Recording My Punk Band

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whiskeyfoot

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Ok, just wanted to see what some of you experienced people would do in my situation.
I'm recording my band in a loft style room...i have one open area for
the drums, etc....
i only have one seperate room up there, and plan to put my guitarists
amp in the room to isolate it.
i am going to run my bass direct using my sansamp DI.
Now here's the tricky part:
Our singer/guitarist for some reason cant cut the vocals after
the fact, we had a session before, and his vocals turn out
lifeless and boring compared to when we're actually playing the songs.
So the scratch vocal turned out better than the studio vocal as
far as performance and enthusiasm goes....though the quality
of the recording sucked (bleed..etc)
So as of now, i want to experiment with recording the scratch vocal
as is, so i obviously want it to turn out as good as possible.
Short of building an isolation booth, what other things, tips, tricks are out
there to make this work out?
By the way, i'm using a preamp in combination with an SM58 for the vocal.
we're not really PUNK punk...more like Social Distortion kind of punk, and he's not screaming his head off, but he can get loud here and there, and that mic has sounded the best overall so far.
 
What about letting him play his guitar while he sings, and monitor his guitar but not record it?
 
I've had lots of people who needed their guitar to sing. Usually I just let them play an unplugged guitar for the vocal take. You could also have him double the guitar (play the same thing as when he recorded with you guys) as he does the vocal track. This also gives you a FAT guitar sound (pan the tracks away from each other in the mix) . If you plan on doing alot of recording as a band he should learn to phsych himself up for a vocal take. Recording is NOT the same as playing live. There are playing techniques that need to be learned.
 
yeah, i'd definately agree...my bro should work on his studio perfomances for sure...i think as time goes on he'll get better, but for now we just need to get something out there! hopefully...hahaa
 
When I recorded my cd I had similar issues... I had a hard time playing guitar while not singing and I couldn't play to a click track. I made a few bad attempts at it and insisted on giving up on it. After getting a few songs done, I came to understand just how much I was tying up the engineer's hands by not tracking individually and really made an effort to do it the way he wanted. It took a few songs, many retakes, and many punch-ins, before I got comfortable with but the end result was so much better... SO MUCH BETTER!

So just because I couldn't do it, that didn't mean I couldn't learn to do it.

Admittedly, it wasn't fun to learn ...I recall being incredibly frustrated until I became comfortable with it.
 
What about just putting up a couple of mattresses around the area where the vocal mic is to cut out bleed. True, it won't cut all of it but maybe enough to sound good.

???
 
when i originally tried this out, i simply put him around a corner into a kitchen (literally..lol) and had him sing away from the drums and it cut out so much bleed it was quite remarkable...but the new area we're recording in doesn't have any areas to hide, its basically one big room with a stair well in the middle and 2X4 banasters around the well opening...and then there is a door leading to a single small room that i plan to use for the guitar amp.
the mattress idea might work good...come to think of it, i have 2 king size i'm throwing away here pretty soon...lol
 
matresses wont do anything to reduce bleed, there not heavy or stiff enough to work.
Im actually fighting with that problem myself with a session we all tracked live, im having the singer come round tommorow an re-record some of the vocals, its just not worth playing with the bleed.
Is there anyway you can give him some headphones and 100m of cable and get him out of there?:p
Just read singer/guitarist... try and get him to overdub or live with the bleed.
 
i'm really hoping he'll find it in his blood to be able to pull off doing vocal tracks on their own. we did a session at a freinds studio (full on multi-room setup) and though the guy doing the recording had no idea what he was doing, i listened to the track and somehow my singer pulled off some awesome vocal tracks...so he CAN do it...just need to figure out how to coax it out of him..haha beer definately wont work this time!:p
 
One thing I did on a recent project was to pump the recorded tracks to the bands PA system and they sang without headphones. I used a Beta 58 or something and there wasn't much bleed at all, as long as you experiment with placement. I was actually very suprised. It worked out very well for the band.
 
Along those same lines, Paul Rodgers of Free/Bad Company/etc is said to have recorded quite a few of his vocals in the control booth during playback. Also heard that he used a 57 (handheld at times, I believe) as well. I think placement could make a big difference.

