Hi Letha,

I checked out the videos and let me say, first of all, you've got a fantastic voice with a very emotive presence. In my opinion, the mic you use is really a secondary concern (for now) as you could make a tin can with a string on the end of it sound good.

I agree with Big Jim; in the first video you were kind of hugging the mic. But in the second video your technique looked pretty darn good to me.

In both videos, I detected what sounded like a bit of overload. Have you ruled out the possibility that you're overloading the mic? If you're not overloading the mic, it sounds like you're overloading somewhere in the signal chain.

When you say that somtimes the high notes hurt your ears, do you mean because they sound harsh or distorted? If they sound harsh then the culprit might simply be your recording chain or the plugins you're using in Audacity. You wouldn't be the first person to experience the "harshness" of digital recording.

For all its hassles, recording to tape had the wonderful side effect of "tape saturation" which added warmth to the recording and is very pleasing to the human ear. With digital recording, there is no saturation effect so what you play/sing is what you get. It can take a bit of practice to learn how to create a pleasing mix in the digital domain.


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