20 Vocal Production Tips

Achieving the perfect vocal recording is a complex business. Hollin Jones explainshow to get the best out of your recording and your kit…

1: Keep It DryIt’s a good idea to always record your vocals dry unless you have a specific reason todo otherwise. While the character of a guitar sound might come from the amp andpedals, in 99 per cent of cases you’ll be better served by recording a completely clean,dry vocal and then adding effects afterwards. There are several reasons for this.

Recording reverb or delay as part of the take can make comping and other edits muchharder because you introduce effect tails to the signal which sound odd when cut andjoined together. And although you may end up EQ’ing a lot of the frequencies in a vocalup or down, it’s best to start with everything present then cut frequencies surgically,rather than starting with a top-heavy take and having to try to add mid and low endback in afterwards.

2: Create Space PocketsWherever you record vocals, be it in a spare room at home or in a studio, it’s crucial tocreate a contained space for your vocal performance. Most people won’t be recordingin an optimum space so there can be a lot of reflections from walls and other surfacesthat will colour your recording, and these can be time consuming to remove afterwardsusing EQ and other tools.

To avoid all of that, a great technique is to use a portable vocal isolation booth such assE’s Space or a similar product. These create a pocket of dead space for your recordingwhich leads to a much cleaner take and also has the added benefit of helping theperformer focus on the task at hand, blocking out the view of the room. They can alsobe used for recording guitars and other sounds, so they’re not just for vocals.

3: Consider Mic EmulationIt’s common sense that you should use the best mic you can lay your hands on forvocal recording, but not everyone will have a top-end model to call on. The best micscost thousands but this is beyond the scope of most people’s budgets. A good solutionis to get a solid all-round performer that doesn’t cost the earth: perhaps a Rode NT1 orNT2 or one of sE’s many condenser mics or something similar, that has a fairly clean,neutral sound.

After recording you can then try using mic modelling to emulate the characteristics ofdifferent mic models without incurring quite so much cost. Waves makes a range of micmodeling plug-ins, and there’s Antares’ Mic Mod EFX, Universal Audio’s Ocean Wayplugin and more. You probably won’t get exactly the same sound as using a £5000 micbut with some care and attention you can get a great effect.

4: Aim for DSP Powered Monitor EffectsOne of the best ways to help a vocalist give a more confident and natural performanceis to provide them with some reverb in their headphones. The contrast with trying tosing completely dry can be quite startling when you actually do it. However it’s notalways quite as easy as it sounds. The problem with using insert reverb for this task isthat you will almost always incur at least a small amount of latency as the vocal isprocessed live through your DAW and sent back to the singer’s headphones.

This can be incredibly off-putting for the vocalist, and the fiddling with audio buffer sizesto minimize it can be a hassle too. Some audio interfaces – typically medium or largersized ones – have onboard DSP-powered effects that can be applied to the monitoredsignal and provide reverb in the headphones but not incur any latency along the way, asit’s processed inside the interface and not the computer.

If you record a lot of vocals this is an important consideration when you’re choosing aninterface.

5: De-ess with CareSibilance is an issue with any vocal recording and although it can be mitigated with apopshield it’s harder to block out than plosives. One solution is to use a de-esser plug-in after recording. These are specialised compressors that work on a very specificfrequency range to rein in the ‘s’ sounds in vocals – used correctly, they can be veryeffective at cleaning up your vocal track.

However it’s vital not to overuse them because they can quickly start to suck the lifeand energy out of a vocal. If you dial in too much de-essing or set your processor to pullback too wide a range of frequencies you’ll find that the vocal starts to sound artificialand overly restrained. The key is to find a happy medium of frequency, de-essing

amount and the aggressiveness of the attack and decay, and take out the harshest ofthe ‘s’ sounds without dulling the sound too much overall.

6: Record EverythingOne trick that some producers use is to record everything a singer does, sometimeswithout telling them it’s being captured. A good example is recording warm-up or testtakes, when a vocalist feels less pressured and more relaxed because they don’t thinkthis one is ‘it’ and may give a different kind of performance to the one they give whenthey think they are centre stage.

This doesn’t just apply to amateur vocalists, it has been known to work withprofessionals as well. Sometimes after the session is over you go back to the warm upsor the tests and find whole takes or parts of takes that work better than the ‘real’ ones,and then splice them in. Tracks and storage space are plentiful on modern systems sothere’s no reason not to do this.

7: Sweet Harmonies

Harmonies and backing vocals can add a lot to the overall fullness of a track and it’spossible to create these after the fact if you’re not able to do it on the same day.Obviously the ideal situation is to get your singer to perform as many of them aspossible at the time and then you have more to work with afterwards. But even if all youhave is a single lead vocal you still have options.

The simplest trick is to double or triple track the vocal and then mix, pan and EQ thecopied versions to enhance the main track. You can also process the duplicatesdifferently, perhaps adding chorus or unison, or other kinds of effects. Some DAWs letyou generate harmonies from existing tracks: Cubase is able to do this, and there areplug-ins that can help too. It’s also possible to pitch shift duplicated tracks to createharmonies, though this requires more care and effort since not every note will sitproperly with the original take.

8: Loop and CompWhen it comes to getting the perfect take it’s rare to find a singer who can do a wholesong perfectly in one go. That’s not a reflection on their talent, just that with modernproduction techniques there’s no reason to settle for anything less than total perfection.You can set up loops to record over different sections of a track and your performer canhave several goes at it without stopping, or indeed try variations as the track loops.

You can then use the comping tools that your DAW most probably has to find the besttakes or best parts of takes and splice them together – with care – to get the perfecttake. This may involve changing the levels of different takes if the singer has moved alittle in relation to the mic at different times. You can also overdub of course, punching asinger in only at the specific point they need to replace a line or word, then punchingthem out.

9: Gate Post-RecordingGating can be a useful tool in the producer’s arsenal but it should be used carefully.Although it might be tempting to use a noise gate during recording, it’s not often a goodidea. Gates work by cutting off the signal – closing – when the signal falls beneath aspecified threshold. They open again when the signal rises above that threshold, withaccompanying attack and release settings to govern how quickly they open and shut.

The problem with this is that since a live vocal performance is an organic thing, withyour vocalist moving around a little and varying their volume without you necessarilyrealising, having a preset gate can result in words or parts of lines being completelymissed if the thresholds that have been set don’t respond to the actual performance.

A closed gate lets absolutely nothing through. A much better idea is to recordeverything, including any stray sounds or breaths between vocal lines, and then eitherapply the gate as an insert so you can tweak it after the recording, or physically cut thesections of silence out from the timeline

10: Pan Backing VocalsYour lead vocal should always be front and centre, but you can get much more creativewith your harmonies, backing vocals or hip hop ad libs. Think about placing themcreatively, maybe using panning to send them a little off to the left or right. This makesthe track sound much fuller and it also ensures that they complement rather thancompete with the lead vocal in the centre.

It’s quite rare to hard pan vocal sounds as this can sound a little odd especially onheadphones, but with things such as hip hop ad libs it’s common to send them off to 45degrees left or right. To get even more creative, consider automating their pan settingsso perhaps one backing line appears off to the left, and the next line off to the right, andso on.

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