Recording vocals at home: how to step up your game.

Okay we need to talk about how your vocal recordings absolutely stink. Nothing to do with your voice: you and I both know you’ve got totally bostin' vocals. Sadly the recordings are just not up to scratch. You’ve tried all of the editing and mixing techniques possible but it’s all just coming out a bit GCSE Music (see High School Music Diploma for Americans?). Not to fear, there are plenty of things you can do to make your home recorded vocals sound clean, crisp and clear. Not all of the methods listed in this article are cost free but a large amount of them can be implemented without spending a penny.

Pre-Set Up

There are some things you can do before you even begin setting up your recording gear. Just because you're not LeAnn Rimes levels of successful doesn’t mean you shouldn’t approach your vocals in a professional manner.

Warm Up

Not only does warming up your pipes stop you from doing any damage to your voice, it can also make hitting those high notes easier and even improve the quality of your tone. It might not be the most punk-rock thing to do but going through some simple exercises makes a huge difference. Roughly an hour before you record try doing some of the following:

Warm up your mouth, face and tongue: massage your jaw, roll your tongue around the front of your mouth ten times, stick your tongue out and open your mouth as far as it will go.
Do some tongue twisters: say "red lorry, yellow lorry" quickly and over-enunciated.
Start by gentle warming up your voice with some humming and sirening. Sirening is making an ‘ng’ sound at the back of your throat and going through the entirety of your vocal range in a sliding siren sound.
Do some vocal scales: either play them yourself on a keyboard or piano or find someone online to follow. I’ve used Jeff Rolka’s warm ups before: https://www.youtube.com/c/JeffRolka Rolka has a huge variety of warm ups for many different voice types and will guide you through your full range.

Have a plan of attack

Going into your vocal recording totally cold can cause some problems; you might end up coming up with some interesting improvisations but you could get frustrated with what’s coming out of your mouth and end up with an underwhelming performance. While some genres or songs might suit a totally raw performance it is generally good to have a plan.

I suggest having a think about a few things before opening your mouth:

Dynamics: how quiet or loud various moments in the vocal performance are going to be. Changing your dynamics across a whole performance can make a huge difference in telling a story. If a vocal is on the same level across a whole track it can sometimes become stale.
Tone: depending on your lyrics and mood of the track you might want to change the tone of your vocal performance. It might sound obvious and patronising to say but just singing with a smile on your face massively alters the tone of your voice. You might want to try a more breathy, soft tone for the verses and open up to a brassy, full tone for the chorus. Play around with what your voice can do!
Breathing: it’s always good to know when you need to take breaths, if you’ve got a melody or section that doesn’t have many gaps for breath it’s good to know when you can take that much needed breath. You can always split a section into two and do it in two takes - thanks digital technology!
Recording order: If you’ve got any really high notes to sing or even some screaming to do you might want to save that until then end. Any vocals that may take a strain on your voice, it might just be a really high energy moment, might be worth sung at the end of a session. Totally up to you though! You might want to get those harder moments out of the way but just think about what your voice is capable of.

Set-Up

Room acoustics

If you’ve ever been to a recording studio you’ll see the walls tend to be covered in weird, foam panels that sort of look like dark-grey McCoys crisps under a microscope. Those panels are in place to absorb any sound that bounces around the room that you’re recording in. You want to eradicate as much of this natural sound reverberation as possible to create a totally “dead” room. Any natural echo that a room has is likely to be heard in your recording (this might be welcomed by some though).

While those panels are easy to get your hands on (Amazon stock them as well as plenty of dedicated retailers) it would be costly to cover a whole room in them. If you follow the simple principle of covering any surfaces that could reflect sound waves then you could create a dead recording space for free. Put up mattresses, duvets, blankets, pillows and towels around the room, heck, build a fort if you’ve got the skills. Anything you can do to dampen those natural room sounds the better.

Microphone choice

When picking the right microphone for you the price is obviously a big dea0... but it isn’t the only deciding factor. While the more expensive mics have an objectively better “quality” they might not have the right sound for you. This is a roundabout way of saying that you can get a more than good enough recorded vocal from a wide variety of microphones; no matter how much you spend you’re always likely going to have to tweak the mix of it substantially before arriving at the sound and tone you like.

With that in mind I’m going to have a look at the more affordable end of the microphones out there. If you want a more detailed look at the various microphones on the market then keep your eyes peeled for a future blog post! Oh and some of these mics will require an interface to connect to your computer/laptop while some will have direct USB connection so make sure to check before buying!

