How many vocals to record

Creating a punchy low frequency sound known as Popping. Place your hand in front of your face as you say these two sentences :. To see which pop filters I recommend, check out this article :. But on recordings, when your mouth is right up against the mic, it often sounds painfully obvious.

Using a condenser mic which is more prone to sibilance , record yourself saying this line :. Hear that annoying hiss? To fix this problem, you COULD just mask it with software tools like de-essers and multi-band compressors …. But the smarter strategy is to avoid recording it in the first place. Grab a pencil , and secure it directly over the diaphragm of your mic with a rubber band , as shown in this picture.

Now…those high frequency blasts will be split in half by the pencil, and diverted off to the side. Problem solved. Due to the design of the cardioid mics …. With certain instruments such as acoustic guitar, this can serve as a useful tool in adding warmth.

If the acoustics in your room suck, so will your vocals. Reflection filters can be a good cheap alternative for anyone in search of a shortcut. To see which ones I recommend, check out this article :. Pointing the microphone at the singer is standard, of course. Try moving the mic 20 degrees to the left and right and see what sounds best.

Without getting into the technical details, the digital sweet spot is basically an average level of dBFS. When setting your levels, try to get an average of dBFS. You should be peaking around dBFS. You would never edit it! It was perfect! And then, inevitably, you start to mix, and… oh. There are spitty words. Some phrases are out of time. Make sure you have enough content to work with! You need to comp your vocals to create the best possible version for your song. Gently coach them towards a better performance, but be wary of introducing self-doubt.

Rule of thumb: Make sure to record a minimum of three takes from the singer. Even if the first take is a banger! They have to feel the emotion and KNOW they sound good. Rob Mayzes is an audio professional, musician and educator. Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content. Recording vocals properly is the cornerstone of a good mix.

One of the most influential factors during the recording phase is your choice of room. You only have access to what you have—maybe just a few rooms in your home: A kitchen. A bedroom. A bathroom. A living room. So… what room should you pick?

All of those items tend to absorb sound, making the room less reverberant and more neutral for getting the best vocal You also want to avoid rooms with a lot of hard surfaces and windows. There is, in this case, too much of a good thing. Find a balance. Far from it. Put the microphone as far away from the walls as possible. When mixing, polishing the final product is an active stage where you have to navigate the signal processing and effects plugins with knowledge and skill or you'll sabotage your results.

While the previous is the artistic part, mixing is the technical part. There's a lot of information out there on the internet. Lots of lists of tips and tricks that never really tell you anything. They either give you the blatantly obvious or the intricate and complex without enough information to make it actionable. In this article, we're going to keep it short and sweet without wasting your time and we're going to make sure you have every vital piece of information you need to record your voice and then mix it down with the production skills of a mixing master.

We'll also link you to other resources we've written so you can explore pieces in more depth if you want. Let's get this party started! Soon you'll know how to record vocals like a pro. We're going to discuss these tips in the order that you would encounter them as you record and process your vocals.

That way, if you're not an absolute beginner, you can skip forward in the logical sequence and find what you need. If you want an in-depth look at how to mix vocals , we've got that for you too.

Let's do it. Before we get into these tips, let's assume that the vocalist is ready. They have warmed up, performed their practice exercises, and are comfortable. They have their preferred beverages to keep their throats lubricated and they are well rested.

We're not going to get into the psychology and physiology of singing itself, just with recording and mixing of the vocal takes. In case you want to jump around, tips are the recording tips , and tips are the mixing tips. Not to insult any reader's intelligence, but if one person hears this here then it was worth it. A lot of people think you buy a microphone and plug it in and that's that. If only studio recording was so simple, right?

Don't let yourself feel intimidated by that. You can typically find a very decent package deal these days that includes a condenser mic with a recording interface that has preamps and converters built in and even comes with a copy of a DAW. For instance, the starter pack above not only has a large diaphragm mic, a stand, pop filter, and all of the cables you need, but it also comes with studio headphones and a preamp and line-level input for instruments.

Something like that gets you started without having to piece together and research all the various parts. Now, the above starter kit is more like "entry level professional" or at worst, "high level consumer" which is still pretty good.

It'll get you going without breaking the bank. If you follow the rest of these tips, it will produce great quality vocals for you. Having access to the right gear will take you a lot of the distance, but not all of the way.

You'll at least need acoustic treatment or a contraption like pictured below:. The idea is to turn an entire room into a vocal booth or create a portable system that helps isolate the raw source your voice from the reflections bouncing off of the walls.

This is absolutely key to creating a clear recording of your voice. Otherwise you'll get a result that sounds smeared and boxy due to the reflections, delays, and other acoustic anomalies that occur in an enclosed room that will feature weird peaks and dips in it's frequency spread.

Strangely, I also have to suggest that you isolate your voice from your breath. What I mean is that, when you breathe out as you sing or rap, you're pushing a lot of air that the microphone can record. The specific peculiarity you want to avoid is picking up plosives. The key to avoiding issues with plosives is to record off-axis, meaning you should aim your voice just to the left or right of the microphone instead of directly at it.

The second defense against this problem is a pop filter, like the one pictured above in the starter kit. These pop filters do exactly what they say. They filter out pops in your breath as you sing by dissipating and spreading out the impact of the powerful blast of air. If you want a fancier pop filter, I prefer the following, because appearances do matter:.

