10 simple things you can do to make your vocal sound great i'm going to talk about four of these
actually are like pre recording the vocals what you can do to get a good vocal recording and then
this there's six that are like after you record the vocals what can you do to make them sound
great first thing is get a pop filter this is what it looks like this is a road pop filter that comes
with the rode mics and here's a rode mic it's the nt1a that i use a lot of the times for vocals what
pop filters does what sorry what they do is they it's a screen that breaks up the hard consonants
mostly from p's like so you have to have this to break those hard consonants up if you don't have
a pop filter they'll go right into the mic and you could um peak and then the recording or that
at least that word of the recording can be ruined i have seen people record vocals like this where
the pop filter is kind of right up to the mic and you know because you want to get nice and close
and that's fine you can get up to the mic nice and close but it needs a bit of space for this screen
to break up that signal and that's what the pop filter is doing so first tip get a pop filter if
you don't have one number two is mic placement and dynamics with the mic when you're singing
so you should have the mic like level with your mouth and that's fine like the typical
way to have your mic set up and start singing most of the time that works fine
however it does it can matter sometimes where your mic is placed to get the right texture and
quality of the voice that you want coming through so if you want your uh your vocal performance to
be very intimate then get close with the mic and you you you can get right in there if you
want it to be if you want more of the room sound you know stand further back and you can shout
so use that dynamics with your mic because that's really going to matter of how the the quality of
the vocal will sound so where you have the mic set up like if it's just level this is going to
sound different than if it's like this this can sometimes get rid of those hard consonants coming
through too if you don't have a pop filter better getting a pop filter though if you have your mic
like this if you obviously if you have your mic turned around it's not going to work if you have
your mic on the side i don't know you're going to need to spend time with the microphone and also
rent different microphones every microphone sounds different too but the placement of the microphone
and the dynamics of how loud and how soft you want to sing matter with the distance that you
are between the microphone too number three in pre-production pre-recording kind of thing
is your room if you can treat your room great you can do some simple hacks this is the this
video is titled easy things right so try to just um if you have like some curtains
go put your microphone in front of the curtains and then sing your vocal takes that if you can
do that you know if your computer's near and that you can make that happen or you can rig up like
some pillows or like a blanket right in front of the mic first step is to like have the the soft
cushiony things that can absorb the sound put that in front of your microphone like or sorry behind
it because when you're singing that's the the sound waves are going to hit that first and then
bounce off maybe even hold the pillow a pillow if you can in front of you or take them against the
wall i've seen people get pretty creative with how they like sound proof their room curtains really
work well or if you have a walk-in closet go in there it will help in the long run to get a dry
recording if you can number four pre-recording technique is warm up your voice no one likes
warming up i hate warming up when everyone tells me to warm up i'm like no that's boring and it
sucks okay so if you don't want to warm up i would recommend warming up but i don't even do it either
so if you don't warm up then just do lots of takes consider like your first three or four takes
or maybe even five or six takes those warming up so you're not warming up like you're not in front
of the youtube video and you're actually just like using the first five or six takes to warm
up your voice and that's what i do because i don't necessarily like warming up so i just consider the
first five takes to actually get my voice warmed up and in the zone and then when i'm copying i
really only look at the latest takes three or four it takes because that's where my voice is really
warm you're gonna get into it so let's jump into logic and talk about the next uh six the first of
that six would be comping your vocals you're going to want to do a vocal whoa you're going to want to
do a vocal comp to get the best take you can do that a number of ways here's an audio track um
i'll just record my voice right now let's say this is our vocal i'm recording from this bar
here into this bar and i'm going to do another take here okay recording again singing singing
singing blah blah okay so now it's made a take folder so ideally do as many takes as you can kind
of like the last one do a lot and then comp your vocal so you're gonna want this one to take one
and this one and take two and then eventually you snap that up and you have a take you can
export that to a new take you can merge this you can flatten this
don't get too deep into copying the important thing is cropping and that is one way to do it
