About vocals

Eleboon

New Member
Joined
Sep 18, 2011
Location
Madrid!
So recently im doing an interesting liquid dnb track, and was thinking about adding vocals, well was thinking about implementing my girlfriends voice. Thing is , everything is in tone and in key, but the volume is a bit low and not so clear. Of course I could raise the volume up but, if I do that, I can hear the "bzz" background sound of the mic recording.

My question is, how do I aproach vocal recording? . Ive never ever recorded vocals " properly" .Ive always just recorded claps, my cello , single words etc... . Im completly lost when it comes to compressing and eqing it also :s

Oh and im using a RODE m3 (http://www.thomann.de/es/rode_m3.htm)
 
I found quite heavy compression, say 20:1, evens out a vocal quite nicely, but that won't help much with noise I guess.
 
eq out the fizz and pump up the volume - simples?


edit - you can use audacity to get a noise profile and use that to remove fizz.

or use the technique where you bump up the gain on the EQ for a small range then - move it across the spectrum till you find the buzziest bit -then simply cut that out.
 
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going to disagree with subprime, gentle compression is best imo, its important to keep the transients nice and natural if the words arnt very clear

some things you can do, double up your vocal channels a few times, give them hard/mid panning and high pass them at diffrent levels, maybe 150hz centre, 300hz mid-stereo, 500-1khz far stereo

you might want to give your central channel a boost around 6-9khz as well, this will help define ur T and S sounds a bit better

If you have allot of hiss, then you could try sum dolby-noise reduction, theres plugins about for that

if you use ableton, you might like this little rack http://johnmiszt.com/ableton/free-vocal-expander-1b/ it doubles up and expands ur channels as i described above, but it wont remove noise, has reverb which may help to blur it a bit


If you cant get into a studio, then 4 single Mattresses standing on their ends can help reduce noise around the mic, build a little booth with them, check all your cables, make sure they are good quality so they dont pic up extra noise, check your soundcard is only recording audio input, not noise from ur computer (get a good quality one), change the mic, SM58 is a fairly standard one that shouldnt give you to many problems
 
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nothing wrong with using noise reduction, reactor grits got quite the boner for it in fact. juanita juarez once said to use 4 or 5 reverbs to get more colorful tone, which could work, theoretically.
 
Especially with a high noisevolume on the track you should be careful with compression.

Adobe Audition has got a very very nice Noice Reduction tool where you just need like 5-10 seconds of your noise recorded. I would recommend this one for your situation.
 
Going to try the "closet" as the booth. Also I think my pc, makes a hell lot of noise, amd 3 cores stock fan, sounds like an airplane! .
Any good noise reductiong vsts?
Pd. Im using ableton live
 
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