yep's guide to better vocal recordings

1.Psychological preparation

This is the most important part of getting a good vocal recording, hands down. Something about the studio makes many singers tense, pitchy, and forced-sounding. Your primary obligation as a recording engineer is to get the best possible recording, and that starts with the best possible performance. It is your job to make the singer comfortable, relaxed, and inspired. You must be at all times patient, supportive and professional. You are their employee, and should let them take the lead when it comes to the tenor of your relationship. (This does NOT mean that they should take the lead when it comes to the recording process—just that sometimes “English butler” is the best hat to wear).

If the singer wants to be buddies (and they often do), then by all means, oblige. If the singer wants to cuss you out and blame you for their mistakes, put up with it as best you can and be appropriately apologetic and subservient. If the singer looks at you as the boss and wants direction and instruction, then by all means provide it. You get the idea.

Create an inspiring, relaxed environment for vocal takes. Don’t leave the singer feeling like they’re in the dentist’s office or a stranger’s living room; make them feel like a rock star. Keep water or soft drinks handy. If the singer prefers harder stuff, do your best to unobtrusively keep them to a low-level mellow buzz. The best and easiest way to achieve this is by working fast and keeping them busy, which is good practice all around anyway.

If the singer messes up and they know it, just be cool and tell them no sweat, that’s what we’re here for, 40 takes is typical, they’re doing great. If the singer screws up and they DON’T know it, don’t tell them they’re doing it wrong, just tell them it sounds great, they’re doing awesome, and you want to get a couple more takes while they’re hot. If they’re way off and don’t know it, tell them you have an idea and you want to try and run through some possible harmony tracks and ask if they think they could try singing it like “…”(hum the melody). Offer to send a synth part through their headphones with the idea you have in mind, and ask if they would mind singing along to it.

Remember that they’re not paying you for your opinions or feedback; they’re paying you to make them sound like rock stars. The best way to get them to sound that way is to make them feel that way.

2.Headphone Mix
This is CRUCIAL. A bad headphone mix will make your job and the singer’s exponentially harder, and bleed-through is the least of your worries.

Let’s start with most overlooked part: Volume and frequency balance. Set the volume of the headphones as low as you can before the singer complains. Turn the lows down, both in the backing parts and on the singer’s mic. Human pitch perception at low frequencies is quite poor and gets worse at higher volumes. Bass notes can easily sound a full step flat at high volume, and they are the first thing the singer will hear if the mix is loud. You want the singer’s pitch to be glomming onto the midrange, not the bass. If they ask for more low end in the headphones, be aware that more kick will almost always satisfy without screwing up their pitch perception, and that turning up the upper mids of the bass will usually make them happy if they want to hear the bass part louder.

Make sure that they can hear themselves clearly at all times. Compression and presence-range boost on their mic are pretty much required. Pitch and timing are often incidental considerations from the singer’s point of view, they want to get nuance and expressiveness and emotion, and if the upper mids are masked in their headphone mix, then they’ll start overcompensating. Focus on giving them a crisp, clear, present sound and they’ll give you their best performance.

Give them some careful reverb and/or delay or chorus effects. These will have a smoothing and a thickening effect that will make the singer feel less naked and more impressed by their own voice. If you can make it sound like they’re singing in the shower you’re golden.

3.Mic placement

I assume you’re using a directional mic to record vocals. “Generic” starting position is about 8” away from the singer, about forehead level, aimed at their nose (to avoid excessive sibilance or plosives). Use a pop filter, both to control pops and to keep the singer from swallowing the mic.

If you want to get more proximity effect and power and articulation, you can move the mic in closer and aim it more at the mouth. Hard-hitting hip-hop MCs often practically swallow the mic, and you can hear every drop of spit and tooth clicking and it sounds like they’re hollering right in your ear.

To get a more spacious, authentic sound, move the mic back a few inches. Forget about Sinatra’s mic-cradling live videos and look at the studio photos where he’s sitting arm’s length from the mic. If the singer is really essy or nasal, try moving the mic further off-axis.

4.Mic Technique

Most singing teachers don’t seem to teach this, which is unfortunate, because it’s pretty easy and pretty important in this age of amplified and recorded music. It is simply the art of moving further away from the mic when you’re loud and moving in closer when you’re quiet. If you watch rock stars in concert they do it all the time and it’s great showmanship as well as acoustically important.

If your diva has never heard of mic technique, there are two quick-and-easy ways to teach them. Method one is to have them stand sort of sideways to the mic, with their feet shoulder-width apart. Tell them to lean on their back foot when singing, and to lean on their front foot while whispering, and when they’re really wailing, to slide their front foot behind the other and lean back on that. This “three position” mic technique is usually really easy for singers to grasp and works quite well.

