Keep in mind I'm just an amateur, but...
yes, presence does involve souding like it's close.
This is what I think people are doing to get that:
compression- sometimes they send it through many stages of compression to get it so the volumes of each note are pretty even, but the multiple stages make it harder to tell that it's being compressed. With rock music especially, compression is necessary on vocals. And I'm almost convinced that people use more than they admit to. Before I knew anything about producing, I didn't realize that this was why the vocals sounded so in-my-face. Now I realize that on some albums I have, the vocals must be massively compressed. And to give you another piece of evidence for why compression is almost necessary in getting someting to sound close: I've had two very musically talented people tell me my recorded drums sound too far away. One said there was too much reverb on them. Well there is none! Every drum is individually close miked in the deadest room on this side of the mississippi (I promise). And all they're really hearing is that I haven't yet put the drums through compression yet(don't worry I'm planning on it). Also, I haven't done any equalizing and the bass is overpowering the highs on most of the drums (this is something else they night be hearing) which brings me to the next thing...
high frequencies- this is the most important part of a vocal sounding present. Hear it for yourself, put on any rock album and listen to how sibilant their voices how (how unnaturally loud their s's and t's are). These are high frequencies. So is that hyped "air" making their voices sound so lifelike. For more proof of this look at the frequency response charts of a few mikes people say are great for vocals. Some I have on hand now are for the Rode NT1 and the C1. From the charts I have, it appears that the C1 is +5 db all the way from 4-13 khz and the NT1 has a big peak at 11 khz. And then to top it off, I've heard some quite well known producers talk about how they often put vocals through the Aural Exciter (If you don't know what that is you should read about it, but it basically creates additional high overtones from a signal by distorting the high frequencies already present). This is another little box that most producers won't admit to using. People could bash me for this, but: I almost think there's some sort of conspiracy that prevents famous producers from admitting how much compression they use or how much unnatural brightness you need in many of the instruments, or how much bass they remove from everything. Every time I read an interview with someone I'm like "Stop telling me that you get your trademark sound by making the singer sit in a comfortable chair and by using scented candles and either tell me that it's a secret or let me know some of the stuff that signal's going through!"
did I get off topic?
(hope some of it was helpful)
