recording vocals

[steve l]

any tips to make vocals sound good on cool edit pro - i use sm58 through my powerhouse amp, & add reverb - compression or anything really . Thanx

[rats]

I'm not very experienced with cool edit pro but I've found the compression features aren't too great. It seems like manually handling spikes on a case by case basis works better. If you have an external compressor use it while recording!

The preset reverbs aren't the best from what I've played with. You'd be best off manually creating your own delay effects. UNless you're into the reverb thing enough to tweak it in the magic ways of voodoo lust.

EQ. get it sounding as good as you can without any effects, then proceed with caution. What kind of music are you doing?

[Eurythmic]

With reverb, less is usually more.

[MarkST]

Hi there,

I am probably misunderstanding you, are you adding reverb etc between the amp and CEP?
If so, try recording dry spending time getting the best possible sound into CEP. If you spend time making the recording area as good as possible (sound proofing, sound damping etc.) and use a pop filter on the mic and get the singing bit (phrasing, expression ) as good as you can, you will find you don't need, or want, to do many changes in CEP. When you do make changes listen to the vocal in terms of the whole song, where does it fit with the other instruments? Then you can decide if you need some subtle (as stated less is more) reverb and compression. You may find that adjusting the other instruments is what you need to give the vocals the space they need.

Good luck

Mark

[JuSumPilgrim]

Some tips to make vocals sound good:

Dont use cool edits compression- as a regular compressor, its not going to work well. Get Waves' ren comps 1 and 2 and their L1. Cool edit's compression is best used as a multi comp. For instance Ive found this to be a very effective multi setting on vocas ---bandwith bet 8k and 12k (or 8k -24k), 1.5:1 ratio, -20dB threshold, expand 15:1@-92dB, attack @ 5ms, release bet 75 -100 ms. That setting yanks out the air on most vocals a little more aggressively than EQ but also smoother and more consistent than EQs do. The sm58 has almost no air naturally and if you want something like a real condenser sound then compressing the top end will help significantly.

Cool edits reverb is among the best around IMO, if used properly. For many applications you will get more mileage out of the basic reverb. Its clean and effective and sounds great at most settings. The full reverb is trickier and almost always requires extensive tweaking. Play around with the early reflections settings, room size, dimension (width/depth), Ive gotten great drum sounds with this.
There are no universal settings for reverb. It depends on your room, the genre of music, the voice etc. I would just caution to watch the gain levels as the full reverb generally reduces the gain by 3dB or so.

The chorus is also very solid but Ive never used any of the presets or anything close to the presets.
Heres a nice smooth medium thick layer on a stereo vocal: thickness @ 6 voices, max delay @ 3 ms, delay rate @2.2Hz, spread bet 50-70ms, a wide field of 80% or so, 90% dry, wet out @20%. Use that with a slight reverb and medium compression and depending on your mic and pre and EQ ability, you got a nice big up front vocal.

As a general rule the presets arent very usable. Use them as a starting point but move away from them and develop your own. Also on most of the para EQ the Q settings are too wide to be effective. Narrow the Q's to 1.3 or 1.45, add bandwiths at 350, 500, 3.5k, 4.5k. Mackie's one of the worst EQs out there so I dont know the wisdom in calling the settings "Mackie mid boost at 2500." Cool edit is an amazing tool, you just have to get off the
main road so to speak.

[schnoops]

Hi dudes,
last year I recorded a full lenght album using CEP only, and I had enornous troubles compressing the drum tracks, and the voice tracks.

Voice is among the most subtle sound you can have, two people never have the exact same voice, and I think the voice is the direct emanation of your personality. that's why you should put a certain attention in getting it right, that's why singing mics are soooo expensive, like the cardioids ones for instance, they cost somthng like 2000 AUS$, because they're perfect receptors in the 1hz-40khz band.
a trick I found out during recording sessions is:
record white noise through your mic in CEP without using any external compressors or eq. then display the spectrum of the track in the frequency spectrum view. this gives you the frequency response of your mic. then define and EQ that compensates the peaks and valleys of the frequency diagram, so that after EQing this white noise track you get a perfect linear frequency response, that is the output is the same for every frequence. this gives you a sort of "virtually perfect" micrphone, with a uniform frequency response.
then record the voice through an analog compressor in CEP, EQ it with the magical filter.at this point you've got the right material to start from.

