thread of vocal engineering tips

Soon I'm going to be doing my first record involving real lead vocals (as opposed to vocals are treated like samples, where things like proper compression aren't as much of a factor) , so I'd be grateful for any mixing tips/ideas. I've got some tricks up my sleeve that I'm happy to share, but I'm also sure some of you are experienced at this.

in radio they always told us to talk at a 45 degree angle from the mic to reduce the peaks of your sibilants and plosives, but that's all I got for ya.

There were a few in the other thread around here or so

oh right, thanks! i've done the thing where you split the vocals into two tracks and pan them hard L/R (and i've been getting more advice on that front), but i've never bounced them back to mono like this:

- when comping together your vocal take, create a separate track with a pitch corrector on it and keep it muted. Select notes here and there that need correction, snip the regions, mute the original, unmute the corrected. I only ever use this a max of three times on any mix tho bc perfectly tuned vocals sound like balls

- record your vocals Elliott Smith/Eno style, double them up hard-panned left-and-right, then when you've got that perfect dual vocal sound, slap them into mono and leave 'em there

- I almost always pitch-shift all lead vocal takes up 5-10 cents because vocals sound good when they're sharp. If Alicia Keys ever tried this she'd be clean off the B-list and on to the A, imho.

- Never do one-can-on, one-can-off when you are doing takes. You will sing flat. Turn your monitored vocal level up until it's as loud as your head-reverberation.

― you and me against the board (flamboyant goon tie included), Wednesday, 9 October 2013 19:36 (1 month ago) Permalink

really, mono? or just back to one stereo track?

a bit of pitch shifting up & down in an eventide stylee can and will do glorious things to multitracked vocals

i vastly prefer delay to reverb on vocals these days but small amounts of both are a wonderful thing

slapback or quantized delay?

i should mention that i'll be dealing with both rapped and sung vox...i'm hoping to create some sort of starting template for each (i'm assuming that the raps will have much less, or at least shorter, reverb for one thing).

Here is my technique for recording vocals that I have used for every song forever, although I only sing and do not rap:

1. Record eight complete takes - don't stop if you make a mistake.

2. Comp these into a best take (usually most of a single take, probably take 6 or whatever with a few bits from other takes).

3. Comp a second best take (usually from 5 & 7, with the spare parts from 6 and maybe some other takes).

4. Record another eight takes in a soft, lullaby-ish voice (you're not looking for expression here, but the timing and pitch should be pretty much spot on - this should be fairly easy to do if you know the song).

5. Mix down the 8 takes from step 4 into a single stereo track, with takes 1, 3, 5 and 7 panned left and the others right.

You're left with three vocal tracks:

1. Main vocal comp (mono)

2. Second vocal comp (mono)

3. Backing vocals (stereo)

Put some compression and a little reverb on vocal track 1, and make sure it sounds good on its own with just the bass and drums. Keep it centred.

Then put a lot of compression, a bit more reverb and a little distortion on track 2. Keep it centred also. Turn it way down so you don't notice the vocal is double tracked - just enough to make a difference. Again, just measure this against bass and drums.

Put some compression and quite a bit of reverb on track 3. You're filling out the sound, but again you don't want it to be noticeable. You can use automation to raise the level at some points for emphasis.

Record extra lines and words for emphasis/perfection and there you go.

^I like it. I'm not involved in tracking but I'm into the mixing philosophy.

How about EQ? I usually high-pass pretty hard but I think I've overdone it at times, I want to be sure to leave in enough mids so it sounds really full without fighting with the track.

mixing has been going well, and EK's post was extremely helpful.

also s/o to the pitch shift on my SP404, i usually like it better than software.

Great tips! I'm really struggling at the moment so I may try some of these.

Argh! Why does everything sound so terrible?

What's frustrating is my original guide/idea take sounded so good, only the lyrics weren't there. Whenever I try and do a proper take it sounds thin, unnatural, amateurish. I tried layering up as in EK's example but it doesn't round out the sound it just phases and distorts the sound. Doesn't help that my flatmate is watching TV in the other room and it's putting me off.

Are you taking a deep-enough breath for each phrase and are you using enough air to support your vocals?

