My singing vocals don't sound good. Advice?

I don't know the Tascam headphones although I have heard they are decent, but I think $40 is a bit on the low side. I have three sets, none are high priced. AKG K240s are about $65, Sony 7506s are in the $90-100 range, as are the Sennheiser HD280s. I've also used the HD200s for tracking recently and they sounded decent. I didn't have a chance to compare them with the headphones I already have.

Of the three, the 240s sound the most natural to me, the 7506s are very revealing with a stronger upper midrange. I find the HD280s to be lacking in upper mids and top compared to the others, but they are nice for tracking.

As for the rack, that's all nice to have a rack full of fancy boxes if you've got plenty of cash, but I have ZERO external equipment for my recording setup. Reaper has quite a few options for compressors, a nice reverb and all the EQ I need. If you're struggling to spend more than $40 on headphones, there's no reason to even considering buying a rack full of external processors.

Regarding what type of clip you should post, just pull the vocal track from something you feel is boxy sounding and give us a 30 second clip. If you can include a couple of hand claps, that will let use hear the room nicely. Attach a 320K mp3.
 
LazerBeakShiek said:
Aside from headphones, there is more gear to help your vocal production. In the rack you need a nice preamp. A Compressor. An EQ. A Reverb box to blend in with your voice. Not to swim in reverb, but short ambient thickening.

Stretching the vocal with two compressors is researchable. One Compressor set slow, then another one set fast. It stretches the attack curve.

Here is an oldie but goodie..The Aphex Aural Exciter..It adds harmonics with your singing. Make sure you get the one that is for +4 line level. The -10 only one is sucks. The better ones are older. Though the last ones, like the Aphex 250 type III has controllable settings for a tweakable knee like curve. Fantastic. Not a BBE maximizer. That sucks too. The Aural Exciter is much better.
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I think I need to offer going nearly an almost opposite direction here -rather straight clean and stripped down voc sample, at least initially to hear and sus out the issue(s).
May I ask are you using hardware kit like this in tracking (vocals in particular)? It looks like what one would expect to be 'mix down kit(?
Thanks
 
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The aural exciters can be used anywhere during the process. The 250III is great for live applications. The harmonics it adds really blend in and help become your voice. That was a piece of gear I came across that I thought was worth a mention.


You want the cleanest best recording into the DAW..play with it all ya want later..

If someone had an issue with the sound of their voice , and somebody says get 'headphones' , I would think they were joking. A headphone set doesnt effect the sound of your voice..but its ok, I added some other things to check out, in case the issue was on all playback devices..
 
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LazerBeakShiek said:
Aphex is currently an incredible bargain. The Made in the USA rack units up till the mid 90's are high quality..I dont know anything about the newer stuff.


Someone recording rock music, wants to sound like the radio, those are the tools to do it. Get the best source you can into it, then bump it up.
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If so, that's kind of a downer. I don't want to have to get an engineering degree to just sing pleasantly on recordings. I can't imagine this tech was around for all the excellent sounding vocal recordings prior to 1965. It seems like overkill and kind of moving too far toward fake, but this is also an uninformed opinion.
 
Aphex exciters left me cold. We had them with similar units in the college studio and there was a button called big bottom on one of them. They worked for some types of music that lacked 'sparkle' but I hated them. They are like the limiters, compressors and other tricks - processing afterwards. A good mic that suits your voice and can work in your room is all you need. But they go after the mic has done it's job. Until we hear your voice, we can't really help that much? We need to hear the voice, in the room. ten seconds would do.
 
rob aylestone said:
A good mic that suits your voice and can work in your room is all you need....
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LazerBeakShiek said:
...and headphones.
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You've missed the point Beaky. The OP has a Blue Spark condenser, an SM57 and an I5 mic, a Motu M2. That's at least reasonable gear, and he's got a seriously cheapo set of headphones, and he's trying to judge the tone of his voice. If I were doing my mixes on a clock radio speaker, would you tell me to add a bunch of compressors, reverbs and exciters to make it sound good? Not likely... The system is simply not going to reproduce things properly. We might as well tell him to just bite the bullet and buy a U87.

Without some reasonably accurate monitoring setup, you're stuck. It would great if we could just tell the OP to buy a nice pair of Genelec monitors, but since he mentioned $40 as a target it basically throws out ANY half reasonable monitors. That's the reason for suggesting a few options of headphones. PLUS we asked for a quick vocal sample, so that we can listen and maybe give some guidance on where any issues come from.

There's always the possibility that the OP's just not used to the real sound of his/her voice. When you lose the natural resonances that you get from your head, people often say "do I sound like that?"
 
Senn HD206 are $25-30 and the best value I found in headphones.
Chelonian said:
I'm going to get something posted here soon, thanks. Learning a lot on this thread, so thanks for all the info!
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Awesome, everyone here just wants to listen and help. Was this your only way to monitor the track? or was this issue on other playback devices?
 