in logic another couple ways you can do is just adding tons of tracks downside of that is you're
gonna have uh if you have plug-ins on those tracks it's just gonna and if you're doing like 20 takes
that's 20 tracks that are running plug-ins that's going to run slow on your computer you could do
track alternatives is another way right-clicking in logic and then going to track header components
uh at the bottom there track alternatives and then you have a drop down here where you can
um have a new alternative and you can you can do it that way here recording our voice again
you know that okay see now we have a which is our comp we have b which is our take we can go again
now we have another take inside b we can go a new alternative and you see what i
mean you can have different comps in different alternatives alternatives is just saying like
another well it's another alternative recently i've been uh getting away from take folders i'm
just gonna delete this i've been setting up like one track so let's say like this is the
um actually we don't need that track anymore let's just take two new two new audio tracks so
let's say this is my lead and then i'll have like my plugins on the side i'll have charles clean
like all my my vocal chain here so this is like my lead vocal chain then i'll have a new track where
i will record the vocals and we can call it takes and i'll just sit there doing vocal takes sitting
or standing until i'm happy with that actual part and then i'll drag it down into the lead section
so for example i would start recording and i might have effects here and i might do system monitoring
depending on how i feel but i might just record in dry as well and you know record in here
recording recording then i'm like oh this part is really nice okay let's put that one down here and
actually like this part too put that one down here and i'd race and then i'd do it again eventually
over time you're gonna bring all the regions down here to the lead vocal track when you have one
thing if you want to re-record over the regions and you don't want logic to create a a take folder
for you you can change that in settings so if you go to settings and i believe it's under
yeah recording audio and if you have cycle on and you record over a region
you can create track alternatives if you want you can create tracks and mute
and yeah so you don't have to have it create take folders number six is to gain stage your vocal and
that just means like when you record especially if you're comping or your voice would be or is
it going to be placed differently on the mic so some words are going to be louder than others
you're going to sing some words quieter the whole the whole signal is going to be a bit like wobbly
so go through the vocal and set the make sure everything is more or less um sounds
like it as at the same level in a way that's good that's what a compressor does
and you should compress it anyways but if you do this it's going to help your compressor it's like
you're going to be a friend to your compressor and it's going to have to work less one way you
can do that is to like go through the vocal like this and you can cut a section let's say
and inside flex pitch you might be familiar with this
you can do a gain on every on the bottom left here uh so where were we here on this one
where's our cursor so let's say we wanted to bump the gain up here instead
we just use this gain and same thing like a click and drag up and you can see that signal increasing
so let's say we want just this word and then we don't have to do any cutting right we just go to
that exact signal and increase it the thing that's great about doing it this way is you can just you
can nail in on little syllables too of the words like this is one word but we're just going to
lower the gain at the end of this if we want or if we want to increase it right the alternative there
is we'd have to go up here and cut it and then sometimes when you cut it and increase the gain
in the region it sometimes isn't a perfect mold i guess you could say here it's just a little bit
cleaner and the next thing number seven is timing and timing is everything if your vocal is not
in time it's going to sound bad and very rarely you'll sing perfectly in time so you really want
to try to get things in the pocket and locked in and i go through my vocal as you can see i've done
it here and i've cut things up and moved words just by nudging them here and there making sure
everything aligns to the grid so for example this word here you know it could even be moved over if
i want to sing it right on the grid and you'll bump up the signal so you can really see things
and i can move this over nudge it over a bit now when you nudge things you're going to
crowd another region so you have to go back and fade that either by manually fading like
with your fade tool i have in my command here i can highlight those in command or you can
do automatic cross fades with the region here of on drag if i change this to drag that means like
if i drag into this one it's just going to create a crossfade for me so personal choice of what how
you how you want to work then you have to listen back and see if that crossfit works
make sure there's no popping and sometimes you might just not be able to get around it because
maybe another word starting right here and you can't fade it and it sounds bad so you have to
just revert to where it was and try to find a balance maybe zoom in more and really you know