For some reason I think I remember reading somewhere that when Rodgers did his singing over the mix, they used a mono mix--I assume to help with bleed or phasing issues, don't know--I really can't remember, nor do I have the expertise to explain that. Maybe someone else can...
 
Since you are doing punk I will add my two cents on bleed. You can actually use it creatively in more aggressive forms of music. Since you obviously aren't doing soft rock you might consider recording a track or two with monitor bleed and doubling it with a clean track. Then the bleed track you can add a truckload of compression and/or play tricks with a noise gate for special effects. See my song "Lessons In Trust" for an example of this - http://www.somnium7.com/
...the chant during the chorus.

I know you really just want to make a recording but sometimes a little creativity in the studio can introduce some interesting sounds...
 
i'm not really sure i understand the method you're talking about....as far as 'monitor bleed'...do u mean to have my singer us a PA in the room somehow? sorry to sound stupid...hahaa
good tunes by the way...
 
i just did a session last weekend where the singer was a step a way from his guitar amp and 3 steps away from the drums. we used his vocal and we used his vocal mic as a type of room mic.

You'd be surprised how close you actually should be to the drums so they don't sound so wack in the vocal mic. they can sound surprising clean.

this works. you have to pay attention to the bleed but you can get good stuff going on. the drum verb on a vocal mic can be fantastic. the vocal verb on a drum overhead can be great as well. take your time with set up is all.

Good luck.
 
whiskeyfoot said:
i'm not really sure i understand the method you're talking about....as far as 'monitor bleed'...do u mean to have my singer us a PA in the room somehow? sorry to sound stupid...hahaa
good tunes by the way...
Click to expand...

Thanks whiskeyfoot. You don't sound stupid. The only stupid question is the one you don't ask.
No don't use a PA on the vocals. What I was saying is if during the recording of your vocal track the singer's mic starts picking up bleed from other instruments you can try to do something useful with it if you cannot get rid of it.
I was giving an example of one possible way to get a special effect out of a recording with bleed in it.

Take whatever precautions you can against this happening. If that isn't possible though then you have to get creative and find a way to make your track work with the mix regardless.
 
Somnium7 said:
Thanks whiskeyfoot. You don't sound stupid. The only stupid question is the one you don't ask.
No don't use a PA on the vocals. What I was saying is if during the recording of your vocal track the singer's mic starts picking up bleed from other instruments you can try to do something useful with it if you cannot get rid of it.
I was giving an example of one possible way to get a special effect out of a recording with bleed in it.

Take whatever precautions you can against this happening. If that isn't possible though then you have to get creative and find a way to make your track work with the mix regardless.
Click to expand...

I was actually talking about feeding the monitoring tracks back to a PA, but you may not be talking to me.

I did some pre-production tracks for a punk band a week or so ago, live off the floor, all members in the same room. For how bad the performance was (they were mad hangover) it turned out nice and raw and beefy. Myself and the band actually like it. But back to the original problem, the vocals were the biggest problem.

Good luck!
 
i'm digging the idea of picking up bleed in the vocal mic, i mean we are on the punk side of things, so a little imperfection might help perfect what we're looking for! hahaa. We're a pretty tight band when it comes down to brass tacks, so retakes and overdubs aren't really going to be needed for the most part, we'll nail it in one take most of the time, i just want to capture the best possible sound during that time...and setting the mic up in the room to capture the vocal track, while using the bleed to our advantage is probably going to work better than setting my stubborn brother up to overdub vocals after the fact. :D
 
whiskeyfoot said:
i'm digging the idea of picking up bleed in the vocal mic, i mean we are on the punk side of things, so a little imperfection might help perfect what we're looking for! hahaa. We're a pretty tight band when it comes down to brass tacks, so retakes and overdubs aren't really going to be needed for the most part, we'll nail it in one take most of the time, i just want to capture the best possible sound during that time...and setting the mic up in the room to capture the vocal track, while using the bleed to our advantage is probably going to work better than setting my stubborn brother up to overdub vocals after the fact. :D
Click to expand...

Sounds like a good plan to me. If it goes horibly wrong you can try and convince your singer after the fact. Vocal bleed into the instruments shouldn't be a problem, it will be intrument bleed into the vocal tracks that may be an issue.

Post the tracks in the mp3 section when you start mixing!

Good luck.
 
yes, i will definately post an mp3 after this weekend, sunday can't get here any quicker!
 
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