hello peops, someone was asking for advice on vocal recording in another thread so i decided to write a quick tutorial, you can download the tutorial as a text document if you want to keep it for reference when offline or you can just read it here,


Walsh350`s vocal recording tutorial

Ok dudes and dudes with vaginas* i`ve decided to write a quick article on basic vocal recording techniques.
I vomited on myself this morning whilst taking a pooh due to a hangover from last night and I still feel a bit ropey so i`m staying out of the studio today and have a little free time.
Also With all the help and advice i`ve gained from the dogs on www.dogsonacid.com it’s the least I can do.
By the way, I`m not spell checking this or even going to read it after ive writeen it so if it doesn’t make sense sorry.

*(female sound engineers, please send me a pic to walsh350@hotmail.com if you are a female sound engineer that isn’t a man beast to disprove my potentially offensive opening statement)*


Try and use a half decent capacitor mic when recording studio vocals, you can pick up a decent one for around £200. If your budget wont stretch the far, a Shure sm58 or sm57 will do the job nicely, I think you can pick up an sm58 for around the £50 mark if you look about a bit. The sm58 has a nice punchy characteristic to it and can be pretty good for capturing grimey/rap/mc type vocals.
Being that a lot of peoples budgets wont stretch to £200 for a mic, especially when people are not working professionally within the industry i`ll focus on using the sm58.

Ideally we would choose a cardioid polar pattern mic with the vocalist directly on axis in order to minimise recording room reflections and other generallt noisy and unwanted shit on the vocal take.
Being that i`m only focusing on the sm58 which has an omni polar pattern we need to take a few precautions in order to capture a clear vocal. A cheap and easy way of isolating the microphone from reflections is to try and set up a temporary vocal booth using duvets. Try and place a duvet or at least part of one on each side of the performer. Stopping reflections from directly behind the performer are worth worrying slightly less about due to the performers body absorbing some of the rear reflections. Try attaching a cushion from a sofa or summat to the ceiling above the mic position and if you have a wooden floor lay a rug down underneath. Hopefully youll have a mic stand but if you don’t youll need to get the mic fixed into the right position some how, personally with my carpentry experience id just cut a piece of wood to the right height and lean it against a chair or something. Fix the piece of wood and the mic with a bit of sticky tape or something. Bear in mind that what you use may cause reflections. Next up youll need a pop shield, they are cheap to buy but if you don’t have one just get an old coat hanger, bend it into a decent sized hoop and stretch some tights/pantyhose over the hole, use the end of the coat hanger to fix the makeshift pop shield onto the piece of wood/mic stand in the right position. If possible try and set up your temporary booth away from the walls and not in the centre of the room.

If you have any traffic noise in your room close up your windows and or don’t record during rush hour or when ever you think the traffic is particularily noisy. Also make sure you turn off any fans or other electrical equipment that may make any unnecrssary noise.

Its easiest to record the vocals without any eq or compression as you wont be able to change the settings afterwards. Set the record level to a point that wont cause the audio to go over 0db, you can use a limiter in the recording signal chain but unless you have a good one, software or hardware, it may add its own unwanted characteristics to the recording.

Set up a headphone mix for the singer, add some reverb onto the vocals to make the singers own voice sound a bit nicer to themselves during the recording. Try using closed headphones to minimise spill from the monitor headphones. If you still end up getting headphone spill due to the singer wanting the monitor mix to loud or whatever i`ll give you one of my secrets. After recording the vocal take/s get the singer to stand in the same position as they did for the vocal take, put the headphones on the singer and set them to exactly the same level as they were set for the previous takes, then record another take without the singer making any noise.
Call this take the spill take or whatever works for you. What you can now do is, reverse the phase on the spill take, you can do this by switching the hot and the cold pin wiring on the xlr before the take, or if you use cubase there is a handy phase reverse button on each track in the cubase mixer. When you layer the spill take over the other vocal take with its phase reversed you it will cancel the headphone spill out pretty much all together, with the spill fader at the bottom and slowly fade up until you hear the headphone spill disappear, then bounce the two layers down to one file and youll have a nice vocal recording without the spill in the back ground. By the way i`d advise doing more than one acceptable take, sometimes in post production you may want to edit different takes together in order to achieve the sound you want.


Now were at the mixing stage at last, its time to polish up your vocal track.
set up a noise gate to get rid of unwanted noise between the parts when the vocalist isn’t making any sound.

Removing 100hz-400hz will clean up any “boxiness” but don’t over do it or you`ll end up losing too much body.

A boost around 7khz with a wide q curve can add `sparkle/air/sizzle`.

Now what I generally tend to do with all elements I use in a track is high and low pass each sample. Push the settings as far as they will go without having any audible effect on the sound, this is one of the main reason its also worth investing in a decent pair of studio monitors. I`m using the alesis mkii`s at the moment and they have served me well considering I bought them for under £300 a while back, but now im saving u for the adam p33 thingys, expensive bastards though.

Heres a few ideas for the processing, obviously theres no set way to do things but try this.

Add a little bit of nice and tight plate reverb then resample.( the number 1 rule with resampling is save as before each bounce)

Now add a little bit of rhythmic delay, and add little more plate reverb onto the delay, filter out the low freq`s on the reverb on the delay if you know what I mean.

To thicken up the track get a different take and layer it over the original at an appropriate level.
There isn’t much point simply copying the same take and placing it under neath the main vocal track because all that’s going to do is raise the vocal level and it wont have any thickening effect. It’s the interaction between the nuances of the different recordings that cause the thickening effect.
Try offsetting the second vocal track a few milliseconds aswell, experiment, use what works.

Another thing you might want to try is adding some sort of extreme effect to the thickening layer, such as a vocoder or something, then just slowly push the level up until you get a bit of the effect without losing the overall clarity and punc of the vocals.
Adding a little bit delay with a different time setting to the main delay can also make the second vocal sound more pronounced without interfering with the main vocal.

now resample and then paste a copy of the vocal recording into another free track in your sequencer/editor.

Lets call these two tracks 1 and 2,

Compress the bejesus out of track 2 then slowly raise the fader level to a point where you have a balance between dynamics and loudness. Don’t go too mad here. Now add any additional eq you may need on the overall vocal signal, then add another compressor on the overall vocal signal, set the threshold to something like -10db with a low ratio of something like 2 or 3:1, adjust make up gain to taste, setting a really low threshold and a low ratio helps to subtly glue everything together, this is also a use trick to apply to entire mixes, although multi band compression has better effects on entire mixes I cant be arsed and don’t know enough about it to write any thing about it. Another little tip I picked up from the grid is too save your final mixes without any compression incase you get signed and the track needs to be mastered properly.


Now Put all the duvets and shit back before your mum gets home from work and decides to send you for psychoanalysis.


Peace

Attached Files

walsh350.txt (8.3 KB, 0 views)

__________________
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

AIM= ARTIKMUSIC