The harshness in this vocal will be the death of me...:)

I thought after 10 years I was getting somewhere, but I've ended up right where I've always, and perhaps always will belong...in the newbie forum. lol

I've been working on this song for a few weeks now. I can not, for the life of me, get rid of the harsh, high pitched buzzing (or screeching? or whistling?) around 8k-10k. I will upload the file as an attachment, so we can avoid postulating endlessly.

The vocal was recorded just off center in a well treated room. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, though I may be biased as I'm the one who treated it...:hide: It was recorded on an SM7B into an Apollo Twin X. It's mostly unprocessed with very slight compression catching the peaks, slight subtractive eq and some gain staging on consonant hits.

I have tried recording it in different areas of the room, recording it from different distances, using an AKG C414, swapping out cables, but no luck. I have tried dynamic eq, eq notches, multi-band compression, character compression, distortion and parallel processing all individually, in different combinations and all together. Even when I destroy the vocals upper-mids and high end, it is still slightly present and by that point the vocal is so dull it couldn't cut through whip cream, let alone the dense aggressive punk mix it's in.

I CAN NOT GET RID OF IT! BUT! I REFUSE TO ADMIT DEFEAT! I WILL FIGHT THIS HARSHNESS UNTIL IT EITHER BOWS BEFORE MY PRODUCTIVE TECHNIQUES OR TIME STEALS THE BREATH FROM MY STUBBORN LUNGS! or everyone here tells me there's no hope and it's something fundamentally wrong with the recording itself and there's no way to make it as smooth and pleasant sounding as I'd like...whichever of those 3 things happens first.:diddlydoo:

Help me Gearspace-Kenobi...You're my only hope















Attached Files



vocalforgearspace.mp3 (6.99 MB)