Behringer C-1 - very cheap and good for demo recordings - £29.00
https://tinyurl.com/emvzaprz

Samson C01U Pro - very decent USB microphone for the price - £67.99
https://tinyurl.com/tjxzxnbm

AKG P120 - a great starter microphone, a jack of all trades but master of none - £71.19
https://tinyurl.com/482tv33y

Audio-Technica AT2020 - quality exceeding the price tag - A.P.O 7/10/21 - £81.78
https://tinyurl.com/tm9ym5dm

Shure SM57-LC - good for recording crisp vocals and acoustic instruments - £84.00
https://tinyurl.com/2pkv8ms7

Like I said - I’ll be making a future post going into more detail on microphones but in the meantime just be sure to read customer reviews and have the sort of sound you want in mind.

Make sure all the connections are secure.

Sometimes you might have a nasty, high-frequency hiss or buzz when you listen back to your vocal recording. While that could be occurring for a few reasons, one of the easiest ways of eliminating it can be to just reconnect all of your cables; an XLR cable can easily come slightly loose. If you find the problem persists it might be worth turning everything off and on again or even swapping your cables out for new ones.

Keep the gain lowwwww.

It’s much better to do your first recordings on a low input gain as a test. The worst thing you could do is record an absolutely banging take to then find out that it’s peaked all over the place and your recording sounds like Julian Casablancas screaming in hell. You can always keep making small adjustments in your test recordings and turn up the gain in post if it’s still too quiet. Going in the opposite direction simply doesn’t work.

Time to record!

The time has come to lay down those sweet vox. Now it’s time to nail exactly how you’re going to record and your approach to the microphone.

Distance from the microphone

Something I’ve learned over the years, much to my detriment, is that it is very much possible to be too close or too far away from the microphone. On numerous occasions I’ve sent vocals over to a producer to be told that it sounds garbage because I was too far away from the microphone on all of my takes. Bummer. By changing your distance from the microphone you are not just altering your volume; the way the microphone picks up frequencies also massively changes. For example, in that particular occasion that I just mentioned my voice ended up sounding very muddy and it was difficult to get a nice sounding brightness out of it.

The key thing to do is to pick a distance and stick to it. The standard that I now work to is that you should be the distance between your little finger to your thumb away from your mic. Just do the hang ten/hang loose/shaka sign with your hand and put your mouth on your thumb and your little finger on the mic. The next step is to sing the loudest note you’ll sing in the song and adjust the input gain accordingly so it’s not peaking on that note.

You can also invest in a pop filter to reduce the ‘popping’ sensation that occurs when you speak or sing plosive sounds e.g. the ‘p’ in please or the ‘b’ in baby. It’s a worthwhile investment and will also stop you from getting too close to the microphone.

Hearing the track

This one’s pretty straightforward and self-explanatory but is definitely important to get right. Yes, you’re going to want to be able to hear the track, the metronome and the key of the song but you do not want it to be too loud. Staying in time is vital, so make sure you can hear the drums and bass or just the metronome if you don’t have anything else. You’ll also need to hear any instrumentation so you can stay in tune and not deviate from the key; if you don’t have any of that then just record some keyboard notes to sing to. However a common mistake is having the track so loud that you can hear it coming through your headphones on the microphone. The last thing you want is the editor to find a constant click of the metronome underneath your voice - these interferences can make the mixing process difficult. The key is to find a happy medium between the track being audible in your ears but not too loud to be picked up. This is another one to iron out in your test recordings.

Record multiple takes

Recording multiple takes has a couple of benefits. Firstly, and most obviously, laying down the same thing a few times allows you to pick the best take and even pick specific moments from each one that you like the most. Rumour has it that George Michael pretty much ended up recording each individual word on the track ‘Faith’. In every take you’ll probably do something slightly different so it’s worth having options when picking your final take. It also means that you have back up takes if you find something wrong.

Secondly, and this one is more for the mixing process, you can really fill out a vocal sound by having doubles. A lot of that shimmering, chorus sound from the 70s and 80s was achieved by simply doubling up the lead vocal and layering them on top of each other. If you’re recording backing vocals you could also try recording them twice and panning them on the left and right, again helping to fill out the arrangement by adding a sense of stereo space.

Improvise

Once you’ve laid down your main vocals it’s always good to go back to it and record some extra improvisations. Whether that be some extra background ad-libs or some more energetic deliveries of lead lines. You could layer yourself singing the final chorus an octave higher on top of yourself, you could fill a gap in the arrangement with a Whitney Houston-esque run or you could add some excitement to your hip-hop track with some shouts or word repetition. Just play the track again and hit record - there’s no pressure because you can just delete that weird thing you just did if need be!

Well there you go - a healthy selection of tips, tricks and life-hacks to take your vocal recordings from amateur to slightly less amateur. I kid of course. I genuinely think that if you give all of these ideas a try that you might be surprised by the difference it makes.

There’s a good chance that upon reading this you’re thinking “Joe I’ve been doing these things for YEARS and you sound DULL.” Well I apologise. There’s always someone out there who’s new to the game and here at Aux we want to provide something for creators at every level of their journey. If you have any further suggestions for improving the vocal recording process then hit me up on our social channels found below.