have you ever recorded your vocals and thought you nailed that performance and then you go and listen to it again and it sounds like absolute poo poo I used to hate my voice for a really long time and over the years I learned how to not just hate it but actually love it and I'm going to show you how I've done that now also at the end of this video I'm going to show you some recording techniques that are going to help you a ton as well so first things first we need to understand why we actually hate the way our voice sounds it's a very common phenomenon amongst vocalists musicians producers and just about anybody in general and it's because of the familiar versus the unfamiliar and I'll get get to that so what happens is you're hearing something different than what everybody else is hearing you're hearing your voice being reverberated through your neck and chest and into your head and going into your ears that way then you're also hearing it being bounced around the room and back into yours that way and so you're hearing something that's completely different than what everybody else is hearing when you press record you're hearing what everybody else is hearing now but not only that you're hearing what they would hear if you were three or six inches away from their ear holes and so immediately you're like whoa I don't like that at all and that's normal that's the unfamiliar it sounds very unfamiliar and the and the weird thing is it's like that ananny Valley where it's similar to your voice but it's not how you're used to hearing your voice and you've been used you have been used to hearing your voice for years however old you are now that's how long you've been used to hearing your voice being reverberated through your chest and neck and into your head and if and and if you're not quite sure exactly how this works just take a stick and bite on a stick and place it on a piano or a speaker and you can plug your ears and literally hear how your how your ears and how your ear canals will pick up sound just being vibrated through your through your face and through your head it's wild um and so there is a completely different sound with that though and so you're used to hearing yourself that way and now not the way everybody else hears it and so that because of that it subverts expectations and and like I have mentioned here like subverted expectations doesn't necessarily mean it's bad right it just means it's unfamiliar which is why I'm not saying good versus bad I'm saying familiar versus unfamiliar uh humans and uh just people in general we have this really awful tendency to like be very fond of things that are familiar even if it's bad for us if we are used to a certain thing even if if it's bad for us we genuinely like that familiarity like if you had a a rough childhood growing up sometimes like getting back into those situations sometimes that even though they're toxic can feel familiar and feel comfortable to you and the the opposite reaction is true as well where something can be very very good for you but because it's familiar it's not necessarily because it's good for you it's just familiar you're used to it and it brings you some sort of comfort it's the same thing here now when you have subverted expectations you expected your voice to hear one way and now you're hearing it a different way that creates this cognitive dissonance and you're like H I hate that I hate the way that sounds I do not like that so now that we understand why we feel this way and how we feel this way now I want to explain how you can actually learn to love that part of you and also how you can use some recording techniques to actually emulate how you're hearing your voice as well so but I'll get to that in just a minute so the the main way that I really learned to love my voice was straight up exposure therapy I just did it again and again and again and I kept recording and I kept mixing and I just kept listening to my voice over and over and over and over and over again then I was making YouTube videos on my main Channel like I've made almost 300 videos on my main Channel producing in the box and I've listened to my voice again and again and again while editing and over and over and over and eventually I got to a point where I actually thoroughly enjoyed the way my voice sounds because it was becoming familiar that volume that exposure that constant listening to my own voice was giving me enough exposure to make me familiar with it and I learned to love it and I learned to love that side of it so you I would recommend me personally I would record something every single day whether that's you getting in front of your microphone whether that's you just pulling out your phone and recording some voice notes or something like that just some song ideas I would record something every single day and this is also twofold this is cool because you're recording something every single day it also gives you an excuse to make music every day and just with about anything else if you feel uncomfortable producing music making music mixing music recording stuff just the more you do it the more exposure you're going to get the more familiar and the more comfortable you're going to get with this whole experience especially as a beginner it is so daunting opening up a DOT and pressing record is is a very simple task to do but it is so daunting when there are so many buttons so many features what's track and what does all this stuff do what's a compressor and an EQ you kind of like start to lose it a little bit and it starts to hold you back where you're like I don't even know if I want to open the dot it just scares me and I understand where you're coming from I was there very very many years ago but I distinctly remember that feeling I started out in LOD or uh Garage Band and that was daunting and then I eventually got to the point where I needed some features that garage band at the time didn't have which was like some buses and things like that so I upgraded to logic and I almost didn't open up logic again for like two weeks as soon as I opened it I