recording screaming & loud vocals

  • Thread starter Thread starter skweeks
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skweeks

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i'm going to be recording my friends hardcore band on my tascam 424 mkIII... the vocals are a lot of screaming, and the singer is LOUD... i don't have access to any mixer besides the one built into the 4track and no seperate mic pre's either... i'm worried about blowing something out or hurting the machine in any way... the 4track doesn't have a pad button either... should i just have the master and channel faders really low and have the trim control very low? i guess that would stop most problems, but there are some parts of some songs where there are actual singing parts which would propose a problem since it would barely pick up anything at all, for those parts should i just be quick with getting the fader or trim up during that part and then boost it again on mixdown?

thanks,
steve
 
In my opinion, i would say for the screaming part purchase a cheap compressor like the nanoverb so your levels stay even. I dont think the vocals would do anything to your mic because vocals are not as loud as say miking an amp, so dont worry about the mic. Same goes for the recorder, as long as you have the levels right you will be fine.
Do separate takes for the loud part and the singing part so you can level out each one accordingly. All this may not be the right idea, but it could be a start.

by the way did you go to East or West?
 
If you have a cheap PA at your disposal you can run the singer through the PA and mic the PA cabinet... That way you can turn the gain way up on the PA and get some nasty distortion. I've recorded vocals this way and they came out pretty cool.
You can then experiment with mic placement on the PA cabinet and get the volume level right.
 
I WAS going to suggest that you stick a sock in the singers mouth, but after some thought, decided "Why waste a perfectly good sock?" :)

Don't worry about blowing anything up. I am sure that the singer cannot sing louder than 125dB SPL, so he will be under the SPL maximum that most mics have.

As far as you equipment is concerned, it will handle whatever it can handle. Meaning, if you can get a microphone to input to the sucker then it will only let the mic get so loud, then it will just distort. For what you are recording there this may sound cool. Hitting the input of the recording machine really hard has no detrimental effects to the unit itself, just the sound it reproduces. So go ahead and kill it man!!!

Hey, if you want to play around with something, try running the vocal mic through a distortion box. Have the singer turn on the distortion during the loud parts, and when he actually sings, bypass the box. I am assuming that you are just using 1/4" unbalanced inputs anyway, so you are using a matching transformer on the mic to convert it to 1/4 from XLR. In this case, putting a distortion box in between will cause nothing the be much worse for the wear. You are already limiting bandwidth and dynamics with the transformer, so running the signal through a box is not going to hurt anything, and you might just get a really cool sound.

Good luck.

Ed
 
Thanks guys, figured out what I needed to know and got some extra ideas to try... to respond to a couple of messages at once...

i am going to east currently...
i'll look into the compressor, i have a friend with a bunch of rack gear for guitar and i'll see what else...
i actually was using the XLR, the t424mkIII has XLR inputs on channels 1-4 so i figured it'd probably be best signal wise, but i'm gunna try out the distortion pedal anyway so we'll see

thanks again guys
 
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