Glo Sings ... Sweetest Taboo

On Monday the UK prime minister announced three weeks of lockdown to try to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus. The hubs and I had already started self-isolating, and social distancing for the past couple weeks and one of the things I’ve been doing to stay sane is recording covers of some of my favourite songs. Sade’s ‘Sweetest Taboo’ is one of those favourites and I thought I would share the recording journey and the song with you. Last year I bought a home recording system called Studio One. I am in the process of learning how to use the system, and this month my first original single of 2020, Regret, will be hitting stores and I mixed that single in this program. I will talk more about that process next week after the single drops. So, I searched on Youtube for a backing track for ‘Sweetest Taboo’ in its original key and then uploaded that to Studio One. This program has some fab presets so I used one of them which opened a session already setup and ready to record. Once the backing track was added to the program, I was ready to go. Over a few days I recorded practice versions of the song, and during one of the takes, I added some lovely ad-libs at the end, which I then turned into 3-part harmony backing vocals. On playback of these practice runs, I realized that the song wasn’t sitting in my ‘sweet spot.’ In a previous post/podcast I talked about finding your vocal sweet spot and after getting advice from some people that I highly respect in my local music community, I landed on Bb as the optimal place for my voice. So, I dropped the key 3 semi-tones from the original Bb minor to G minor (the minor relative key to Bb major). After a few practice runs in that key, I was ready. I then double tracked each backing vocal part, ending up with six backing vocal tracks, then recorded four takes of the lead vocal, and then picked the best parts from each take (referred to as comping) to share with you. Here’s my version of Sade’s ‘Sweetest Taboo.’ Stream & Download Here