Forum for Vocal Recording Techniques???

[ofajen]

Yep. To jive with what both of you guys said, despite the fun little stories you hear like John Lennon singing lying on his back or Tom Waits singing through a megaphone, great vocals are almost always gotten by sticking a quality vocalist in a quality room in front of a quality mic and short signal chain. Put a pop filter up and you're good to go.

There's not often a whole lot left. Yeah there's good old plate chambers for reverb, Motown compression, some overused effects like AM-radio-sound bandpassing, things like that. But get past those half-dozen or so standbys and there's not a whole lot left to talk about.

Watch just about any video of FamousArtistX recording their vocals, and you'll see then standing in a quality-teated sound room front of a pop filter, in front of an expensive Neumann or AT. That's the secret formula.

G.

That's a pretty good summary.

I will also mention that, a few days ago, I posted the user guide for the Josephson 700 series of mikes. Those mikes offer separate outputs for each capsule, so pattern (and/or stereo image) decisions can be deferred until mix time. I don't have the $5400 for his mono mike or the $7200 for the stereo mike, but I have started to experiment with tracking to both an omni mike and a figure 8 mike placed as close together as possible, to experiment with the options that method opens up: not just selecting the pattern after the fact, but processing the signals separately before mixing them to create new sounds. I'm not yet sure whether any of that will be musically useful or not, but it does offer some interesting options, like using the low end from a figure 8 mike with the high end of an omni mike.

Cheers,

Otto

 

[Ford Van]

I totally agree. Some years ago, I used to track to my 3Ms using only the preamps on my old Mackie 1604. Never had any complaints, as long as I had good sounds reaching the right mike for the job. I would crank the recorder gain up and use a reference level down around -6 dBu, to make sure the unbalanced preamp outs weren't pushed too hard, so I got best sound I could out of the Mackie.

Now I have groovy things like the GR preamp, the MixPre and the old Altec tube preamps, which are all great tools. But the difference in the preamp alone isn't that much compared to the mike and to the sound going into it.

If I had to choose, I'd keep the Studio Traps and the mikes and lose the expensive preamps and not lose any sleep. The only nuisance would be losing the portability of the MixPre, but that's a different question.

Cheers,

Otto

It is refreshing to read somebody that shares this opinion! I stated the "mic over preamp makes a bigger difference" a couple years ago here (under an "unknown" username... ) and was flamed all to hell by the "experts" like chessrock and Blue Bear.

But, I stick to my guns on this one. The difference between middle of the road quality preamps and high dollar preamps is subtle, and what happens BEFORE that preamp has a FAR bigger impact on the sound quality!