I am passionate about listening to music and singing, and know many people who are also equally interested. This series of posts is to share my experiences with singing and audio recording. Over the years the technology revolution has made it affordable for an enthusiast like me to do quality recordings at home. I have also constantly learned several ways to improve the quality of my recorded songs. This field has now become so vast that I feel more like a novice who is groping his way around and discovering new stuff regularly.
Today we have the convenience of digital music literally on our finger tips, but here is a look on the life as it was before the digital revolution.
To begin with, when I was a small child, Radio or a Record player used to be the only source of music at home. The radio was AM and the record player was mono, but I distinctly recall that its sound used to be very clear and good quality. I do remember using a few 78 rpm records, but most of the time it used to be 33 rpm LP or 45 rpm EP records. I am still very fond of the songs that I heard at that time.
Then in early 70s, we experienced stereo sound, again on the record player. The sound was much better. Still there was no way to do recordings as cassette recorders and cassettes became popular only in late 70s. Once cassette recorders were available, it became possible to record your own songs.
This gave rise to a lots of fun. I used to enjoy recordings songs in my and my friends voices on my self-made cassette recorder. I distinctly remember an occasion in 1982, when I went to a friend's vacant flat in Mumbai, and recorded several Rafi and Mahendra Kapoor songs on a cassette. The echo effect due to the empty house made them sound so good, that my friend decided to keep the cassette. I wish I would have made a copy of the cassette for myself, but dual cassette tape recorders needed to do a tape copy were not common at that time.
While this was an enjoyable experience, most of these recordings sounded somewhat dull and boring without the background music. Listen to the song "Sanjh Dhale" below to see what I mean.
I tried to record with the song playing on record player or radio, and it sounded better, but obviously I could not do anything about the original vocal in the song. For an example, listen to "ye Berukhi" or "chand si mehbooba" tracks below.
Similarly I tried instrumental tracks as well without much success. Listen to the track "Ye Chand Sa" below for example.
My wish at that time was for a tape that has only the background music and
no vocal. In hindsight, I was looking for Karaoke tracks without knowing
that this would become available in future. This was 1980s and Hindi Karaoke
would take another ten years to become a reality.
I got my first brush with Karaoke when cassettes with Hindi Karaoke tracks became available in 1990s. When I tried to sing with a Karaoke tape (I still remember my first Karaoke song - Awaara Hun) It was nothing less than a nightmare. Why? Because I was essentially a free style singer, twisting the rhythm of the song at will. It did not matter so long as as I sang all by myself. But when I sang with this music track, I found that I can not keep pace with the rhythm of the music easily. I was either going too slow or too fast. I firmly believed at that time that there was something wrong with the music. :)
This was my first big lesson - the need to maintain the rhythm while singing. Once I started using the Karaoke music tapes regularly, I got the hang of it soon.
Listen to the track "Awaara Hun" below to get an idea of how it sounded.
So, I decided to record my singing with Karaoke track. By that time, there were specialized Karaoke Audio systems available with two tapes that allowed you to play the music on one tape, and sing in a mic and record the mix on another tape. But my Panasonic dual cassette recorder did not have this Karaoke function for recording, it could either record from the tape or from mic. So I decided to open it up, and modify it so that It could record a mix of tape and mic sounds. I also took the music signal out and fed it to a home made amplifier to make the music available on my earphone. This was needed as the speakers were muted during recording and you need to hear the music. This contraption worked great and I had years of fun recording with this system. Check out the track "Mana Janaab Ne" below.
The quality of the recorded song was only moderately good, but it was really enjoyable. I had no idea at that time why these recordings do not seem to have the depth or presence that is seen in the original song, and what I can do to improve these. This was early 1990s, home computers were not yet common in India and MP3 was still not invented, and it will be several years before we would experience the digital audio revolution.
Read my next post in this series in which I talk about life after digital revolution - The Dawn of Digital Era
Music Series - My Experiences
Welcome to my Music Series blogs. There are following posts in this series;
Discover the ultimate audio recording device for home surveillance at Spy World. Enhance your security and peace of mind with our cutting-edge technology. For any query: Call us at 8800809593 | 8585977908.
ReplyDelete