Board Thread:Beginning Singers/@comment-25251315-20140801043145/@comment-5290733-20140801213342

Speaking from experience here--

The most important thing to do first is to get your equipment and your voice set up to optimal conditions. You can do this even if you you aren't in a good singing environment, just play around with your settings, look up troubleshooting on audio forums for your particular brand and on home recording in general, etc until you feel like you can record a pure sound, not full of noise and breathiness. When you hear your recording it should sound similar to what you hear irl,bad environment or not - otherwise your settings are wonky.

Before you record the actual thing, practice a lot and record yourself, doesn't matter where you are, and critique yourself hard to get the little kinks out. Decide what parts you want to put your own personal flair. Sing in the shower. Learn the harmony beforehand so you can get right into it once you're back in a good recording environment.

Finish recording well before 8/15. Mixing may take a while, esp. since your friend may be busy/on vacation or may not be used to working with your voice. Before sending raws off to the mixer, make sure all the easy stuff - light noise removal, overall timing to the instrumental - is all done by you ahead of time. Make the mixer's job easy. Don't ask the mixer to get the instrumental themselves, get it for them. Use the official instrumental from piapro, not a rip from NND.

Encoding to video isn't very hard, but you need to download the original video when NND's not in economy mode using the program of your choice (so get one if you haven't one already) and find an encoding program (XviD4PSP works well for me) and practice encoding with your own unmixed vocals and the official video while you wait for the mixer, so you can play with the program and get to know it and search around for suggested file types and so on. A short utattemita video won't take that long to encode, unless your computer sucks.

Any time during the process, you'll want to jot down a message to accompany your video so you don't have to stress about it while you upload. Introduce yourself, since it's your first utattemita, and credit the original.