live & studio vocals

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ok, ok...

some of you told me (and I somehow found it out myself too) that recording vocals you should back away from the mic at least 6 inches.
i did so and will do in the future - it really helps a lot to make the vocals sound better.

but hey: what about singing live? "eating" the mic seems to be standard.
what do those sound-engineers do?
I know that these 6 inches of air between your mouth and the mic do some natural low and high cut - but I tried around with EQ and... naaa ... it didn't get that good.

how would you treat those vocals?
 
maybe i'm just a bit dumb sometimes - but not this time. ;-)

you can use dynamic ones for recording too (as I do). eating that dynamic mic and leaving the recorded part as it is or even tweak the eq a bit sounds like shit - whereas live recordings don't.

the fact that distance (or better the air in this room) makes some frequency cuts doesn't depend on which mic you use.

i'm sure you would agree that a vocalist sounds way different singing directly in your ear than singing two yards further away. and that's not much to do with reverb.
 
Dynamic mics are more sensitive to close sources, and when you're playing live you want (almost) as much "signal" from the singer as you can get. That way you don't have to gain the mic so much and thereby decrease the chance of feedback.

It might also be so that when you record, you do so in a good sounding room, and actually want to have some of that into the mic. When you play live, you usually add some reverb, or just let the hall do the reverb for you.

Hope this helped.
 
Good points I'm sure, but this is a good opportunity to point out that rules (especially in music and recording) are meant to be broken. I recently read an interview with Terry Date about the recording of the last Deftones album (which he produced), which sounds pretty damned good to me. It was recorded mostly live with everybody jamming in the same room seperated by foam barriers. He used SM57's for guitar, had cranked-up wedge monitors sitting in front of everybody, and the singer used a hand-held SM58, handled in the typical live "eat the mic" fashion. He cupped his hands around the windscreen, dropped it on the floor, the whole bit, and look how that turned out. Terry claimed they didn't touch it up much or re-record, except for removing some of the more disruptive noise (like when the mic was dropped).
 
hmmmmmmm...

so how would you treat live vocals sung in the "eat the mic" style?
just a low cut and a bit more reverb or heavy eq-ing?

i mean on all live-records I got (even on non-professional ones) the vocals don't sound really worse than on studio-records.

i remember when i was a bit younger playing at the talent-show of my school. my singer ate that mic and... uh... it sounded dull. :-)
 
If you don't "eat" a SM58 it sounds thin, it's designed for close miking. Mind you I get a singer to eat an AKG414!
cheers
john
 
Diragor

You know where you saw that interview? I would like to read it. Thanks!
 
It all depends,

close miked studio recordings sound different from say 1 foot away. You can tell when a singer moves right up to the mic when he is singing softly.

I saw a guy sing right into a c414 the other day, and it sounded awesome. He must have either had the 150 hz pass going or recorded in omni, cos the bass would have been overwhelming otherwise.
 
Yeah put in the highpass but stay in cardiod. Also use the pad.
cheers
john
 
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