I'm trying. Going for an echoey Cocteaus style vocal and it's hard to get the half - pronounced words without slurring or over enunciating. Must say my voice wasn't great yesterday but I had several takes and they weren't awful, it's more the mix which is letting things down although it is the hardest vocal I've had to do - there's a whole wordless bit where I'm trying to do this'eh eh uh eh eh eh uh' thing but it always goes slightly out.

Speaking of which, how much breathing should I trim out of a vocal? Is it generally wise to cut it all out? Should I leave some in?

Anyone got any good settings for gates and compressors? I'm using reason 7 and sometimes it feels like a dark art. There are times when I find I'm either cutting out syllables or there's a harsh attack. It doesn't seem to have an attack setting in this program though which is weird. Other times I get this nasal effect that sounds like I have a cold.

I'm using a cupboard as a makeshift vocal booth but it would be easier if I could just sit at the computer and sing without having to move from mic and laptop. When I recorded the guide, I was improvising and it sounded great but I was just holding the mic with my eyes closed. As soon as I have a lyric sheet in front of me I feel a bit tense and weird.

sounds to me like you should step back from recording for a second and do a bunch of singthroughs until you are more at ease with what you're trying to record

Yeah think I need to take a break and maybe wait till my housemate isn't in the other room to hear me. The climate might not be right or something. Maybe do some washing up and sing while I'm doing it.

the other option is to just record a bunch of singthroughs with no expectation that they'll be usable (spoiler: some of them will be)

like, change the mindset from "this is a recording" to "this is me playing around, seeing what works" and see if that loosens up your performance

what mics do y'all use

I'm just using an sm58

I'm still trying to decide whether I should really be singing at all xp

I use this: http://bluemic.com/yeti/

this is probably stupid but as far as gating goes, i don't. i manually chop the wav file on the vocal for any sections where there is no singing, and then i manually trim/fade the breaths etc (and sometimes it's nice to leave them in). i'd rather just do that once than have to listen a bunch to determine if the gate is working as desired for each line.

^^^ I do the same

Yeah I do that instead of gating too. Wondering about compressors though. When people talk about adding 'a lot of compression' I sometimes wonder what that means in terms of range, threshold, release, etc.

gefell mt70s for vox here

gating seems p unnecessary for vox really - i'd chop out any insane breaths/noise manually

i 'get' compression for instruments but when it comes to vocals i just use it for flattening it out really. i find "opto"-style 2-knob compressors are good for that

Yeah, I just use compression on vocals to flatten things out enough so I don't have to play with the volume every word.

For backing vocals, I use a lot more compression cos they don't need to be expressive in that way.

I don't know what I'm doing with most of these things and it's just trial and error, really. For main vocals I'll just use a vocals preset, turn the ratio to maybe 4:1 and if I feel like it I'll mess about with the threshold. For backing vocals I'll go 10:1 or more. I have never messed about with attack, release etc in my life, cos of presets.

I like things that sound pretty rough.

I don't take a deep, audible breath before every line, so I don't worry about that. In the old days of home recording, noise and hiss was such a huge problem that I would silence the vocal tracks when there was no singing. Nowadays, you can make things so sterile so easily that I don't always bother.

At home, I just use an SM58 for vocals because I know if I got something fancier what I would gain in clarity/detail I would lose by entering an endless battle against the noises of the room I sing in. Mostly, an SM58 just gives you the sound that is right in front of it. As I said, I like things rough, and a lot of the time I don't bother wearing headphones when singing.

yeah i just had a load of friends on FB saying i should use a rodes condenser or w/e but the SM58 is great at not picking up stuff going on in the house really.

Wondering about compressors though. When people talk about adding 'a lot of compression' I sometimes wonder what that means in terms of range, threshold, release, etc.

