Recording the vocals

Whenever you record vocals, there are many different things you need to take into consideration to ensure a good recording.  Because believe it or not you capture a lot more than just the vocal.

here are some factors that could affect a vocal performance;

  • confidence
  • being in a comfortable environment
  • having a good headphone mix
  • Making sure the pitching is perfect
  • The emotion of the song or singer
  • The Clarity of the vocal
  • Intelligible or understandable pronunciations

A lot of these will be perfected through lots of practice and its harder to capture emotion in a song when it isn’t your own without understanding what emotions need to portrayed.

When physically recording a vocal track you need to firstly choose the microphone that best suits the singer. To do this we picked 3 different microphones to choose from which were the SM57, Electrovoice RE-20 and the AKG 414. Although some people may think that a microphone is a microphone, they are very wrong. The frequency response specifications is what you need to look at dependant on the vocalistist voice ie if the vocalist has a lower voice, you would use a microphone that had a better low end and mid range frequency response opposed to the high end.

As well as looking at the frequency response you need to check which respond or reduce sibilance which is the S’s, T’s and C’s that tend to peak in vocal tracks. We did this practically and we decided that the RE-20 sounded more warm and accurate with limited sibilance. To reduce the sibilance further we used a pop shield.

Once we had decided the microphone, and the headphones were set up to the vocalists requirements, we adjusted the gain structure to effectively pick up the vocal as the vocalist had a soft quiet voice.

Once we ran through the song a couple of times we then started to record. We thought that the take was sufficient however when the vocalist listened back she picked out a couple of parts that she wanted to re do. so again to do this we used a pre role so she could join in with the track and record over the part that was wrong.

 

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