Recording Professional Vocals

We are writing this tutorial because we are sick of all the websites that promise to give you great sounding vocals if you buy their super-expensive equipment. Whilst it is undisputable that the more you pay, the better the equipment, it is only when you know how to use that equipment to its full potential, that you acheive the best results.

We firmly believe (and have proved it on many occasions) that you can still get a pretty good vocal sound from the most basic of setups.

You Will Need Some Equipment:

A microphone (condenser or dynamic - not a computer microphone).
A microphone pre-amp (do not use your dj mixer mic. pre-amp as these usually give bad results).
A computer (a fairly fast one with enough power to run your software).
A sound card for your PC (some of the high end sound cards have a microphone pre amp built into the sound card).

Now for Hooking it up...

A microphone signal output is too low to plug right into your computer. This is why we require a microphone pre amp, it simply boosts the gain (volume / level) of the signal to a high enough (hot enough) level to record with your PC. Microphone pre amps are usually pretty easy to figure out - they have an input, an output and a gain control (volume knob).

So the chain of equipment goes Mic - Preamp - Soundcard.

Sound cards usually have a mic input, a line input, and a speaker or line output. The mic input is NOT suitable for our setup because the mic input already has a tiny (very low quality) preamp, suitable only for low quality microphone. You should attach the output of the preamp to the line input of the soundcard.

Now simply set up your recording software (we recommend cubase for professional audio recording), per their instructions & record the input into your sequencer.

Optimizing the Quality of your Vocal Recordings

The most important factor that plays into the result of the quality of your vocal recording is the vocalist. You have probably heard the saying "good mic technique" this refers to the singers ability to adjust the distance from them to the mic to compensate for loud and quite parts of the song. There are also other factors that come into play like the problem of words in a song ending or starting with "s" there is a sharp unwanted hiss on the "s", this is called sibilance & can be fixed in a number of different ways. One way is to get the singer to tilt there head slightly off-axis from the microphone for a split second during the pronunciation of these sounds. You may run into this problem with the letters "s, sh, ch, z, t, j" as well.

However, the most common method used in recording studios is to place a click eliminator (or "pop shield") in between the singer and the microphone. In its most basic form (used by many home studios) a pop shield can be a pair of tights stretched across a coat-hanger.

You can read more about Sibilance in our Sibilance article.

Another major problem with recording vocals in plosives (similar to sibilance, but affecting different letters / sounds).

You can read more about Plosives in our Plosives article.