Should you practice singing with your recording setup?

  • Thread starter Thread starter dchalo
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dchalo

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For some reason, I find it harder to stay in tune with headphones on and through my interface than I do when I'm just playing guitar. What gives?
 
A lot of professional singers have this issue also which is one of the reasons they make headphones with only one earpiece. Usually it can help if you get a proper level of your voice in the phones. You can also pan all to one side and wear the phones on one ear with the other earpiece on your head to block any bleed. The proper headphone mix is really best though.
 
dchalo said:
For some reason, I find it harder to stay in tune with headphones on and through my interface than I do when I'm just playing guitar. What gives?
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Keep practising with this. It will be of benefit to whichever way you choose for real. The more difficult, the greater the benefit. That is the beauty of practice scenarios.

Practise different ways -- headphones loud, headphones soft, no headphones, from memory (to hone phrasing), etc. etc. They will all help strengthen the method you finally prefer for actual production.
 
If you have a good headphone mix and you still have trouble, it's most likely because you don't recognize the sound of your voice in the phones. People have the same problem with monitors sometimes.

You have to adjust your expectation of what your voice sounds like, because what it sounds like naturally when you sing, is not what it sounds like to anyone else.

A little reverb in the headphones help to.
 
I agree that you have to learn to listen for the sound of your voice in the headphones and learn to adjust that voice, not the one you're hearing in your head. I'm still working on that!

Slight tangent: I had a friend over and we were just trying to get a vocal track down for a song he was hoping to do at an open mic - he's not done this before - and he kept saying he couldn't hear himself. On the set of headphones I had on, it seemed like that was all I could hear! Finally I had to say, let's just try and record. By the second take, he was saying the vocal was too loud in the headphones, and I hadn't changed anything! His brain had finally connected that noise in the headphones with what he was doing :)
 
Gtoboy said:
A lot of professional singers have this issue also which is one of the reasons they make headphones with only one earpiece. Usually it can help if you get a proper level of your voice in the phones. You can also pan all to one side and wear the phones on one ear with the other earpiece on your head to block any bleed. The proper headphone mix is really best though.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I do when I'm practicing my singing, especially outdoors. Though, in my opinion, this does not excuse properly training and hearing your voice only.
 
I've had similar to Keith's story happen to me. I was a drummer that would with a click and backing tracks, so I wore headphones. The singer was across the room facing me, with two EV 15" floor monitors from the 80's (The ones Bruce Dickenson always had his foot on) being feed by a 500 watt crown amp.

I could clearly hear the vocals through my headphones with the click track, bass, keyboards and guitar blasting and over my drums. As I said, she was 20 feet away and the wedges were pointing away from me. Singer couldn't hear herself. She never figured out that all that sound that was keeping her from hearing herself was her voice. (her voice was the only thing in the wedges)
 
Have you tried having the headphones on one ear only? Or try it with drums and one other instrument, or bringing the volume down.
 
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