vocal combo groups did actually have great singers in them, but in R&R and C&W, for the most part there's a whole spectrum of what would be considered crummy solo singers by voice quality alone. Think of favorite local bands - same story I'm guessing. Very, very few pop/rock/C&W bands or even pop solo acts rest on laurels of great voice quality.

In listening to the recordings, I do think there's probably a little bit of room for you with vocal technique. But that's just to my ear. You need to decide precisely what it is about your voice that irritates you. Here's a wild idea:

1. Take the $200 you were going to spend on the MOTU units and the $50-100 you would likely spend on decent cables to hook it all up, set that money aside.

2. Burn a home-made CD of your recordings.

3. Find a local, recommended voice coach/teacher

4. Find out how many voice lessons $300 would pay for. I'm guessing you will get 5-8 lessons out of that. In the first visit with the coach, use that CD and while listening, point out what it is that bothers YOU to the coach. If you can't verbalize it to the coach, it's going to be very difficult to either process it out of the music, or teach it out of your technique. You might find that to be a very difficult process, but it is central to being able to change what irritates you about your recorded voice.

The reason I recommend this last process is that the coach might want to train your technique to what suits him/her, and you could still end up disappointed. You need to be able to verbalize what it is, at specific moments and phrases, that sounds irritating to your ear. If you can point out something like: "Here, when I sing the word 'really', I don't like how nasal it sounds" to yourself or to the coach, then the voice lessons will be kind of a waste.

In fact, you don't even have to do this with a coach. Take one of your recordings (one without alot of outboard processing) and critically listen to it bar by bar. Write out notes like the one above. When you are able to do that, go spend some coin on the voice lesson #1.

Getting voice lessons is nothing to be ashamed of. No more shame than taking guitar lessons, drum lessons, etc.

And by the way, at least with Sinatra and Bennett, the key there is their technique and ability to smoothly slide in and out of notes with their own identifiable flair. Neither of their voices is particularly rich. EQ had very little to do with their success. My High School choir teacher abhorred Sinatra (at least back in my day) as exactly what they would try to teach out of our technique. He used the term derogatorily as in 'Hey, Sinatra, hit the note at the beginning, not 3/4 of the way into it!'

Think of your fave Sinatra phrases from his entire discography. I'll lay money there's a serious slide involved. Whether it's: "Come ffffffllllllllllyyyyyy with me", or "New Yooooooorrrrrrrkkk" For examples of a slide up and a slide down, Sinatra was the master of that and made it cool.

If that's what you're shooting for, a good vocal coach can help you learn how to do that - maybe not with the same flair, but at least get you close.

Just another 2 cents.

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