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.
Reprinted with permission; February 2007; Author: yep