How To Create a Vocal Recording Template

[Music] five what's going on ladies and gentlemen this year boy five piece producer and engineer extraordinaire and today I'm checking in with another lesson as always this time focused on recording and I specifically wanted to talk about setting up templates for recording this is for all the artists at home that are recording themselves I'm gonna show you this in Pro Tools however what I'm showing you is gonna translate into other dogs where they're using logic Ableton Cubase etc so I want to dive into this maybe we could just jump into Pro Tools and I'll just show you how I would generally structure my template and then you can find some ways to apply this in your own setup or maybe even replicate exactly what I have going on here so I'm gonna jump in here and just get started so the first thing that we want to do in every setup is we need to have some tracks to record on right that's the most important thing now I'm gonna propose something that's a little bit different for most people a lot of places such as colleges and whatnot that teach you how to record they'll teach you to record on to playlists that's something that I used to do as well when I learned in college I was using playlists and Pro Tools all the time however I've learned afterwards after working with a lot of very talented people Grammy award-winning people that that's not actually the norm especially when it comes to hip-hop and pop music so we're gonna set up this template to mirror what those people do and just kind of get it going from there so the first thing that we need to do is set up a bunch of audio tracks I'm in Pro Tools as I mentioned so Pro Tools is a little bit more complicated than your average daf is usually way more steps this may be easier to do in your setup it just depends on what you're using so we're going to set up a couple of audio tracks we're gonna say 11 mono audio tracks and the reason why it's mono is because we're gonna be recording an individual microphone set on a human voice so I'm going to create that we've got these tracks and I'm just going to label them and maybe I'll explain what they are afterwards so we're gonna make this first one our record track I'm gonna color it red so it just stands out and then I'm just gonna call the other one box one box two and I'll just copy box to make it easier on myself box three box for box five box six box seven box eight box nine and box ten so we got ten box tracks here but color and pink it's a personal preference but I do like using colors just helps me visually identify what something is I don't even have to know what it is I'll just see hey these are pink it must be vocal tracks so we got these ten vocal tracks and we got our record tract okay now what we're gonna do here is and this is different from the Play listing option that I was mentioning what we're gonna do is we're gonna use the record track to essentially record our takes as we're recording and once we get our the take that we want instead of going to a new playlist like we would traditionally we're gonna drag that take onto another channel such as these Vox channels and well listen if we like it we could keep it in and just keep recording and punching in or we can mute this still keep it for maybe later if we want um and just record a brand new take on that same spot well show you a little more in-depth example in them in a bit let's just get this whole thing set up and then we can really really take a look at it so we got these tracks set up the next thing that I want to do is whenever you're recording you need to have some effects on your tracks as well you want to have some reverb some delay stuff like that so what I would do is I would create some aux tracks I'm gonna create five stereo not mono stereo aux tracks and you might be wondering about an aux track is an aux track is something that you can send a signal to you can actually pass the signal through it as well so for example I could send this box ten I could send it to be received on aux one and then I could send that aux one to go somewhere else and this could actually be direct as I just mentioned or it could be via a sent so it could be used as a send effect as well so in different dogs they might call these different things aux is one thing bus is another thing a send is another thing usually these are all just the same thing it's a blanket term that people use interchangeably amongst these sound these sources so got these ox ox is set up I'm just gonna name them so we're gonna label everything and then we'll actually get into the nitty-gritty of the routing and setting it up I just want to get you guys familiar with what this is comprised of and then build from there so ox one I'm gonna make it a long delay we're have to set up the delays and stuff as well but at least if we have an idea of what's what will be good so I got long delay medium delay this is a short delay and then I'm gonna do a plate reverb and a hall reverb now these are just ones that I like to use in my setup you might find yourself wanting to add some additional ones perhaps the slap delay may be a distortion bus parallel compression bus these are some more advanced ones but we could talk about that a little bit later so I got these labeled I'm gonna color them all green that's just what I color my effects and I know that their effects for that reason so I got those we're gonna place them eventually as well and route them correctly and now we need just a few more tracks barong honestly almost done setting up this template at least from an initial perspective so we're gonna need one stereo audio track I'm gonna call this beat this is where your two-track beat would go so if you're recording on a wave or an mp3 usually this is your producers mix so you just house this here and I know you might be wondering well what if I have stems I actually recommend that you don't record with your steps the reason why is as an engineer I know when somebody comes in here with stems it's super annoying for me to have to you know suss out everything balance everything just to get set up so we can record that process can honestly take a long time instead I'll just record to the two-track beat and then since I have that to track exactly as it needs to be as the producer gave it to us we can just focus on recording the vocal and then we could replace that to track later with stems and mix it properly if we need to and we usually do but you know this is just more of an efficiency thing than it is about being very particular so we're going to have this track for the beat up maybe