The other alternative that’s even easier and more rock-starish requires your singer to touch the mic stand, which can introduce handling noise, so use a shock mount and approach with caution. Have the singer hold the mic stand just under the shock mount, with their arm bent about 90 degrees. When they whisper, have them pull in close to the mic, and when they wail, have them stretch out their arm all the way. Moving the mic stand is tres rock star, but introduces more potential for handling noise. Getting the singer to move their torso is better in the studio.

One final tip about mic technique is that you have several tools at your disposal to keep the singer placed correctly, with or without their cooperation. One of my favorites is the “dummy mic,” which works wonders for singers who can’t resist the taste of mics in their mouth, or who don’t understand the concept of “off axis.” You simply set up a mic for them to chew on, swallow, spit on, whatever (a shure SM58 is a good pick) and then set up the “real” mic behind it or off-axis or whatever. Whether you tell them that’s the real mic or just an extra ambient mic is up to you.

Another useful trick to reinforce mic technique and to guard against straining is to mix in a little bit of a separate bus of the vocals to their headphone mix that is fed through some heavy compression, distortion, or even digital clipping (the “dummy mic” is a good place to get this separate feed from). This serves a similar function to grooved pavement on the side of the highway. It gives the singer an early warning when they’re about to go in the red. Sort of a subconscious cue to back in your lane.

5.Mic Selection (and preamps)

The question that every new recordist wants to know is: “What’s the best vocal mic under $X?” There simply is no one answer. A mic that does wonders picking up the rich, gravelly, woody resonance of Louie Armstrong might be terrible at capturing the pristine airy harmonics of Celine Dion’s voice.

You can use any mic for vocals. The things that make a good mic for a given vocalist are not represented on a frequency response chart. If they were, you could simply use an equalizer to make a radio shack mic sound like an AKG C12 and save $15,000 or whatever. Any directional mic requires a precise system of baffles and resonators that affect sound in nonlinear, frequency- and phase-dependent ways. These are things that people are talking about when they say a mic is “warm” or “crisp” or “detailed” or “smooth” or “rich,” or “quiet” or “powerful” or whatever. They are characteristics that cannot really be quantified, because they respond to different source material in different ways.

So how can you tell which mic to use for a particular singer? Simple; set up all the mics you own in front of the singer and have him/her sing for a minute or two while you record. For real. You will very quickly start to get a handle on which mics you like for which types of singers, and will be able to narrow down the choices in the future.

On to preamps. 99 times out of 100, the mic will make a far bigger difference than the preamp will, presuming that we’re talking about a certain modicum of quality here (i.e. not the built-in preamp on the 1/8” jack on a stock soundcard). If changing mics is like swapping ingredients in a recipe, then changing preamps is like using better-quality ingredients. Preamp quality matters more in clean, lightly-processed acoustic recordings than in heavily-processed rock mixes.

6. Finding the best spot in the room-- dead vs. alive

If you really want to get the best-quality recordings, do yourself a favor and set aside an afternoon to walk around the spaces available to you to record in, carrying a microphone, and speaking or singing into it descriptions of where you are. Try and keep the mic a constant distance from your mouth and try to maintain a fairly consistent volume as you verbalize. Chances are 100% that some places will sound better or worse than others.

You will likely read a lot of stuff on the web and in books about how important the environment is and how most home studios have terrible acoustics and so on. This is mostly true, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t great spaces to record in wherever you are. Some of the best recordings ever made (including all the old Motown) were made in small residential rooms with only the most rudimentary sound treatments. As with all things audio, what you have to work with is not as important as what you do with it.

7.Studio tricks and mixing techniques

This is not even close to a comprehensive mixing guide to vocals. This thing has already gotten way too long, and mixing is totally a whole nother thing. But I will include a few quick tips that are relevant to think about as you record.

Motown compression (a.k.a. New York compression—don’t ask, I don’t know). This is a very useful technique for situations where you have a dynamic, expressive vocal track where you need a way to keep the musicality of the performance but also find a way to push the lyrics and the articulation out in front of the mix. You basically clone the vocal track, and apply heavy compression and presence-range eq boost (somewhere between 4-10 kHz) to the clone. Now you can treat the main vocal part like any other instrument, using reverb and dynamics and tonality and whatever, and then just dial up enough of the compressed clone to keep the articulation and clarity. Knowing about this technique can also help keep you from overcompensating as you record.