get into it maybe you can find a fix it really makes a difference just nudging it here and there
making things really sound locked in this is what the pros do and this is something that you need to
do if you want to play at that level for example this word is needs to fall on here then i'd go
over and crossfade that and you go through your whole track making sure everything is on the grid
listening back does it is it in the pocket does it groove well you do want a bit of human in it as
well so there is a fine balance next thing number eight i believe area number eight number eight is
actually start adding effects i'm not going to go too deep on effects types of plugins you use but
the important things right you're going to want to do some type of shape eq'ing usually you want
to cut out some lows like this depending on how low or how high your voice is sometimes you know
in this region here you can do a dip because it usually sounds a bit muddy there and you
can also look in this frequency range between 1 and 6k there can be sometimes some annoying
frequencies here you're just shaping it a little bit not doing so much a multi-band compressor you
can add you can add the logic ones they're super they're super standard as well compress your vocal
and have that needle jump around negative five you can have it all the way to negative 10 if you want
depending on how crunchy you want your vocal to sound but i'll show you in this vocal here
though the truth has hit me hard i was just hoping that i would forget tooth is a cool plug-in it's
actually really great it kind of just sees the plugin it sees the frequencies that are crappy
and takes them out for you and yeah you do have to pay for it there's a free trial though you
can add another compressor on your vocal you should be adding de-essers too i skipped that
i'm just using a logic de-esser recap shape eq multi-band compression de-esser compressor another
eq another compressor de-esser valhalla reverb pitch correction or auto-tune more reverb more
reverb and delay think number nine to make your vocal sound great and something easy you can do
doubling the lead vocal ideally not the whole song but maybe in the most important song a piece
of the song so in the chorus and doubling it well not doubling it actually recording
three brush takes of the chorus so go take your chorus vocal so it's over here and i
haven't done this yet on this vocal but i'm going to be doing this oh i just hope you know that was
usually for the doubling thing you you don't need to get too overwhelmed because
they're going to be tucked back but then you would go over record and sing the exact same thing i
think it's great and a tip i got from charlie puth actually one of his videos i don't know him seeing
like normally the first one okay got that one and you're gonna put that one in the middle and then
two you're gonna have two more that you're going to pan to the sides and those ones you can sing
a bit softer still in the same tone the same note and key and octave i don't know but softer and so
you're going to be panning those to the side and that just helps support the vocal the two ones
on the side like hug the lead vocal and the one that's in the middle just is like right behind
the vocal because they all sound the same it kind of sounds like it's only one but it's bigger all
types of pop music do this if you don't want to go and sing your double again or seeing the lead
again the chorus lead you can do things like you can drag this whole thing down make a copy of it
and then use like a format shift or a pitch shifter something like the soundtoys altar
boy or even in logic pitch i think it's pitch shifter or vocal transformer maybe
yeah it's a vocal transformer if you change the formant which is like the i don't know the texture
of the voice that should be enough to make it sound different it's not good to just double it
and not change it at all because that's going to create phasing issues issues which is a good segue
into the next one which is number 10 add harmonies this is gonna make your vocal sound much better
and you don't have to be like the dixie chicks or like crosby stills nash you really want octave
harmonies for example this pitch lower and higher you can do it higher one too that's going to sound
really chipmunky though this one oh i just hope you know so you might want to not do that ideally
you can sing it so you can sing that high and it doesn't have to be full voice seeing those high
harmonies in like a baby whisper voice so it's like not like that i'll show you in this part here
that was me before just that texture like baby soft voice doubling those and recording two of
those and panning them is gonna give it a really cool feel it's up to you on on the quality or
not the quality but the style of harmony you want i've also seen other artists do and i have
another video on that where it's like a phineas doing four tracks of the same tone and then
hard panning two to the left and right and then bringing some right like kind of in the middle
so if these are the four tracks here like some of them are like this and then the other two
are like that so you're kind of using the full image of the stereo field and that's going to
create a huge width for you go have fun with your vocals now i hope they can sound better
after you watch this video feel free to subscribe and as always i hope to see you in the next video