10 Tips To Produce Better Vocal Recordings (Part 1) In contemporary, popular, and virtually any vocally based style of music, the vocal track is the key player in the success or failure of a songs production. Just because the song’s great, the singer is superb, and the engineers are excellent, doesn’t mean the vocal track will automatically add up to the expected sum of its combined parts. The vocal recording can go right-on accident, and it can go wrong despite having all the required pieces. Adequate preparation and mindful attention to the process can eliminate some typical pitfalls, here are 10 tips to produce better vocal recordings. (Part 1)
10 Tips To Produce Better Vocal Recordings (Part 1)
1) Warm Up The Vocals Make sure the singer has had time to warm up through their typical vocal exercises, but also make sure they are warmed up on the song they are about to perform. Remember, the vocal performance is the one that makes or breaks a record. This song needs a GREAT PERFORMANCE. If they are not comfortable, warmed up, and encouraged… The performance, and resulting vocal recording will be usually suffer. More about facilitating the right environment in tip #9. In addition a regiment of lip trills, tongue trills, and preferred vocal exercises, i find some physical exercise and light cardio tunes me up, gets the blood flowing, gets me in touch with my breathing, and just makes me feel great before i sing. 2) Vocal Mic Selection Because Ribbon Mics are rarely used, the 2 main options are between dynamic and condenser mics. Of course, you may only have 1 or 2 mics, so the options may narrow down even further. (Note: you can usually rent mics from nearby commercial studios, if your mic locker is lacking) The choice between dynamic and condenser is a important one, and should be the first
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consideration of mic selection. Realize that you’ll have suggestions, and you should make them, but it is a singers preference. If the singer prefers the feel of holding a mic while performing then you should accommodate them and allow them to use a dynamic microphone vs. pushing the condenser. If after we’ve determined that a condenser is the mic for the job, the next step is selecting the microphone that is going to best capture, supplement, and help define the singers vocal style and tone. Since condenser microphones can have such varying personality and characteristics, intimate knowledge of each mic available for the project, and an understanding of the vocal type will pay off. This is the experience factor, and cannot be gained by any thing other than experimenting with many mics and many singers. The art of good mic selection is more of an intuition that gets built up over time, and cannot really be quantified or considered an exact science by any means. 3) Mic Placement -found the best spot in the room. Experiment. Test the sounds from different spots in the room. You don’t really want to be close to any wall, nor do you want to be in the exact center which is prone to standing waves and phase issues… But move the mic around until you find that sweet spot. KEEP IT AWAY FROM REFLECTIVE SURFACES! Just as you’ve tested the room to find the best spot, adjust the stand, mic position, and the angle, to allign and lock in the best overall mic placement you can get. Generally aim the mic somewhere between the tip of the nose and bottom of chin. But maybe it sounds great just below the chin, your ears are the judge! Remember that mic placement is to tracking what mic technique is to the quality of the singers voice. It’s the engineers job to capture the best possible performance at the source, and mic placement (along with just not screwing your levels up) is one of the things that is going to impact the quality of the raw track. You cannot polish a turd, so do your best to get it right at the source. Use a Pop Filter. This will help control plosives, and regulate the distance between the singers mouth and the microphone. General Proximity = 6-8“. You want to the singers mouth to be as close to the mic as you can without sounding muddy, but not too far away as to pick up unwanted noises. Once you’ve gotten the right spot, pop filter distance, and have found the ideal axis, place a piece of tape on the floor for the singer to reference and know where to stand. From there, they will remember they way they were standing when it was sounding perfect, and will naturally be able to find that place again.
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4. Picture What You’re Going For You don’t have to get too carried away with this, but if you understand what you are going for and have the idea of what sound you’re after, there’s a much better chance that you’ll get it. Or at least know that you don’t have it, which will allow you to focus on why not, and find a solution to fix that. 5. Get Your Levels Right You’re not going to clip are you? Double check you have left ample headroom, or have a limiter/clipper/slight compression set up to avoid the all too ugly digital distortion from disrupting an otherwise perfect vocal track. Are you leveraging the best link in your signal flow? Do you have a really nice preamp whose gain nobs are pumping out meager amounts of gain, while the input channel fader on your DAW is pushed all the way up? Let’s remedy this so we are getting the most out of our recording signal chain. Make sure nothings peaking into the red… It is almost always better to record at lower levels and capture the dynamics of a performance than to squash the heck out of our signals, or record as loud as you possibly can when tracking… The reason for this is that you have much more to work with. That dynamic range is the life of the vocalists performance. This is the expressiveness and character that can be captured and felt if you resist the mistaken notion that we need to record at as loud a level as possible.
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