Gaining Vocal Confidence as a Producer: The story of Week 10 “HEY”

Until 2021 I didn’t even really consider going back to being a vocalist at all.

I just assumed I would stay on the sidelines producing and having vocalists feature on tracks.

I was inspired by two people specifically:

• Lido, and the person who introduced me to Lido’s music…

• Torr

Both artists had started out as producers and started adding vocals to tracks and slowly gotten to a point where most if not all of their music featured their voice. Between 2018 and 2020 it was incredibly inspiring to watch Torr start to song-write and implement it into his production. We commonly exchanged works in progress and watching his journey I realized that…

…Torr’s vocals worked because he wasn’t trying to be anybody else, he was expressing himself purely in a style that was all his own.

He took inspiration from hyper-pop, punk music, electronic music, etc. but the combination was all his own working with the strengths he found in his own voice.

It’s hard for most of us to hear our own voices but as much as many of us think our voices aren’t meant to be on our tracks, many times it’s just because we haven’t found our strengths. The first steps are just recording and trying things out. I found my style in a combination of dramatic, emotive rap, and autotune + distortion + pitch/formant shifter layers for sung parts, and I’ll continue to explore future combinations as I use my voice more.

I had actually started my journey into music writing songs and rapping but I quit in 2013 due to hateful internet comments and so I could focus on producing for other artists…

Focusing on production for the next 8 years gave me skills I needed to work with various types of vocals and eventually get back to recording my own… but I had to have the confidence to get past my own personal criticisms of myself. Sometimes we hold ourselves back more than anyone else.

To close this out, I’d like to give you a quote I keep in my wallet always to remind me to keep making my authentic music no matter what. I hope you will keep it in your mind as well:

”There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”