Help with "boxy" vocal track

  • Thread starter Thread starter warble
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warble

warble

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Hey all,

I recently recorded three vox tracks using SM58's on each. I'd have preferred to use condensers, but only had one available and all three wanted to record at the same time. To make things a "little" worse, the monitoring through headphones while tracking thing didn't work out either - which means I had to have a little of the instrument tracks coming through a monitor in the room the vocals were recorded in.

For the most part, the tracks turned out surprisingly good with the exception of a "boxy" or "singing into a glass jar" mid-range problem with one of the lead vox tracks. It's only on a very small part of the lead, and really only in that one part of the entire track. I've been tweaking it with EQ but can't seem to center in on at least trying to dimish this sound - even slightly. Is there anything I can do via EQ or some other method to just reduce it? I'm using a gate of each of the vox tracks, so that helps with cutting the bleed when the vocalists weren't singing - just have this little problem I'm hoping to cut down a little.

Any ideas? Or should I just be happy that I got (for the most part) useable tracks? :)
 
What probably happened is the singer(s) turned away from the mic for a moment. Usually, they'll do this if they don't know their lyrics well and they're looking down at their lyrics on a music stand / cheat sheet. So what happens is the mic pickes the vocalist up off-axis, and picks up more of the room, which I'm guessing isn't very well-treated if it's sounding boxy.

It can't really be fixed, but it can be prevented. When you hear it happen, stop the singer and explain to him/her the importance of singing right up on the mic, and how looking away even for a brief moment can ruin an otherwise good vocal track.

If you happen to be working with someone who has a habbit of doing this often, then you might consider using a mic that's really strong off-axis, like an Electrovoice RE-20, and treat your room so that any room ambience you pick up isn't going to be all nasty and boxy-sounding.

Oh, and one other thing I just thought of ... if you were tracking all three vocalists simultaneously, it's possible that what you were hearing was a phase issue with one or both of the other mics. You can solve this by gating / silencing the other mics while the lead vocal track is going. Assuming you've got three separate tracks, this should be simple.
 
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