Low frequency rolloff: This can work wonders to get a vocal sit well in a dense mix. If you’ve never tried it, you’ll be amazed at how much of the low end you can cut out, even on deep, resonant voices. Cutting the lower mids can also help reduce any pitchiness or honky or nasal artifacts. Use a shelving filter.

Doubling the vocal track—having the singer sing along with him/herself can thicken up and even out a thin, uneven, weak, or subpar singing voice. This is easily overused, but on a lot of hard rock records, a combination of low cut and doubled-up tracks is what turns poor singers into powerful rock stars (think Linkin Park). Chorus or delay effects can also be employed with similar results.

The “whisper trick”: Having the singer whisper along with the vocal track in a monotone can be a quick and easy way to get a “huge vocal” sound. Again, easily overused, and most effective on weak vocalists in dense mixes.

Autotune and it’s offspring: Avoid using it indiscriminately on the “auto” setting. If you have a great performance with one or two off notes, just adjust them manually. If the whole performance sounds off-key, you need to evaluate realistically what the singer is capable of. Sometimes good singers get bad in the studio (see item 1: psychological preparation). If this is the case, you owe it to the singer and to the recording to try and find a way to get a better performance of them. If the singer just sucks, it’s still your job to do what you gotta do to deliver the best product possible. In all cases, do not succumb to the temptation to just automatically put autotune on every track. For a variety of aesthetic and psycho-acoustical reasons, “perfectly in tune” is not necessary desirable, and does not even necessarily sound more “in tune.”

Hope some of that helps.

Cheers.

Thanks for the kind words.

It would be very unusual for me to pan the lead vocal anywhere other than dead center, and usually that would be to deliberately create an unusual soundstage for dramatic effect.

Chorus vocals can be treated in a number of ways, depending on what you're going for. Panned wide gives a "big mono" "wall of sound." Panned behind the lead reinforces and strengthens the vocal track. Panned close together off to one side gives a natural "three girls at a mic" soundstage placement.

Cheers.

FWIW, I actually usually take the opposite of Max's approach, giving the singer a lot of themselves in their headphones, especially in the presence range. I like to give them a pretty compressed version of what they sound like with a lot of detail and articulation. I want them to hear what they sound like through the mic and play to that rather than what they sound like in their own resonating skull. I also usually want them to err on the side of singing quieter rather than louder.

I have almost never heard a musician of any sort complain that there was too much of themselves in the headphone mix, so long as they could still make out the other instruments.

Note that some singers will do better singing with one ear cup off, hearing themselves in open air, or even without headphones altogether, just singing along with the monitor speakers in the control room. Provided that the control room is fairly noise-free and the singer is using a directional mic pointed away from the speakers, bleed can be much less of a problem than you might think in this scenario.

But again, whatever gets the best performance. If your singer wants it different, then that's what you should give them.

Cheers.

excellent, thanks.

Those are some excellent tips! Thanks for sharing. I record mostly myself and another guitarist/singer that I collaborate with, so that takes a lot of the pressure off as far as having to deal with clients as you were describing. I'm sure that can really be hectic for all of you who record other people.

He discovered last weekend that he could more easily hit the pitch if he held one cup of the headphones up to his ear and kept the other off so that he could hear himself in the room. Today I tried that whisper technique to get a little more grit and thicken his vocal track up and I liked it so much that I used it on a couple of the songs that I sing. It doesn't take much to get the right effect... in fact, unless you solo the two tracks you can hardly tell it's even there.

And I can totally relate to what Jack says about getting comfortable recording guitar. I've been playing for almost 30 years and I consider myself a guitarist first and a singer second (well... maybe 3rd or 4th really). Somehow I can usually get my vocals down in just a few takes, but when I go to record guitars, I suddenly have fat, clumsy fingers that won't go where I tell them to.

Thank you "Yep". A good thing to have condensed like that laying around. Went in my collection, thanks again......

ORIGINAL: fejede
...The sensitivity (input gain) on the pre-amp; what should it be set to (less or more)?...

When in doubt, set it as high as you can while still being absolutely sure that the signal won't clip the input converters. For vocals at 24 bit resolution, I usually record with the loudest peaks coming in at about -6dB or so on the input meters, maybe -12 if the singer's really wild and I'm worried about overs.

As a rule, for the best signal-to-noise ratio and digital resolution, it is best to do any amplifying of the singal as early in the chain as possible, although sometimes some kinds of gear are used differently for various aesthetic reasons. The worst way to do it is to have the signal pass through one device that's turned way up, then another that's turned way down, then another that's turned way up again, and so on. This is true for all instruments and recordings, not just vocals. This kind of stuff is called "gain staging" or "gain structure," and detailed discussion is really a topic for another thread. You can run a search or start a new thread to get some more detailed information on theories and practice.