I'll color it purple and now we're going to create the final tracks in this we're gonna create three stereo aux inputs I'm gonna label these and then we'll talk about what they are so the first one's gonna be a vocal master second one's going to be an instrumental master and then the third one is gonna be master ring okay I'm gonna call these different colors so got that and the light baby blue kind of color I don't make my final mastering blue and I can add a little common here final out okay so we've got everything set up ultimately these two these three buses that I just created the vocal master is going to be where all the vocal tracks ultimately go including the effects the instrument master is gonna be you know the instrumental or the beat in this case just a two track and then our final mastering is gonna be where both of those buses ultimately some okay so now let's actually go through and route this accordingly I'm actually gonna do this in a reverse order so I think that might make more sense so let's start with the mastering for example I'm gonna let this continue to come out of one and two this is my main speakers I'm gonna change the input so that it comes in on let's say 51 at 52 I'm using some of these busses elsewhere but we'll just start fresh here so 51 52 and I'll rename this mastering okay I'm gonna go now into my instrumental and vocal master and I want these to ultimately go to the input of my mastering so I'm gonna set the output of them from 1 & 2 which is what it is right now I'm gonna set it to that mastering bus that we just created which is yellow cuz I'm using it so boom mastering and now we have to set the input of each one as well so I can actually cascade this in Pro Tools if I hold shift option command if I click on the top one when I go to bus I'll choose 5354 and you see it's 5354 here but 5556 hence the Cascade mentioned and I'll rename this so the first one is instrumental master and the second one will be vocal master so now those two tracks are set to receive a you know from those two buses that we set up will do the instrumental one first because it's super simple since we're using a two-track beat I'm going to change the output from one and two I'll set it to instrumental master so now the instrumental should or the beat I should say will go from here and feed this instrumental master which would then go to mastering the input I'm just gonna set the no input I could have just left it it doesn't really matter I'm not going to be recording on that track but just to keep things really clean we'll set it to no input let's do these vocal effects I'm gonna change the output see how it's 1 & 2 right now I'm gonna just set them all to go to the vocal master that we just created now I'm gonna mention sometimes what I will do is create a mother aux that all of these effects would go to I'm not going to do it here I mean it is great when it's when you're mixing it'll give you a little bit more control over each element however not the biggest deal right now they're all just gonna go in some with the individual audio tracks at that vocal master level as well so got those set up we have to set up the inputs of them though and each of these have to be a unique input because they're all unique effects such as long delay medium delay etc so I'm gonna do the Cascade thing once again shift option command I'm going to click on the input of the top one and I'll click 5758 and you see it cascade 57 to the 8960 etc etc I'll just go through these and rename them so long delay next one will be medium delay the next one will be short delay then we got a plate reverb and finally we have a hall reverb so those are set up still got to apply the effects and all that we're going to get there we're just trying to focus on the routing for a moment so those are routed let's go into our Vox and our record track all of these tracks are ultimately going to go to the same destination as the effects which was the vocal master okay I'm gonna change the input so there is no input across the board but my record track I'm gonna set it to receive the signal on my interface on my mic is set up on mic line one so I'll set that and this track again is going to be the place where we focus on actually recording the take so I would record enable this and start recording and then bring it down to these other tracks okay so right now everything is routed correctly and we could really be sure by importing some stuff but let's set up our effects and just get things routed a bit better or at least just set up better before we double check and test everything so let's start with the long delay it's really just setting up our FX for so long delay I would say this would be about a half note delay I'm gonna focus on using just stock stuff I want this to be relevant to everybody and if I can make it work with the stock stuff then you can as well I'm gonna go in and set up long delay - here we go and I like using presets presets just help me get there a little bit faster delay second note let's just stick with the classic okay so I'll put this on and right now we should be getting a half note delay here it also has the note meter here so you can manually select it if you want but I know that this is gonna be cool my medium delay I want this to be a faster delay than the long one obviously so let's see what Pro Tools has for me here medium delay what do you know going to the presets again and I want this to be a quarter note so I'm gonna do a quarter note delay or fourth delay as it says here and we can work with that for now now I'm going to do a short delay same exact recipe go in short delay plug-in and the key to a short delay is it's gonna be an eighth note so I'm gonna create an eighth note delay now I could definitely maneuver with these parameters and change stuff I might do that let's just stick with the preset for a second so we have a half note just so you guys all know quarter note and eighth know okay those are our delays so they're gonna be just slightly different rhythmic timing right and then we're gonna get into our reverb so we have our plate reverb these are just different textures right every reverb has a few different textures and what I'll use is let's just use the stock D verb I'll even copy this over we'll address this Hall verb in a second and I'm gonna go here let's just do a vocal plate because obviously we're recording vocals and then I'm gonna go into my Hall verb I'm gonna change this to let's just do large Hall okay cool so now these are all setup we have our three delays got our two different reverbs right they're gonna feel a