Vocal Recording Made Easy – Tips

To finish my little introduction to vocal production, here is a couple of tips.

1. First a cool little tip on how to add monitor reverb when recording vocals. Since we blend the music coming from the computer directly with the voice in the interface, the vocal will sound dry in the headphones. Some singers prefer to monitor with reverb added to their voice while singing. Here is how you can do that. Normally you mute the recording voice in the audio recording program, because we are alreay monitoring direct from the interface to avoid latency. If we instead unmute the recording voice but turn the fader all the way down, we can add a send in PRE fader mode to a reverb plugin. The reverb will be present but not the dry sound. Since reverb typically has a predelay anyway is does not matter that we will hear the reverb with a small latency from going through the converters and plugins.

2. Adding special effects. It can be cool to add a speaker effect to the vocals in certain parts of the song, like the bridge or in a tag after the chorus. If you insert a guitar amp simulater plugin on the vocal track you will get that effect. Only problem is that it might be too much effect. To give me more control, I copy the vocal onto two seperate tracks and just place the guitar amp plugin into one of them. Then I can blend as much or little I want of the effect into the vocal. You can do the same trick with a compressor set to compress heavy. By adding a bit of that compressed vocal with the uncompressed vocal you can get a very cool sound. You should be aware that not all audio programs compensate for the latency the plugin adds. If that’s the case you will have to compensate manually.

3. Delay in certain parts. Often in songs you will hear a long panning delay in spaces between the vocal, typical in the end of the chorus or verse. You can automate a send to the delay to get it sounding only in these certain places. But it can be differcult to get it precise, so instead of automation, I simply move the vocal parts that need the delay onto another track that sends to the delay. Just remember to also copy any EQ and compression you are using.

That’s it for the introduction to vocal recording. Next time I will start my introduction to mixing, my favorite part of music production.

See you soon…
Johnny Jam

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Tagged as: audio, Delay, Effect, Monitoring, Record producer, vocal recording