looked and I'm like oh my word this is insane and then there was even another section of the advanced features because when you first install logic it's at basic features by default you have to like click Advanced features to see all the other Advanced features that are there and it's like oh my word what am I doing I don't even know why I'm doing this why why am I here and I closed the the do for a while and I had to like take a couple weeks to kind of like calm down a little bit and get back into it it's very daunting and so just being able to get that exposure constantly recording yourself constantly doing that stuff it's just going to make you feel a lot more comfortable in the studio I have I have done a lot of songs I actually got a video that'll probably be coming up on this video where I've done so many songs over just the last year um I actually gotta figure out how many I've done over the last couple years because even just the last year I've had to do like three different backups on hard drives I have produced mixed mastered and just wrote a lot of songs this year and the more I do this even now the more comfortable I feel so get some exposure therapy and really start to figure out what works for you and continue to just go down that path continue to record yourself every day and whether it's a song idea or whether it's just a cover or anything else it it is just going to help you with time so exposure therapy is actually one of the main ways that I actually start started to love my voice now for some recording techniques this is really cool okay and I don't really see a lot of people talking about this so I can't wait to share this with you um so it's going to be pretty helpful if you have a condenser microphone this is a dynamic microphone they're a lot less sensitive condenser microphones whether large diaphragm condenser microphones or anything like that if it's just a condenser microphone they're they're a bit more sensitive in fact this microphone here there's a street just on the back side of here on the back side of this wall there's a sidewalk and then a street and when people drive by pe I really can't hear road traffic from this microphone and I have a lot of acoustic treatment up but I can't hear a lot of road traffic from this microphone but I can with the condenser I can hear everything it's insane um and so and mostly it's because of that window it's just insane how much more sensitive they are but because they're more sensitive they pick up a very wide frequency ban and you're able to kind of use that microphone to your advantage so first make sure that you have a condenser microphone phone of just a very sensitive mic and then start facing it upwards but down towards your chest itself this is something I don't see a lot of people doing but it's such a hack it does two things one it starts to pick up the lower Resonance of your chest as you're singing like your throat and your chest and it really starts to add that to the recording which is what you're actually normally used to hearing so because you're used to hearing how it's vibrating in your chest and your throat and in your in your face and head it's actually picking that up it's not picking your voice directly from your mouth it's actually starting to pick up some of that stuff so you kind of want it like above you almost facing down towards your chest and towards your neck and it's going to get a different sound entirely it also does one other thing which is just nuts it eliminates a lot of the siences and plosives so pive when I into the microphone like that all that air is like kind of shaking that around and this is actually somewhat of a decent microphone with the pop filter to keep that from happening but it still still happens a lot so those s's s is that sibilance and theives are the P that kind of like low-end Rumble you're hearing when I do that it eliminates that because it's up here so really you don't even need a pop filter I still recommend one but you still don't even really need to pop filter so you you set the microphone up here where you kind of have to look up at it it's about 8 inch away from from your your neck from your face there like 8 to 12 inches um and then use that record with that it is such a hack and um I've I've recorded my vocals like that quite a bit and I thoroughly enjoyed the way it sounds I'm used to hearing my voice that way so it works for me but I don't know how other people feel about it but I genuinely like the way that that sounds and I've used that recording technique on some other artists in the studio and they've liked the way their voice sounds with it because that's what they're used to as well so give that a shot and see if it works for you put the microphone up here so you kind have to look up at it but have the the like capsule of the microphone facing towards your necked towards your chest and give that a shot see what it sounds like and then one other thing is just a mixing mixing trick which is actually using some saturation to kind of boost that low end so if you just kind of run it through a saturator just kind of saturates some things up warms up the vocal a little bit makes it sound a bit better now mixing is an entirely different thing I actually got a video on my main Channel that I will put somewhere over here and I'll make sure I leave it in uh the link in the description as well there's like five things that just always seem to be true every time I I go to mix vocals and uh that's what that video is going to be all about there and that's on my main channel so uh go check that out if you're interested in how I mix vocals and mix songs and in general so I hope this video served you I hope you you got some enjoyment out of it and hopefully you don't hate your vocals as much as I did when I started so thank you so much for being here this is this is kind of an experiment Channel I'm just try testing it out just pressing record talking to you guys just being raw genuine so if you like this kind of content let me know down in the comments below I'll see you in the next one