I'm Nuno Fernandes, I'm an engineer and a producer and today we're going to
talk about vocals. To me vocals are the core of a song, people listen to songs
because of what they make them feel and usually that's the vocal.
Producing your vocal session is a little bit like being a therapist, you have to be attentive of
their mood, their energy level, sometimes singers are very perfectionist and
they'll want to keep doing a line over and over, so you have to be able to tell
them no, that you've got it and that you should move on to something else.
The available energy to sing in a session is limited and maybe you can get
two hours of really good singing from a singer in a day, you can't have them in
the booth singing for an hour straight. You have to make them take breaks if
they don't want you, and you have to manage their mood also if this song is
about being angry and they're in the super good mood and not really transmitting
the emotion of the song, you'll have to make them angry
and that might be that they'll be angry at you
but if you get the performance at the end, that's all it matters
I'm sure you'll be friends in the end
The main thing I think you have to make sure that
the vocalist is comfortable and feels at ease with you and the room and the microphone
have a nice mood lighting going whatever makes them feel at ease
so that they can perform. You don't need to spend thousands of pounds renting a
studio to record vocals, if you have a big enough room at home, a bedroom or whatever
make it look nice with a nice vibe make sure you control the
environment with one of these or a reflection filter.
You can have good, professional results at home.
A microphone is important but I don't feel it's the main thing
you just have to find something that sounds okay and
that they're comfortable singing into maybe you have a U47 in your mic cabinet
but if the singer is uncomfortable standing in front of that big metal
cylinder you're not going to get a great performance
But there are several different types of microphones and you'll get different sounds out of them
so we can use large diaphragm condenser microphones and usually they'll have a
really nice high-end and add a little bit of presence to vocal but they can be
too sensitive and if you're doing a heavy metal album or heavy rock thing
you might be better off using a dynamic microphone. So you'll have to try out a
couple of different microphones but just keep in mind you don't need to spend
thousands of pounds getting a microphone to get good results.
Most of the times you'll be using the microphone in a cardioid pattern and when you're in that
pattern microphones suffer from a proximity effect so you have to keep in
mind that if the singer goes closer to the microphone there'll be a boost in
low end frequencies. So it might be if you're recording a very
intimate, romantic vocal you might want the male singer to have a deeper sound
he might want him closer to the microphone but if you want a more
ethereal sound and the singer it tends to sing close to the microphone you
might have to do some EQ-ing or choose a different polar pattern.
So when tracking in you might be tempted to use some processing on the vocal.
I'll probably use a high-pass filter just to take low rumble because there's no
useful information down there and if I'm in a studio I might monitor
with compression but I won't print that to tape, but some people like printing the
compression to tape and committing to a sound while recording. If I do track with
compression, which happens occasionally, I just want to see the needle moving
slightly, never pass 3dB gain reduction
because EQ you can undo more or less after printing
compression you'll be in trouble if you compress too much.
Usually it's convenient that the singer can hear themselves
you have to set up a good cue mix. If they're not comfortable with
what they're hearing in their headphones, forget it you're not going to get a good
performance out of them. What usually singers will need to be
able to listen clearly is the harmony of the song and themselves so they can sing
in pitch correctly. Some singers like a lot of reverb, some hate reverb so that's
something you have to find out when you're tracking.
Baring in mind that too much reverb might hide some tuning problems
Regarding tuning software to enhance the performance
I feel that if you have a great performance with a great
emotional delivery of the lyric and a couple of things are out of tune
you can try to get them but most likely you won't have the same emotion to it
and if it's just a couple things just fix them. What I don't believe in is
having somebody just hack a vocal and then creating a performance
on Melodyne or something the performance needs to be there and
then you can slightly enhance it with tuning.
I hope this was helpful and it will help improve your productions
thanks for watching