Cheers.

Yep,

I got to thinking about this thread and realized that every time I've sung before (which is only in church and high school, always live performances) the "sound guy" has told me to hold the mic an inch or so from my lips. What is the difference between this sort of set up and what happens in a recording studio? Based on this prior experience I've always had my mic real close for my "studio" recordings (which are few in number at this point). I'll try having it further away based on this thread but would like to know why the disparity.

Thanks!

Sam

ORIGINAL: samhoff
Yep,

I got to thinking about this thread and realized that every time I've sung before (which is only in church and high school, always live performances) the "sound guy" has told me to hold the mic an inch or so from my lips. What is the difference between this sort of set up and what happens in a recording studio? Based on this prior experience I've always had my mic real close for my "studio" recordings (which are few in number at this point). I'll try having it further away based on this thread but would like to know why the disparity.

i'll give it a shot. i used to be one of those sound guys. the reason they want you to be one inch from the mic is because they don't have compressors or clip envelopes and they don't feel like or aren't talented enough to "run the board" so to speak. so in order to get a consistent volume out of you they want you a consistent distance from the microphone. it's a lot easier for you to be consistently close to the mic than far away.

another big problem is feedback. if you don't get close to the mic then they have to turn it up. when they do it's more likely to feed back thanks to the guys who originally decided the speakers should be behind the stage instead of beside or in front of it. the typical mic run is probably 100' or more back to the control booth and they don't have nice preamps (well some places do), just a noisy mixer someone bought 10 years ago, so signal to noise is a much bigger deal than it is in a studio with $1000 preamps for the vocalist and a dead quiet room and everybody with closed-back headphones.

you also don't get the cream of the crop running boards at high schools and churches. the basic requirement is not being afraid that the mixer will electrocute you and knowing how to plug something in and where the power button and volume sliders/knobs are. once sound is coming out of the speakers they are pretty satisfied. "one inch from the mic" is also so they don't have to worry too much about the volume sliders when you're actually performing.

Good stuff.

My singer has terrible mic technique. I asked her to find a teacher and get some lessons but she was unable to find anyone who knew what to teach. When we are recording, stopping her and correcting her technique inteferes too much with the performance, so I use some mild compression to help tame her loud bits and I can always edit the massive in-breath at the beginning of a phrase.

ORIGINAL: samhoff

Yep,

I got to thinking about this thread and realized that every time I've sung before (which is only in church and high school, always live performances) the "sound guy" has told me to hold the mic an inch or so from my lips. What is the difference between this sort of set up and what happens in a recording studio? Based on this prior experience I've always had my mic real close for my "studio" recordings (which are few in number at this point). I'll try having it further away based on this thread but would like to know why the disparity.

Thanks!

Sam

In live sound, feedback control and minimizing bleed-through are every bit as critical as sound quality is. Close-miking reduces the amount of gain needed and allows the engineer to roll off some of the low frequencies due to the aforementioned proximity effect. Both of these factors reduce the risk of feedback. And when you're standing in front of a full band, there is a tremendous amount of ambient sound from the band. If the mic is more than a few inches away from your mouth, it may be picking up more of the drums and amplifiers and horns than it is picking up your voice, and the sound tech will not be able to amplify your voice in relation to the rest of the band no matter how much he turns up that mic.

in the studio we don't have all these practical considerations, and can focus solely upon getting the best sound quality, which might come from recording with the mic a little further away.

cheers.

Ok one thing i disagree with is that the micis more important then the Pre Simply put great pres cost more. It will give u a true read on the color and response of a given mic. Plus i can get a great mic for around $250 just ask michael joly at oktavemod.com So give me the best pre i can get and ill find a great mic for the singer and save some dough to buy a few of them

Not with a SM57 since its a dynamic microphone Yep is referring to a condenser mic which is much more sensitive. You need to be closer to SM57 but dont eat it cause you will get the pops and too much bass in the vocal sound. About an inch or so but again the vocalist needs to move away as he or she increases the volume. The best compressor on a vocalist is themselves moving in close on soft parts and away on loud parts. This is a skill that takes time to master and alot of great singers dont understand this. This is where the engineer plays a big part in couching them on the performance.

In response to some recent threads, a bump.

Apologies.

Cheers.

Yep:

I'm reading up on some various techniques (I'm a noob) and wanted to thank you for this article. Very helpful.
I'm thankful for experienced folks like you sharing this type of knowledge with the rest of us.

Thanks again.

Jeff