Michael Hopcroft

Oh, the Fish stories I could (but won't) tell. How old must she be by now? Is she even still alive? My equipment at the moment is very limited, as you would expect. I should have invested a little bit more in a microphone setup.

Since I normally perform a cappella and rarely play instruments (I can't play them at all well), it's natural that I will want to record my audio tracks first. But I get the impression that recording vocals first and building everything else around them does not usually work. Years ago, I was put in a position of trying to do some recording, and my producer had recorded backings and had me record one verse or part of a verse of my vocals at a time. Since that's not a very natural way to sing a song, it went nowhere, and the album I'd mapped out never came close to completion. The way I sing more naturally, especially since I sing by myself most of the time, would be to take the whole song at once and sing a few takes of it, and then go from there. But I have never once heard of that actually working as a production technique. So what do people with producing experience normally tell artists in my position when they want to record?

Who needs flying cars? What we need now are musicians as dedicated to, and creative in their craft, as the Beatles. Not that creativity is lacking today, as there are many artists doing truly remarkable things with a wide variety of musical styles and genres. But I want to see the game change again. I want to see artists come along who redefine the expectations of what popular music can be and what it can say.

I am a singer, primarily performing at science fiction conventions and online meetings in the subgenre known as "filk." I have never learned to play an instrument, though—most "filkers" who get concert spaces at least play guitar. I don't. Anyway, I have a concert scheduled at Orycon on the 17th. It will be a half-hour a cappella set, and I'm wondering how I can record it. This is the final Orycon, so it's quite an occasion, and I want to document this for posterity and share the tracks from it in case anyone ever develops an interest in them. I have yet to decide my set list, of course. I suspect it will be from a variety of sources. Since "filkers" borrow tunes and sources liberally, and I tend to cover different artists anyway, it could prove to be a pretty varied set. So it's making me wonder how to record this set, what I can do in post-production given the limited tech I have access to, and whether I am a good enough singer that anyone would care.

The memory that struck me was his 1980 directorial debut, Ordinary People. It was one of the first films to treat mental illness and suicidal ideation with a real degree of compassion that I saw. Previously, "crazy people" were portrayed as funny, dangerous, or both. The idea that they were suffering seemed to be overlooked. That changed with this film. Ordinary People was taut, powerful filmmaking from a first-time director, and to a troubled youth like myself, it was a revelation. My mother did not want to take me to see it because she had heard about the mother in the film and didn't want me to compare her to this fictional mother.

I would like to thank the respondants. I appreciate the efforts. Off to Techniques I go!

I am very new to the entire home recording process -- I made some attempts a few years back, but never got anywhere. I have a simple starter project I'm working on that has a backing track over which I want to record vocals. Think of it as a custom karaoke recording, only without the alcohol. The problem I have had on my first few takes is missing the cues on starting to sing seconds off -- which, as anyone who has made music knows, can make all the difference between a good take and one that does right into the Recycle Bin, Would visually marking those cues help, and if so how do I do it in Sonar (I barely know anything about using sonar, of course, as you can probably tell, so be merciful!). And where in the documentation (if I can find any) does it cover recording vocals over instrumental tracks?