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Aside from headphones, there is more gear to help your vocal production. In the rack you need a nice preamp. A Compressor. An EQ. A Reverb box to blend in with your voice. Not to swim in reverb, but short ambient thickening.
mobdro 2022
 
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TalismanRich said:
Regarding what type of clip you should post, just pull the vocal track from something you feel is boxy sounding and give us a 30 second clip. If you can include a couple of hand claps, that will let use hear the room nicely. Attach a 320K mp3.
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I know you and everyone wrote this all to me in late September, but such is the protraction of my way! Anyway, I am now attaching a ~30 second clip of (not ready for time) singing in the room I have to record in. The first section, before the several hand claps, is close to the mic and then after the claps I step back about a foot or so.

At this point, I am not sure if this is boxy sounding or not...I've lost perspective on whether this sounds OK in terms of the quality. I want the original sound, before any effects/EQ put on it, to sound as good as possible. So I could use other pairs of ears. It doesn't sound great to me, though, even if my singing were perfect. Sounds too much like a 1979 era handheld black tape recorder.

The microphone is a Blue Spark mic with the button ("Focus Control") in the out position, which is for "enhanced low end" apparently. This is recorded through a MOTU M2 and into a laptop via Audacity.

I could do other singing now that I have the time, so if this isn't a good enough representation, let me know and I can easily post other things now. (Lower voice, button in, etc.)
 

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Chelonian said:
I know you and everyone wrote this all to me in late September, but such is the protraction of my way! Anyway, I am now attaching a ~30 second clip of (not ready for time) singing in the room I have to record in. The first section, before the several hand claps, is close to the mic and then after the claps I step back about a foot or so.

At this point, I am not sure if this is boxy sounding or not...I've lost perspective on whether this sounds OK in terms of the quality. I want the original sound, before any effects/EQ put on it, to sound as good as possible. So I could use other pairs of ears. It doesn't sound great to me, though, even if my singing were perfect. Sounds too much like a 1979 era handheld black tape recorder.

The microphone is a Blue Spark mic with the button ("Focus Control") in the out position, which is for "enhanced low end" apparently. This is recorded through a MOTU M2 and into a laptop via Audacity.

I could do other singing now that I have the time, so if this isn't a good enough representation, let me know and I can easily post other things now. (Lower voice, button in, etc.)
Click to expand...
Everyone hates their own voice, learn to live with it.
 
Chelonian said:
I know you and everyone wrote this all to me in late September, but such is the protraction of my way! Anyway, I am now attaching a ~30 second clip of (not ready for time) singing in the room I have to record in. The first section, before the several hand claps, is close to the mic and then after the claps I step back about a foot or so.

At this point, I am not sure if this is boxy sounding or not...I've lost perspective on whether this sounds OK in terms of the quality. I want the original sound, before any effects/EQ put on it, to sound as good as possible. So I could use other pairs of ears. It doesn't sound great to me, though, even if my singing were perfect. Sounds too much like a 1979 era handheld black tape recorder.

The microphone is a Blue Spark mic with the button ("Focus Control") in the out position, which is for "enhanced low end" apparently. This is recorded through a MOTU M2 and into a laptop via Audacity.

I could do other singing now that I have the time, so if this isn't a good enough representation, let me know and I can easily post other things now. (Lower voice, button in, etc.)
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I listened to your sample. Well done for posting it.

Thoughts:

1 Just about everyone hates the sound of their own voice. That's just something you have to live with and get used to.

2 However, I hear nothing wrong with your voice itself, and nor with the raw recording of it.

3 But, I can hear the sound of the room influencing it and giving it a kind of boxy sound. You could try a larger room.

4 And it is very dry. So if you are going to sing along to a highly processed karaoke track, it will sound a bit weird. That's when you will need to consider further processing, such as adding erverb.
 
After you convert to freeze/stem. brickwall limit everything. The brickwall effect has a compression type that will allow it to sound similar on all play back devices.

Take the stem and ram it into the limiter with gain. Push your voice against the brickwall.

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Gecko is right on point here. Listening on headphones, you can really hear the hollow sound of the room, especially in the second part of the take. Your close in vocal is much better sounding, although I can hear some of the room in the sample.

If you look at the waveforms of the hand claps, you can see the short but prominent echos. A desirable reverb will have a much longer, but even decay. This gives you two choices, either use a much bigger room with treatment to even out the reflections, or a very dry, damped signal and introducing reverb to the track. The room will have a significant effect on the sound, compare the reverberation of a theater to that of a gymnasium. Both big, but tremendous difference in the sound.

The second approach is much easier to achieve, especially if you are working in a set home environment. You can dampen sound fairly easily by hanging things like moving blankets. For simple vocals like you are doing, you aren't going to have to worry about bass traps, etc. You don't have much in the low registers. Most of your vocal energy is from about 180Hz to 3kHz. Plus, stay close to the mic. Most of my vocals are withing about 6 inches of the mic with a pop filter.

Here is your first section with three reverbs, the first is an impulse response of a plate reverb, the second is a IR of a Vienna hall with a longer decay, the third is an IR of a medium tiled room with a much shorter decay. All are at the same level. You should be able to hear how it affects your voice. Note that this is on top of the short slap echo you already have, so it's not ideal. You try to match the reverberation to the rest of the track you are singing with.

 
BTW, regarding the cheap Tascam 200 headphones that were mentioned earlier in this thread: I ordered a pair just to see what they sounded like. They are awful, all bass, nothing that you could use to judge a mix. I have cheap Sony earbuds that sound 100 times better. Don't even consider them.
 
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