It may be a matter of my personal taste, Michael, but there were two things about "My Lady," which are actually interrelated. First, I was only able to pick up about one word out of three in the lyrics due to—what? "Overproduction?" Electronic echo and electronic sustain of the instruments. I have good speakers, plus I have a pair of pricy studio-quality headphones.

Examples of what I'm talking about: Roger McGuinn, formerly lead singer of The Birds (Seeger's "Turn, Turn,Turn") has a most interesting web site called "The Folk Den." Having focused lately on essentially traditional folk songs (as contrasted with "folk songs" written in the 1960s or just last week), It's an on-going project of his to record songs and post them on the web site for anybody to make use of.

He gives you the words and the chords he uses, along with some background notes on the song, and an MP3 you can listen to and/or download. Thank you, Roger McGuinn!

But—my one criticism of the MP3s is they are generally overproduced. He will lay down a couple of guitar tracks, then overdub his singing of the melody with his singing of a harmony line. Along with some in-computer studio effects. A simple, straightforward single voice singing the melody, accompanied by a single guitar—without all the overdubbing and in-studio and in-computer horsefeathers—would be sufficient. Fine! Very nice, actually.

Another example. I am acquainted with a young woman living nearby who has a very nice singing voice, and she writes her own songs (CLICKY). She did a CD recently and a friend of hers produced it for her, adding a guitar track (she doesn't play, herself, she just sings), a drum track (EEEK!!), and did some hanky-panky with various effects, including horsing around with Melodyne. Amazingly enough, the ten songs (kinda sparse for a CD) came through okay. The guitar was fine. But some of the other additions—especially the total unnecessary and quite intrusive drum track—definitely do not enhance Misty's efforts at all. Too bad!

Unfortunately, poor Misty has a box of about 250 CDs in a closet, out of which she has sold . . . well, not that many. I bought one from her in the spirit of "support your local musician." (Not bad, actually. Except for that @%$&ßq# drum track!!)

Just a suggestion: you might want to try recording something just "bare nekkid," just as it comes out of the voice and the instruments and listen to that very carefully and ask yourself, "If I add any effects to this, is it going to enhance it? Or is it just going to clutter it up?" Keep a raw copy and try adding whatever effects (a touch of reverb, perhaps?) you think would spruce it up. Then listen carefully to it, AND the original. Does it really help?

Experiment.

And this may sound like strange advice from one who, on these threads, keeps getting dubbed a "loony liberal," but with what one puts on a recording, it's much better to err on the conservative side than to throw in everything including the kitchen sink!

But it's your work. You have to do the deciding.

Cheers.

Don Firth