recording a capella

karambos2

karambos2

New member
I'm recording an a capella outfit at the moment.

For example, at the moment I've been recording 5 singers with two mics. Later, I'll do it properly (i.e. one singer per track) but at the moment it's two mics: a Neumann TLM103 and an AKG SolidTube. The boys (bass, contrabass and tenor) mostly through the Nuemann and the girls (alto and soprano) mostly through the SolidTube. I say "mostly" because obviously there's some leakage.

So when it comes to creating the final mix I've got two tracks, each with compression at a ration of 6:1 (or thereabouts), each with a limiter, each with some reverb.

I'm fairly sure that has helped matters. However, I've also done the following and I'm not sure if it's a good idea:
I rolled off the lows at approx 80Hz for the boys and 100Hz for the girls
I rolled off the highs at 15kHz for both.
Finally, I added a really small amount of chorus to give it some umpf

Are there any "standard" tricks that people could recommend that should be applied in any case to the vocals? What do the pros do?
Kind of "Oh, everyone knows you have to apply some...."- type of thing.

Thanks for any advice
 
yeah i agree....6:1 seems like quite a lot. Especially for an acapella ensemble. 4:1 is probably the highest I'd set it at.
 
Thankyou. Yes, I will try reducing the compression and not band passing the highs.

I forgot to say that I'd experimented with three rough areas of the frequency spectrum:
I boosted ~200-300 Hz for some "rumble"
I reduced ~3000Hz for, well, because it sounded good
I boosted ~5000 Hz for presence
I reduced at ~7000 again, because it sounded good
I boosted at 10-15,000 for top-end

But with the same singers, it sounded good on some songs and bad on others. Strange. They are not professional singers but they have been together for a number of years and have done over 30 gigs in various lineups.

The mics I have are:
Neumann TLM103
AKG SOlidTube
Sennheiser 421
Shure SM57
Beyerdynamic Opus99 (kick drum mic)

I also panned, not heavy, but enough to be noticed. On my sequencer (Logic) it works from -64 to +64. I panned at somewhere between 25-33.
 
I would say you hit it on the head when you said you EQ'ed because it sounded good. That's really the point. There is no "supposed to", really.
Even automatically twisting the lo-cut is suspect. Many bass singers go below 80hz.
The only thing I've found is try to avoid excessive boost. I'm not as sure with software, but hardware eq generally is more favorable to cuts rather than boosting, and boosting eats up headroom. If I find myself boosting more than a couple of bands by more than 6 db, I usually try to replicate my curve by lowering the amount of freq. boost and increasing the depth of my cuts. Or adjust my mic placement to accent those frequencies. This keeps the bulk of the signal further from the noise floor, and you put on average a stronger signal to tape. Add to that some judicious compression and you get even better signal.

And it's pretty rare that the eq settings will stay the same all the way through a project, even with experienced singers. Their voices change from song to song to match the material. One of the fun parts of mixing is the chance to bring the best out of every performance, and in the studio it's nice cause you can do things like eq each song differently.

And- there is nothing wrong with the way you are recording. The sound can be awesome. The mix is easy to do by having people get closer or farther away from the mics. It's a classic bluegrass and folk music recording technique. Close micing five singers is also going to bring up it's own issues in terms of bleed and phase issues rising from five open mics in close proximity to each other. I ran into this at a live gig with an a capella group- they hated being far apart because they couldn't blend well enough, even with monitors, and being close resulted in a lot of comb filtering with individual mics. 1 A/T 4033, everyone's happy.
 
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