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In more than three decades of music making, I think I’ve worked with a vocalist… mm, let me see… once. It didn’t go particularly well. We started off at opposite ends of the page, as it were. Actually quite literally, come to think of it. They wanted to sing. I wanted spoken, whispered words from a fantasy series of books I was reading at the time. Of course I did. Needless to say, I didn’t get out much in those days. Communication was therefore just one of the issues and it all went terribly wrong. So, naturally I did what any frustrated geek of the late ’80s did at the time: turned to technology! Only technology of the late ’80s didn’t really help. It was digital – just – but Atari’s didn’t have Auto-Tune (the inventor of Auto-Tune probably wasn’t even born). So I vowed that, going forward, I would simply do the vocals myself. And then, after realising I can’t sing, quickly vowed again that I would simply wait until technology caught up to make my vocals sound half decent. Fast forward 30-odd years and computers are good enough to make even my poor singing great. So I’m using and abusing my job to bring you (aka me) a great feature on how you (aka me) can make your (aka my) terrible vocals sound great. It starts on p16 and covers just about everything – tuning, effects, mixing and gear – to make anyone’s vocals passable. I’ve waited more than three decades for this. Now to dust off that vintage microphone and get recording. Now where are those Tolkien books?”