Compression can be hard to get, it's best to listen to stuff while playing with extreme settings to hear what they're doing. Something being heavily compressed would probably imply a high ratio, e.g. 8:1 or 10:1. Threshold just determines at what level the compressor actually kicks in; set it too high and nothing gets lowered, set it too low and everything is. What you want is for only the louder parts to get lowered, so you have to set the threshold to the material. For the attack and release, again just mess with it and see what it sounds like, if you play with extreme settings you'll start to hear different effects.

with this vocal mixing i've been doing more buss processing than ever before, like sending all the lead vocal tracks to one group track for compression etc, and all the background tracks to another one with a different effects chain.

it took a lot of playing around to figure out the relative fader levels between the sends (?) and the buss tracks, but it seemed better to keep the buss levels high and adjust the level that's going into them, otherwise it would hit the compressor too hard and break up.

idk, it's trial & error but i'm really happy with this first track, hopefully i can use the session as a template for the others.

along with harmonic overdubs, is it generally good practice, with clean-vocal leads, to double these up with multiple takes in order to thicken the vocal, or does this surmount to problems with phasing and/or consonant clustering?

Also - anyone got any tips on stereo/panning backing vocals. I have about 3-4 different harmonies. Should I centre these or have them panned left/right or all biased to one ear or something else??

i've been panning backing vocals wide, but sometimes will bounce them all to one track because i want to the whole group to have some stereo motion (ie everything moving from left to right at once). that's a pretty specific effect though.

I disagree with most of Mr. Goon Tie's tips fwiw

along with harmonic overdubs, is it generally good practice, with clean-vocal leads, to double these up with multiple takes in order to thicken the vocal, or does this surmount to problems with phasing and/or consonant clustering?

A doubled vocal is a doubled vocal, it's a very common practice in many kinds of music, but it's a different sound than a single-tracked vocal, it depends on the voice and the song and the desired effect. Many singers sound better doubled, some don't; sometimes it's cool to only bring the double in for certain sections or phrases of the song.

I have about 3-4 different harmonies. Should I centre these or have them panned left/right or all biased to one ear or something else??

Again it depends on what's going on in the overall mix and what effect you're going for. In a "modern" approach you might put them all on one side if you wanted them to sound really glued together as a group and you had something else on the opposite side that complemented/balanced them out, or you might pan them just a bit out to each side. In the early days of stereo it was more common for mixes to have more lopsided/extreme panning so you can get kind of a retro effect by doing stuff like that.

Hello again this thread. So I've recorded and comped my takes and am pretty happy with my vocal on the whole (it's not perfect but what'cha gon do?

Now I'm left with the dilemma of it sounding a bit like the vocal's only been pasted over the top of the track. I've gone in and standardised the volume, got rid of some of the breathing and other bits and bobs but still it doesn't quite seem to mesh in so well with the backing track in places. If I turn it down, it gets lost, if I turn it up it just juts out horribly in the mix. Turning up the reverb/echo makes it lose focus but turning it down, again, dries it out and makes it sound painful in places. How to bring out the vocal so it's nice and clear but also not a pasted-over-the-top job?

maybe do some light processing on the master channel? something short of mastering but that would help glue everything together, put in the same universe? i have some tape saturation plugins i like to use, idk if that would work for your aesthetic.

maybe mastering will do the trick, does it still bother you if you throw a limiter on the master?

Pretty hard to say without hearing it -- it could be down to the arrangement as well as the engineering and production. Some ideas: set up a reverb bus and send your vocal and some of your instruments to it, but in different amounts. This puts them in the same acoustic space, but at different distances to the listener. You might give the vocal the least reverb, but add a subtle slap delay for added depth. And definitely put a "color" compressor across the master bus for some glueing, there's nothing wrong with doing this while mixing as long as you don't go overboard and squash the life out of the track. Some free VSTs I like for this are CamelCrusher, Blockfish, and Rough Rider.

"If I turn it down, it gets lost, if I turn it up it just juts out horribly in the mix."

try automating the volume so the vocal ebbs and flows with the musical arrangement. do the same with the reverb send so that at certain points of the song the vocals sound wetter than in others. should help them pop out a bit, and that way you won't potentially fuck up the dynamics with a master comp

presumably you've done this already, but make sure that there isn't any frequency masking or clashing from instruments in a similar frequency range to your voice. whatever daw you're using should have a spectrum analyzer to check with, then use an eq to cut accordingly. be careful not to boost any vocal freqs too much

Thanks folks, will try out a few if these