Bah, screw those charts Beeps...well, not physically...lol...

Go to a music store, put on some headphones and talk into a few mics. When the hair on your arms stands, you'll know you have a winner. :) Seriously though man, you'd be surprised at what mic compliments your voice. I've used some really weird set-ups in my time. Like I always say when we talk about mics...I got a U-87 that only works for me when I sing in the key of G. LOL! I just hate the sound of MY voice through it. 500 other people that come through here will sound great. But me....uggh. I'm better off with one of those Blue mics, an AKG or an Equitek CAD E-200...which has been my personal vocal weapon of choice. Something about that old dinosaur...it just helps me sound a little more like a singer. LOL! :)

-Danny

Beep,

newer ATs are good mics.  The ones I'm talking about were1980s versions of cheapest of the cheap.  I forget the number but a long time before Audio technica a name in mics.

@

@AT... Yeah, I've got a few crappy old Audio Technicas in my collection and they are pretty much useless for recording. I was a little surprised that the AT2020 got recommended but it does seem to get good reviews. For the price I figure it's worth a shot.

@chuck... I've never been big on lots of reverb/delay anyway. Just enough to make things not sound like they were recorded in a box. I do tend to go a little wacky with the compression though but that's mostly because of my crappy mics. It helps get rid of some of the weirdness I was mentioning earlier. I took a look at that Rode but that's definitely out of my price range for now but I've got it bookmarked for the future. I will eventually start investing in nicer stuff but I deem my current situation a bit of an emergency. I've got pretty much everything I need to fake a pro sounding production EXCEPT a good sounding vocal mic. It's a drag I can't get these C101's sounding a little better. They are very close but just not close enough. They make things stick out of the mix too much. They are pretty slick for other stuff though like acoustic guitar. Cheers.

lots of good advice, especially about mic position and room treatment. those are the biggies.

when it comes to mixing, i'll add this as well - highpass filter, as high as still sounds good. depends on the voice and the mix but i've done as high as 250hz for myself. you may also want to dip the fundamental and resonant frequencies, ~100hz and ~800hz respectively. play with both to find what works best, i've found for myself that 650-750hz is really where my voice resonates.

add 200hz for warmth, and dip 400hz if you find vocals aee covering the bassline. sounds silly but vocals are a wide band instrument and they step on a lot.

if you need more presence, clone the track, bandpass 2.5k or so, squash the hell out of it, and mix in low. for a bigger sound, use a very short stereo delay, different times either side. in X1, the cake delay has a really good preset for that called fatten up or something.

for more presence, cut 5k in your instrument mix to let the vocals come through without adding sibilance.

but room and mic placement make the biggest difference by far. 

Surprisingly the room isn't too bad from what I can tell. It's about 18' x 9'. On the two shorter walls one is the entrance which takes up half the wall and I've hung a double curtain rod over it. The outside rod I hung industrial grade vapor barrier and the rod inside the studio I hung heavy "silk" curtains that have a cotton backing. I did this to keep noise from coming in/out of the room. The other short wall has a patio door and a huge window both of which take up pretty much the whole wall and I have more curtains hanging there. So basically the two end walls are 75% covered in fabric. The wall opposite my DAW desk has a big old couch against it right in the middle taking up about half the length and the wall is one of those fire/soundproof concrete walls covered in plaster. I'm thinking of hanging a blanket above the couch. The wall my DAW desk is on is unfortunately a regular hollow drywall and stud wall and I think the studs are aluminum which kind of sucks. Typing this I realized that this might why my speakers sound more boomy in the bottom end so I may have to figure something out for that but again a blanket or some curtains should do the trick. Actually I have some acoustic ceiling tiles at my old place that might work. The ceiling is popcorn stucco so that helps diffuse the sound a bit and the floor is hardwood laminate which seems to be okay but I also have a huge carpet I was gonna lay down but I prefer to be able to roll around on my chair in there easily and I hate carpet. Too filthy.

The big problem is the noise from outside. There is a LOT of traffic outside my windows but the mics only seem to pick up big trucks or idiots blasting their horns/revving their engines. I was looking at getting some sound blacks (large pieces of thick black fabric used on film sets to reduce noise on soundstages). I found a place on amazon that sells really big pieces of the stuff for $75. It's not the really high end stuff but to get the Belgian Velvet ones or whatever it's called costs HUNDREDS of dollars for the same size. At the end of the day I won't be able to get it perfect but my voice tends to cut enough that after trimming the clips down all you can hear is me. I've had really good results isolating the vocal tracks further in Sonar so I should be okay even if things aren't ideal. No one would be able to tell unless they were a producer listening to the isolated tracks through headphones. As much as I'd like to get some stuff picked up for mass distribution I'm still very much at the point where I mostly need stuff to market myself. Then if something sticks or I end up better off financially I can think about renting studio time or setting myself up in a more pro environment. Most of my current fanbase don't even give a flying fart about super high polished production values anyway... in fact it's sort of frowned on. They want gritty. They ain't gonna get ultra gritty because I personally want things to be clean enough for a wider audience but by no means are the little shortcomings my current set up has going to detract much from the bigger picture... I think.

But... I do try to keep making things better as much as I can and there may be situations that I do need to make a little sound fort for myself. Just not much more room to play around with in here and I wouldn't be able to use my big DAW without a tablet or something to drag into the "booth" with me. My current workaround if I end up needing it is optimizing my laptop and tracking vocals on that then tossing it back over to the big system. I'm still in the writing phase though so I'm not going to sweat that too much for now and I do think with a new mic and applying some of the tips here and whatever I learn in my future studies I should be able to get things sounding more than acceptable.

Sorry for the long post... I tend to do that when I first wake up. Gets my brain moving. lol

Thanks again guys. This has been an awesome thread so far. Cheers.