It's a long list, but only because I've been neglecting it for a long while. I've been awash in the excitement of learning Stick and doing fractals, and cranking out new pieces, but losing track that my main goal is to write songs, and all the rest are merely tools to do that along the way. And I do love the instrumentals and they are rocking in their own right. Not everything needs to be sung over. But a lot of what I do and have done does need to be sung to.
I have a 20-minute commute to work in my car. Yesterday, I put PND (Prezident Neutron Daze) on my phone and connected it to the car stereo. My ride to and from work involves me singing at the top of my lungs--just wailing away, with no shame, filter, or self-consciousness.
Then sitting in the car at lunchtime in the parking lot, eating my sandwich and chips, listening and singing some more. No shame or filter.
This morning, I put my new Shure MV88 Lightning mic for iPhone in front of me on the console in the car and put PND in my earphones on another device and sang on the way to work. I'm still working on lyrics, so a lot of "Shabba Do," and "I don't know" (my favorite singing filler phrase). I wailed away into it, and tonight, I'll see how it came out. The Shure MV88 records stereo 24-bit, 48 HZ vocals and I've really liked what I've recorded with it so far.
I made some backing vocals tracks in the studio last night on the "real" studio mics, and I think I've got the basement room noise (heater, fans, and PCs) down to a low level by just singing balls out loud, using directional mics, and putting up some noise baffling blankets and padding. But mainly just increasing the volume. That's probably the easiest way to tweak my signal-to-noise ratio: if you can't decrease the noise, increase the signal. Same for the car: what little road noise bleeds into the mic is masked by me yelling my balls off into the mic and turning down the input. I may even end up using these tracks and making this my short-term production method: like Car Karaoke, except for just recording the vocals. I got 40 minutes a day with just me and the car and my voice.
It's interesting that I have no style yet in singing. Or rather, I can sing in a number of completely different and yet shitty ways. I have a country twangy voice (that I hopefully will never use in a recording, although that's probably my money voice!), an Axel Rose voice (both a high and low voice, both of which I've stolen from him), a James Earl Jones Darth Vader Voice of Doom voice, and a bunch of crappy versions of Steven Tyler. I wish I had a better David Lee Roth, and I have no Sammy at all. I might have a Brian Johnson voice in there somewhere. But that hurts after a while.
As for rap, I can give you an Eminem rap style or a Snoop Dogg or an Ice T. But I have no style of my own, because I don't do this enough yet.
So I sing in a number of crappy yet enthusiastic ways, and slowly I'm sure I'll figure out what my style is. My apologies to anyone that can sing easily and naturally. I'm sure it's like someone watching a beginning player of any instrument and wanting to say: "The A is over there, man. No, over there! No, that's not even on the right string. The top string--no, the OTHER top string!"
I could take voice lessons, I know. But I'm far too embarrassed to sing for a teacher. And god knows (pun intended), I had some twenty years of choir practice at church every Sunday morning and night and Wednesday night, with Mom on the accordion and the congregation rocking "Amazing Grace." I loves me some church music, although not so much churches these days. I just need to DO IT. And KEEP DOING IT. And then "sucky" will turn to "Good Enough For Rock, Especially if the Lyrics Are Really Lit." See: Tom Petty, Neil Young, and of course, Bob Dylan. Heck, Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn--good enough vocalists but not the best, and even Billy Joel thinks he can't sing...but songwriting is the thing.
This trainwreck in motion is starting to come together! I'm going to be tormenting you all with my lyrics and vocals, on top of otherwise-rocking music, soon enough! 
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) Cheers!