We've covered in-depth the nature and problem of plosives in our article called Taming Sibilance and Plosives. Finally, the last thing you want is to have your instrumental leaking out of your headphones and into the microphone as you record. Earbuds can work sometimes, but I recommend you pick up a set of closed-back headphones that are meant for recording applications. My personal favorite are the Sennheiser HD Pro's, although any set will work.

The key is that the soft cushions seal off the sound so that it only reaches your ear and not the microphone. Also, the back is of solid construction, versus a perforated style that may be more preferable for mixing but horrid for recording. So now you have the ability to record the highest quality version of your isolated voice. But just because you have the ability doesn't mean you know how. This is where a lot of people goof up. It's easy to start twisting knobs on the preamp and interface until it sounds right in the computer.

It's also just as easy to screw up your gain staging. So the question is, "What is gain staging and how to do I do it right? Gain is the ratio of the output of a signal, in this case your recorded voice, to the input of the signal. It's kind of like a volume knob, except there's a maximum and a minimum range before your quality takes a nose dive and this range exists at every stage of the recording from your mic to the preamp to the converters.

You need to get it right at every stage to secure a professional quality recording. If you want to understand gain staging in depth, read our Headroom in Audio Recording article. The basic concept has to do with fully using every "bit" available to you in the computer without pushing it too far. It's just like pixels on your TV or computer screen. Recording quietly means you have to turn up the volume later on. This is like saving an image very small and then stretching it out on a 62" television.

It's going to look extremely blurry. But if you save the image record at the right volume initially, you won't have to stretch it turn it up later. Since you're working with a very simple signal chain, setting up the gain staging is quite simple.

In your software that you're using to record, whether that's Garage Band or Pro Tools, you need to monitor the level of the signal you're sending in. If you do this right, it means your preamplifier is operating at the optimal volume, your master channel is sitting at perfection, and your analog-to-digital converters are nailing the perfect level.

In our case, we can do it all with one knob, the preamp's gain. If you want to really dig into the concept of gain staging , check out our deep dive on the topic. Now, my friend, you're recording the highest quality possible vocal ever.

Now it's not about how you're recording, but what you're recording. Allow me to explain There's the temptation to deal with recordings like the old days when you were committing straight to tape and you had to get it right the first time. This means that you'd go ahead and record your reverbs and other vocal effects lives.

There's absolutely zero reason to do this today in the digital world. The only effect that has any business hitting your signal before the signal reaches your computer is compression.

If you don't need to compress before hand, then don't. Some singers are unruly though, move closer and further away from the mic as they perform or are just extremely dynamic naturally.

You may need some compression to keep them from clipping or at worst a limiter. Something as light as a ratio should help tremendously though. The reason you want to record a dry signal, which means no time-based effects like reverb, delays, and echoes, is to keep your options wide open when you begin to mix.

If you commit an effect to the track, you've just wiped out all options. You're stuck. If you apply compression, you're now compressing reverb and echoes too. You can't choose a different reverb. Never record wet. Dry only! Remember, the entire reason you went through the trouble of isolating your signal is to get rid of flutter echoes, early reflections, and other acoustic problems.

Don't add any in at this point. Your goal as a vocalist is to give the best performance possible. Your goal as a studio engineer is to make sure the vocalist has what he or she needs to give that best performance. We said to always record a dry signal, but that doesn't mean you can't listen to a wet signal as you record. The most comfortable place to sing is in the shower. People belt it out and let loose and feel great about it. The reason has to do with reverb. You're in a tiled or paneled shower in a small room with a tile or linoleum floor with a hard counter surface and a big mirror, etc.

Everything is hard and flat surfaces bouncing your voice all over the place. What you end up with is a big, lush reverb that masks the precise details of your voice. You may not sound awesome to your neighbor, but you can't hear the tiny details that make you self-conscious so you feel like you're giving a Grammy-worthy performance.

Help your vocalist feel this good and get their mind out of their way by feeding back their voice into their studio headphones with some reverb. I think sometimes, here, this is very much a case of just two-compressor approach. Clip Gain in Pro Tools Example.

Maybe cut out some of those mid-high frequencies, which you feel are a bit harsh. Sometimes I like to turn it up briefly, so you can work out what sticks out, what sounds harsh on the ear. So cut some of those frequencies. And then perhaps use another compressor just to bring the level up and to make it sit nicely at the front of your track. Then, obviously, delays and reverb are very important for helping it to bed into the track.

And that, again, is always an experimental process using slight delays or maybe longer delays which you then feed into the reverb as well. So hopefully this helps set the foundation and fundamentals for what goes into recording vocals at home. Try to take these points into account whilst in self-isolation, as it is the perfect time to start recording your next album! The largest purpose-built recording studio in the world, we take a brief look at the history of the legendary Studio One.

Once devoted purely to the recording of classical music, this space has now played host to the scores of some of Hollywood's biggest blockbuster movies, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings series. How an elegant sixteen-room, three-story town house built in changed the course of music history forever, the ripples of which are still unquestionably strong, inspiring and infectious.

It saw the Chicago rapper teaming up with a piece all-female string orchestra for an ambitious concert that featured expanded and reimagined takes of his biggest tracks of the time, and may be one of the most well-known instances of hip hop and classical music coming together. Interviews Studios. Ashcroft produced the album with regular collaborator Chris Potter, as well as with Wil Malone who provided the string arrangements which were recorded at Abbey NewMusic Studios.

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