help!!! harsh vocal!! i lost all motivation on recording

dlogan


Common frustration finding that right tone - don't give up! You'll need to find what works for your voice. It may be that your microphone is not a good fit for your voice. But as far as making the best of what you got and wanting to know where to eq, try out the Voxengo SPAN free VST spectrum analyzer. It will help you know what's going on in certain frequencies -and especially helpful can be the function where you do Control-left click and can listen in on what's going on in certain frequencies. That can help you pinpoint an area where you need to do some narrow EQ cut. Experiment with some different reverb settings too, to soften your vocals. But I also agree with Reece - get an objective opinion.

Rothchild


Hi davidrr,

Have you tried this with eq, it's the tried, trusted, true and tested way to do things.

Take your vocal track and insert a Sonitus EQ, grab node 3 (could be any node really but go with me here) and drag it to the top of the display (maximum gain), then in the area underneath the display go to the Q setting for node three, you can turn it up by pressing and holding the mouse button on the number and pushing the mouse up. As you do this you'll see the point, that node three makes, become sharper until it makes a pointy bump.

Now, with your vocal playing, sweep the frequency of node three up and down (ie move it from left to right and back again across the display of the EQ) When you hear it accentuating the most of the sound you don't like (the harsh bit) stop and pull the node all the way down. You should hear that frequency start to disappear. This is often referred to as notching out frequencies, what you've done is turn the volume down of that particular frequency, the higher the Q level the sharper the notch (and with it comes other effects which you may notice) you'll start to learn how much or little ! and or gain you need to address the issues you're finding in your vocal recording.

What I tend to do is use a series of small, fairly sharp notches to get the basic vocal in shape, I'm not shy to use more than one eq to achieve this (because little and often seems to work better). Once I've got rid of the bits I don't like I use another eq to turn up the bits I do like! When I'm boosting I'll tend to use lower Q levels than when I'm cutting as they sound more natural.

Hope this helps, good luck and have fun!

Child

sane1


I remember an article from Phil Ramone many years ago about his production of a Billy Joel album (I think it was the one that had AllenTown.

Anyway he left all the EQ flat; and spent hours getting the sound he wanted for each instrument and voice from the mics and placement of the mics.

So, yes EQ may not be your problem.

i just wish i knew how to eq,