Advice for recording lower register voice for someone producing his home demo CD.

[Greg Marquiss]

Good Afternoon,

I am wondering if anyone knows and is willing to share secrets of recording and / or mixing lower register voices. I have a deep voice and when I get down toward the bottom end of my range, especially with sustained notes, I have a rumbling gravelly quality to those tones. In some of the old Elvis Presley Gospel albums where he was backed by the Jordanaires, there were tracks in which their bass singer had a similar gravelly rumble to his voice, and on other tracks it was completely missing. Elvis' voice, even hitting his lowest notes was always clear as a bell.

The two condenser microphones I have are the AKG C-535 EB and a MXL 990s, plus a few assorted low end dynamic microphones that were thrown with packages I purchased. To keep signal levels up I have been close to the mic and trying to stay between -12 db and -3 db. If I get too far back from the mic as the voice trails down at the end of a word or phrase, the noise gate to suppress breath sounds will cut off trailing consonants making "win" out of "wind" for example.

I have both Cakewalk's Sonar Artist and Sound Forge 10, each with a decent sized collection of effects plug-ins, plus I have about a dozen plug-ins I purchased from Waves. There is probably about any plug-in I might need already available to me. I suspect there is some technique or processor to eliminate or reduce the low register gravelly rumble from recordings. I just don't know what it may be. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Thank you.

 

[keith.rogers]

Thos old big dynamics popular for radio are generally good for low bari-bass voices, like the Shure SM7b or EV RE20, but part of the problem is controlling the proximity effect with low voices. The mic (RE20) is one way to do that, but simply setting up a pop screen and experimenting with distances from the mics you have, and then using that (popscreen) to really keep your mic-mouth distance constant can help even out things a lot. You should find that the mic isn't as much of an impact - even a good (not stomped on, beer soaked) SM58 is going to work well, probably.

If you still have a lot of stuff trailing off, then, frankly, you need to pay more attention to your [mic] technique. Compressor plugins can help, but they can't create stuff that isn't there, so practice correcting what you hear in the recording that isn't right.

My $.02.

 

[Massive Master]

Side-note -- I'd probably back off on those levels a bit also. *Peaking* at around -12 or -10dBFS perhaps.

 

[ecc83]

"Noise gate"? Not commonly used 'going in'?

I think I would ditch that and control breath sounds some other way, pop shield, technique.

But then, Joe Cocker did ok!

Dave.

 

[mjbphotos]

Yup what they all^^^ said - back off to about 3-4 " off the mic, use a popshield and 'kiss' it. Record at -18dB to -12dB, and get rid of the noise gate. Learn to breathe quietly (practice!)

 

[Chili]

I'm kinda curious to hear this "low register gravelly rumble" you're talking about. Can you post a clip?

Backing off the mic is probably the first thing you should try. I'm thinking with a powerful voice, you might be rattling the foil or diaphragm. Which makes me wonder why you feel you need to be so close. That brings up gain staging in both the analog and digital realms. Record at lower levels like the others suggested. You can't expect commercial level of volume during the tracking and mixing stages. You mentioned you have a decent sized collection of plugs, are you using too many, perhaps? Don't use the noise gate. In fact, don't use anything on the way in. Mic>Preamp>interface>record raw. Then during mixdown, add whatever is needed.

To control the breath sounds, you don't need the noise gate, especially if it is cutting off words. Instead, you can manually edit the breaths out. After finishing all your takes, go through the timeline in Sonar and manually edit the space in between each line of the lyrics. There might be a special function to do that. (Highlight a section, click on Silence). For a typical 3 - 4 minute song, it doesn't take but a few minutes to edit the vocal takes and you will have much more control over the results than you would using the noise gate.