Chapter 28: Vocal Recordings
(A few hours later)
"How about now? Do you think you could try now?" Tang Miaoyi had finally completed the backing track and was ready for An Qiuying's melody. She immediately looked at Qiuying with hopeful eyes.
There had been no problems in production, so the most important part of "Solo Dance" now lies in Qiuying's hands.
Although An Qiuying can now remember all the lyrics after practicing, the main issue is whether she can match the feel of the song with her vocals.
Songs have a particular style of singing, that makes the song flow. Songs that could work for one artist's voice, won't for another. A country singer wouldn't work on a rap song, just like a pop singer wouldn't fit well in an opera. As such, when recording vocals, the most important part is the Timbre of a voice.
(A/N, Timbre is what makes voices sound different, even when singing the same notes)
The style of singing was important as well. If a country singer were to sing "Solo Dance", with a voice full of "Twang", it would clash with the song, and make a huge mess. While an extreme example, even subtle things can distract from the complete piece.
And of course, it's much easier to replicate a style after you hear the original song.
Unfortunately for both of the girls, the reference for the song was in a different world. So, Tang Miaoyi had to attempt to coerce Qiuying's voice to sound similar to Theresa Rex, the original "Solo Dance" singer, without hearing it once.
"Should I try?" An Qiuying hesitated for a moment, not wanting to make any promises.
"Okay, get ready." She thought for a moment and nodded.
Miaoyi signalled for Qiuying to prepare and then moved the track needle to the starting point. After she set up the recording microphone, checked the sound card, and handed the monitoring headphones to Qiuying. Miaoyi gave her some encouragement, "You can do it!"
An Qiuying took the headphones and put them on, while Miaoyi's slender fingers rested on the enter key. With a slight opening of her bright red lips, she counted down,
"Three..."
Qiuying's expression became serious, and she closed her eyes.
"Two..."
"One..."
As Miaoyi counted down to "one," she pressed the enter key.
On the computer screen, the track needle began to slide smoothly along the waveform.
"In the faded light, you touch my body..."
With her lips opened slightly, Qiuying began to sing the first verse of "Solo Dance." Her voice transformed into a melody that floated throughout the room. Miaoyi couldn't help but almost exclaim in admiration, but quickly covered her mouth just in time.
It was truly stunning...
First of all, An Qiuying's singing was in English. With the original being in English, Miaoyi wasn't comfortable enough to translate it and keep the rhymes. Plus, even though China was more prosperous in this world, the British still colonialized half the world, so English was still the most common language.
But even in English, she sang without a *significant* accent, partly due to how simplistic the lyrics were. Miaoyi could already tell how talented she was, her first note carrying a firey resonance that was wonderfully nuanced in its details. Combined with the beautiful electronic melody of "Solo Dance," Miaoyi felt that this song was not far from being released with this vocal performance.
"I can feel your hands on my skin, think you got me right where you want me... but you're just in my way..."
- - - - - - - - - -
Ten minutes later...
After a playback of the vocal track, Tang Miaoyi wrinkled her brows and pressed pause. "There's a part of the lyrics in the chorus where the vocals become too breathy, we need to re-record that section." When it came to making music, Miaoyi was completely different from her usual image, listening carefully with a serious expression on her face.
But it wasn't a big problem, as the overall performance was already very good, far beyond her initial expectations for An Qiuying. What are the chances that her classmate, who is sharing her house, was also a great singer?
...
..
.
Honestly, considering she transmigrated, pretty high...
"How long did you practice last night?" Miaoyi asked with some doubt. An Qiuying's skillful performance was honestly surprising, suggesting that she had been practicing for quite a while.
"Three or four hours... I really like these two songs, so I just practiced a little more than normal." Qiuying's eyes shone with excitement, like a devoted fan staring at Miaoyi.
Tang Miaoyi was at a loss for words for a moment, not knowing how to respond. "It's okay... there will be more in the future..."
"I'm looking forward to it." An Qiuying smiled brightly.
Suddenly, Miaoyi felt her heart skip a beat, feeling a rush of excitement.
"N-Now I'm cutting out this part, and you'll record it again," Forcing herself back to work, Miaoyi's beautiful eyes flickered as she spoke.
Regarding re-recording, if only a small part of the song has issues, there's no need to record the entire thing again. You can just cut out that part and rerecord it separately.
In fact, there was no reason to record the whole thing at once. If Miaoyi wanted, she could record the whole thing piece by piece, and it would work.
But she didn't want to, for two reasons. The first was that she needed a baseline for any subsequent re-recordings. Right now, she was working with a piano for the melody, so anything would work better.
The second, and main reason was that if each part was recorded separately, the emotions of the singer is lost. If she recorded each piece separately, after the 20th recording, Qiuying's voice would be dead tired, and any emotion that she would have conveyed at the beginning of the recording would slowly fade away. Better to record everything at once, make one good take, and then cut up the recording afterwards.
The second round of recording went smoothly, and Miaoyi eventually considered the song recorded well enough to move on to the next step...
"Should we start listening to the fans' recordings now?" An Qiuying was aware of the recent controversy on Weibo and brought up Miaoyi's response.
"Mm-hmm, this step is quite crucial." Miaoyi nodded and logged into the email address that was posted on Weibo.
An Qiuying was the lead vocalist, so now they needed to collect the different tones that would enhance the song. This was a rather unique way of collecting sound, and not a very effective one. There was almost no guarantee that a fan would have a decent microphone, and anything recorded on a bad microphone was in no way professional quality.
If even 1 in 1000 had a decent microphone, Miaoyi would be considered lucky.
Fortunately, she had a lot of fans...
"Ding ding ding ding~"
[You have received 78,465 new emails.]
There were over 70,000 new emails, and not all of them had attachments; some were just other information. Some were just spam, while others were from scam artists. There was even one signed by some guy named Eric...
In short, there was everything, and not all of them were audio recordings from fans.
This was simply the result of giving out a public email to random people on the internet. This was quite normal, and fortunately, not all of them were from fans. If all 70,000+ emails were just audio recordings from fans, that would have been terrifying...
Tang Miaoyi had no interest in these junk emails, so she only kept the ones from fans and the audio files they had collected, deleting everything else.
However, this was a pretty huge workload, and Qiuying couldn't help, so Miaoyi spent about two hours alone sorting through all the audio emails. Even after removing meaningless emails, there were still over thirty thousand left...
It was still an enormous quantity, and even after a quick glance, they were densely packed in the mailbox, making one dizzy.
"Why isn't my bank account balance this full?" Tang Miaoyi silently complained.
During Miaoyi's "Fun" email sorting session, Qiuying went to cook, while Yang He from Light Cloud and Zhang Yuan from Tianyou Entertainment both inquired about the progress of the new song through communication software.
Miaoyi gave them both a quick estimate, "It may take another three days to finish 'Solo Dance,' and 'Closer' will take about a week or so."
Finally, after dinner, Miaoyi returned to her room to continue her work.
Now that the fans' audio files had been sorted, the next step was to screen them.
However, just as Miaoyi was about to continue with the production, her phone lit up, and she received a new message.
"Who is it?" Tang Miaoyi picked up her phone and looked at it.
Yang He and Zheng Yuan already received their answers, An Qiuying was in bed, and no one else that she knew of had her number. In theory, at this time, no one should be looking for her...
With a puzzled look, Miaoyi instinctively froze after seeing the sender's contact name, which had only three letters in the remark,
Mom...
"Yiyi, do you have enough living expenses? If you do, then next month, your mom's living expenses might be a few days late in transferring to you. If you don't have enough, just let Mom know, and I will do my best to find a solution for you..."
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