No, it’s counterproductive perfectionism
I’m sitting here watching live performances on KEXP and seeing how they’re using SM-58s and Sennheiser HD-280 PROs for vocals and monitoring respectively and I’m thinking…
I have a £580 Neumann TLM 102 microphone on my shopping list that I’ve been saving up for to record my vocals, because that’s a “studio mic”
These performances sound perfectly fine and my vocals wouldn’t exactly suck if I recorded them with my SM-58. And yet, I’m stalling, waiting until I can make it all “perfect”. What a disease. It’s not even like I’m putting that mic in a professional studio or through anything more than a Focusrite 4i4 in a tiny room I’ll treat to the best of my amateur knowledge. And it’s not like the mic itself is some unique fancy high-end thing or like mics can magically make your voice better (sometimes even a high-end one will literally be a bad fit for your particular voice)
I wish I could be one of those people who just do things and hope for the best. For once I wish I could just rip off the band-aid.
My perfectionism helped me excel academically but also almost miss deadlines. Now that I have no deadlines, I’m free to waste entire years of my life, and it is fucking terrifying.
I’ve changed the cups on those HD-280s twice since I started this album and I still haven’t gotten around to recording the damn thing. My days are spent in limbo, doing all sorts of other things, from paid work to purely wasting time. Awful.
I worked in broadcast television for a decade and did audio for several years. We always used the SM58 for vocals when we had music performances. It’s pretty hard to improve on it.