One last important thing: if you tweak the voice using fft filters, use, but don't abuse, and use the same filter over all your songs(apart from distortion effects, echoes...). I found out that using different voice fft filters on different songs sounded like different people were singing on each song. I couldn't even recognize my voice on certain over tweaked tracks.
It's good to have a certain uniformity of the voice texture over your record,, that's what gives it personality.

try using a slight stereo leslie effect on the voice, it spreads it accross the stereo spectrum, and makes it less statically located.

also try to dub certain tracks, and do a disjoint frequency filtering using band pass filters, so that each dubbed track doesn't spread over the same frequencies, and spread those tracks in the stereo field.

one last thing: before recording , test your room with white noise, to get its resonance frequency, and try reducing the artefact by piling up cardboard boxes of different sizes around your room in a random manner, try putting mattresses on the windows, floor, large plain walls, wich are all sources of reflections.
what I did is :fill up my toilets with mattresses and pillows, and put a bag full of polystyren balls in front of my guitar amp.
this helped a lot in getting a neutral recording environment

cheers

[JuSumPilgrim]

Originally posted by schnoops

a trick I found out during recording sessions is:
record white noise through your mic in CEP without using any external compressors or eq. then display the spectrum of the track in the frequency spectrum view. this gives you the frequency response of your mic. then define and EQ that compensates the peaks and valleys of the frequency diagram, so that after EQing this white noise track you get a perfect linear frequency response, that is the output is the same for every frequence. this gives you a sort of "virtually perfect" micrphone, with a uniform frequency response.
[/B]

If you look at the frequency response of any good mic- AT 4050, Neumann TLM-103, NTK, NT1000, C1, etc. You will not find a flat even frequency response. Youll find bumps and and scooped out frequeies all across the spectrum. Thats partly what accounts for each mics individual character.

[camn]

Doubling.

Lemme say it enough times...

Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.Doubling.
Doubling.


thats it. fug effects. Effects are for sissies.

xoxo

[dobro]

LOL @ camn

LOL @ camn

Jusum: did you read what Harvey Gerst had to say about mic manufacturers' stated frequency response graphs for each mic they make, and how they round it off and smooth it out to make it look pretty? The thread's up in the mic forum, and it's a humongous monster with loads of stuff in it.

Also, Jusum, you seem to be more familiar with Cool's compressor than anyone, here or at Syntrillium, so I'll ask you my pet question: do you know why the compressor has two attack settings and two release settings, and more importantly, how to make it work? I'm really encouraged by what I've read in this thread to use Cool's reverb (I'm just getting into reverb with this album), but if I can't figure out the compression feature, I'm gonna ante up for some other software.

[JuSumPilgrim]

Dobro:


I ran through that thread briefly. Harvey's posts are great..they always have more than you can register in one sitting.

As far as the level detecor -its the input section with an attack and release added. Which I take to mean that the track so to speak is compressed bet the attack and release settings of the input. So if you set this at 10ms and 400ms release, the compressr will start working in that range. After its starts working- the ratios apply themselves to the thresholds on the gain side, the typical part of the compressor and the output is your compressed track

The added attack/release allows greater focus in compressing and I believe greater transparency. (Im not 100% sure about that but it seems logical to me that if you narrow the focus of the compressor- the compression will be less apparent on the track overall and that may be why it sounds like shite at high gain settings). The major difficulty Ive had in getting the cool edit compressor to work as a regular compressor is in the traditional tab part of the compressor. The 6 options for setting ratios and thresholds. It starts sounding screwy if you set more than 2. Its not impossible to get normal sounds out of it, it just requires alot of careful tweaking and thats probably when people say...screw this....and they stick with their straightforward comps.

The thing about cool edits philosophy that I dig and what will keep it popular in the long run is: when in doubt give more parameters. More parameters means more creative control and more possibilities which means greater usability in general. Not always, but more often than not. That said, the compressor used as a basic compressor without the bottom 3 ratio ratio/thresholds, without going for too much gain, will generally be smooth and very very transparent. But it wont be as fluid, easy to use and as warm sounding as waves' ren comps which more usabe for basic everyday compression.

As far as setting the input (level detector) go for wide settings like 3ms -350. For most things, the wider the smoother. The narrower, the chunkier unless youre at low gain settings.