If you read my last blog, you should now have all the gear you need to create a professional-quality vocal recording.  Now unfortunately, you gear isn’t going to make your singer sound like Bono on its own.

I’m going to assume that you have a decent handle on your DAW of choice, and I’m only going to cover the more physical and acoustical aspects of the recording process.  So let’s get into it!

Before your singer even shows up, think about the space where you’re going to record.  This is probably the MOST important and commonly underestimated aspect of the vocal recording process!  Quite often, novice producers will find that something sounds off about their vocal tracks, but they can’t put their finger on what it is.  Most frequently, it’s an unwanted color added by the natural reverb of the room in which you’re recording.

To achieve the most control over your vocal sound, start with a really dead room.  You can add your own reverb later, and it’s a lot easier to make your vocal sit comfortably with the rest of the band that way.  What defines a dead room?  Start with a small odd shape.  Walls that aren’t square or rectangular.  In a room with parallel walls, sound bounces straight from one wall across the room to the other and back and forth almost infinitely, creating an ugly ping-pong-like delay.

Fabrics, folds, and irregular shapes about the space also help to diffuse sound and reduce reverberation.  The best space in the house is your bedroom closet.  Keep the clothes hanging inside; they’ll absorb sound better than almost anything you can buy in a store.  Open the doors at an acute angle, and drape tons of thick blankets and comforters over the doors with tons of jagged folds.  The most important place to deaden sound is actually right behind the singer’s head.  Sound bouncing off of the wall behind the singer is the stuff that’s directed straight into the front of the mic.  The next most important area to deaden is the wall right behind the back side of the mic.

Get your closet set up with the mic, pop filter, and shockmount (pictured above).  Angle the mic in some weird way so that the area behind and in front of it are both well-deadened.  Place the pop filter somewhere between three and six inches from the front of the microphone and adjust the stand to a height that’s appropriate for your singer.  Placing the mic slightly high can result in a more nasal sound, while placing it lower can give you a deeper and throatier tone.

This is about the time when it would be helpful to add the vocalist.  It’s good to keep some water in your studio to keep the singer hydrated.  They like to lube up with stuff like warm tea with honey.  No milk products; they gunk up the throat and the vocal cords.  (This is the case with most singers.  One of the singers with whom I work most frequently, however, favors drinking milk and bingeing on ice cream before his sessions.  Hey, everybody’s body is different!)  Other factors that affect singers are time of day and weather conditions, so keep these in mind as well.

Now give your singer a shot of bourbon to open up his/her sinuses and toss that diva in the closet!  Pray to all applicable gods that your singer has memorized the lyrics to your song, because music stands can cause terrible reflections and paper rustling in your vocal track sounds even worse.

Play the rhythm tracks to your singer and make sure the volume level is appropriate and comfortable.  If possible, kill the click track--you probably won’t need it anymore by the time you’ve hit the vocal stage, and you definitely don’t want it to bleed from the singer’s headphones into your mix.

Make sure your vocalist is standing good and close to the mic so you don’t have to push the gain too hard on your preamp.  She should be able to get just a few inches away from the pop filter and stay there.  If the singer moves, you’re going to have weird timbral variations and increased room reverberation (nasties) that you won’t be able to fix later in the mixing process.

Get your vocalist singing with the track somewhere around the climax so you can get a good feel for the maximum volume you’ll be working with.  Set the gain on the preamp or interface so that you’re around 3 dB or so below clipping.  Always allow for a little extra leeway, because you know she’s ALWAYS going to sing louder during the actual take.  If the track does clip during a take, just finish out the take and don’t try to adjust the gain until it’s over.  Add a touch of reverb, even if the track is going to end up dry.  For some reason, vocalists just don’t want to perform without reverb!  It’s good, though, to record using the reverb and delay that you’re going to use for the final mix (if your CPU can afford the resources).  That way the singer can sing around the effects and react to the way they interact with her voice.

Tell your singer that you’re going to run through the song just to practice, warm up, and get the levels right.  Say you’re going to play the track, and have her sing along.  This is where I like to secretly hit the record button, just to see what happens.  Usually it won’t be a good take, but you can at least listen to how the vocal gets picked up in your DAW, and you’ll get a fully uninhibited performance from your vocalist.  Maybe some good blackmail material if you’re lucky.

Try to record three to five really perfect takes all the way through the song with a whole lot of energy and passion.  Make sure each part is perfect, because while audio editing and autotune can be really useful, nothing can make up for a well-performed take.  Once you have a couple of complete performances, you’ve got some choices from which you can “comp” a final vocal track for your song.

Again, it’s really important to make sure your singer stays in one place.  It’s easy to get sucked up in your computer and forget to look at the performer and check her location at the mic.  Periodically verify that the tone and volume of your vocal track haven’t changed throughout the recording process.  Sometimes we forget to do this until the mixing stage, when the vocalist has left the building and it’s too late to re-record.

Most importantly, be nice to your singer!  If you’re an instrumentalist and producer, it can be very easy to slip into the habit of harshly criticizing your vocalist when the performance isn’t exactly the way you envisioned it.  Yes, you need to coach your performer so you can improve the quality of your track, but use nice words and positive criticisms.  Instrumentalists can do a number of things to their instruments to change their tone or intonation; but when you lambaste a singer, you’re picking apart her voice--her body and her ear.  Don’t forget that most people are self-conscious about their voices, and they normally don’t even like to hear themselves recorded!

Alright, Quincy Jones, go record some stellar tracks, and when you’re finished, come back for part three: mixing your vocals!