Recording vocals for a hardcore/metal album NEED HELP

S

scorpionmcnuggt

New member
NO ONE has been able to help with this yet. We are recording a metal album. To get an idea of what the vocals sound like listen to hatebreed, bury your dead, or the haunted. The problem I am having is everyone has tutorials on how to get good vocal sounds, but it's all for pop, vocal, bon jovi, pretty stuff. I just want to know how others who may have done this have handled them. We are running the mic through a digitech vocal 300, and an Ultra-Voice. I have everything sounding good, BUT the vocals will not sit in the music the way they should. No matter what the volume mix, panning, EQ, they still refuse to fit in. They don't have a contained sound, it's more like a voice over in a Godzilla movie. I hope there is someone out there who knows what the deal is.
 
I think the advice anyone here will give you is compression, EQ, and especially reverb. Not the splashy Bon Jovi kind, a subtle roomy one to push the voice a little back in the mix. When you're mixing, start with a very low volume in mono and hear if it fits right.
 
Some thoughts.

Look for info on the artists , producers , and engineers who worked on the releases you mentioned. There is likely to be some interview where they talk about their vocal recording approach.

You write that "We are running the mic through a digitech vocal 300, and an Ultra-Voice". I take it you are recording through these unit and applying some processing that gets recorded. Have you try recording dry , just mic and preamp?

A picture is worth a thousand words (or something to that effect) , so try uploading a rough mix of a part of one song (one verse maybe) where the problem is most evident to you.
 
If I were you, I would first try compressing and verbing it the ways mentioned.

If that doesnt work the way you want, maybe try sidechaning the vocals with some of the instruments that it is competing with.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
I think that we could eventually replace you with a bot that analyzes a thread and automatically links one of your old posts that answers everyone's questions. :D
Click to expand...
Works for me!...as long as it doesn't link to the many posts where I was wrong :o .

In fairness, though, I linked to that thread for two reasons: 1) It's not an "old" thread; when I linked to it it was (on my page) only three or four positions down the page from this thread, and B) there are a lot of good answers in that thread besides just mine. This is one of those questions for which there can be many different possible answers.

G.
 
I would say bypass that digitech thing and do some compression post EQ as stated. I play in metal bands, too, and that usually helps. If you want to add some distortion to the vocal track later, don't use that digitech thing, use a decent guitar pre-amp with a line in/out. Works much better, IMO. You might re-compress after adding the distortion, or sidechain it to only distort the low end or something. Good LUck!
 
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