little bit different because they are different textures but those are all set up so now the key is we have to be able to send signal to these effects the way that I would do this is via a send right we have the send category here I'm gonna click and select all these tracks including my record track and if I hold shift option I'll be able to send all of these the same bus I'll be able to send the same bus to each of these different effects channels so for example let's start with the last one long delay if I go down here long delay you see it populates and all of them are going to be set to infinite so we're not going to actually be sending any signal until we decide to so I'll do this across the board for each one we'll do medium next do short as well oops that was an accident it's supposed to be plates there we go and then we'll do a howl verb so these are our essential effects and now they're as you could tell they're on each of these channels and there will be sent to these individual effects tracks so if I want to apply you know a long delay to one track but not the other I can send it and have that track be affected while not affecting the other ones I can also just have a bit more control over the elements right I could choose how much I want to send I could choose exactly which tracks I want to send rather than putting my reverb directly onto a track or putting a delay directly onto a track obviously if I have to do that on an individual track and I have to apply multiple reverbs and multiple delays to each track you know if I do that every single time eventually I'm gonna start running out of CPU RAM and my sessions gonna start you know crashing clicking popping and just giving me all sorts of problems so for that reason we rely on using the sense it just makes your computer run a bit more efficiently and it lets you just achieve a more cohesive effect across all the tracks that you're trying to affect so this is set up everything is routed correctly what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna save this right now as a template and I'm gonna bring in a beat I'm gonna put it on my beat track and then maybe we'll do a little test vocal I have a microphone right over here I'll bring it into the frame and you guys can see that this works and is just doing what it needs to be doing it's set up correctly ultimately we just want to make sure that everything is routed correctly so that when we actually sit down to use this it's gonna fly okay so let me save this as a template first we're gonna go to file save as template I got my own little category here five piece presets I'll extend this and you can see that there's a few different templates here that I've used and I always save new templates even if I update something so as you can see 5-piece full mixing template August 2017 5-piece full mixing template January 2018 so there might be slightly different slightly improved as I might call it but I just want to always have these just in case maybe one day I'm like you know what 2017 was sounding a little bit better than 2018 what was I doing them just for that reason so I'm gonna save this as a new one I'll call it recording template lesson hit OK and now that will in my list whenever I want to set up a new session at least in Pro Tools I can call upon that template and this will open up exactly as it is ready for me to go so now let's actually import a beat and get everything set up in a good way I'm gonna bring in a beat that I have is too explosive I'm gonna copy it and the reason why I want to copy it in Pro Tools is this is going to put it in the Pro Tools file so if that beat ever gets deleted from its original location I'll still be able to open up this session and the beat will still be there without any problems as opposed to add if I add it's gonna look for the original location of the file that's not really going to be helpful if something gets deleted because it'll be gone at that point so I'll press done it's gonna say where you want to save it destination automatically it's set to this template or this folder for this template I should say press ok I'm gonna drag it down onto this beat Channel now the reason why I do that that's why I have this set up it's just efficient I can instantly put it on this channel and have it routed the way that I want without having to click into the output and the input and change stuff so now that I've done that I'll delete this most important thing that I have to do now is set the tempo luckily I wrote down the tempo I'm going to turn off my conductor 141 BPM is the tempo of this track and what I'm also going to do actually I forgot to mention is create a quick track this is your metronome so if I play this we should hear the metronome and everything should be in sync with each other right now five okay sounds like it's on time I don't need to play the full thing for you to know but we know that the beat is in sync I wrote down the tempo that's also just something that I did for myself to make it easier if you're producing your own tracks and you're gonna record on them I encourage that when you bounce these tracks out you can include the tempo information even if it's for somebody else just do that it makes it way easier for that person to make sure they get the right tempo so that way you can fly your hooks and copy and paste them from one location to another while preserving their timing on the track so done that and if I play this right now one more time let's actually look you'll see that it's going to go to the instrumental master and ultimately go to the mastering so you see that now if I mute the instrumental master here we're not going to hear it right so that's how you know things are routed correctly this is a good thing in this situation we just want to make sure that everything is routed properly now another thing that I actually forgot to mention is we would want to solo safe our channels so I'm gonna actually so solo safe to explain what it is it essentially just allows you to solo a track so let's say for example this beat if I were to solo it right now you wouldn't actually hear it because it's being routed to this instrumental master and when it's soloed the instrumental master becomes muted because it's only supposed to focus on soloing this one track for example I'll show you we don't hear anything right now if I solo safe the track what's gonna happen is when I solo a channel it's gonna not mute these other channels on purpose so for example I'm gonna solo safe if you hold command and click on the solo button or the S you'll see that it becomes transparent and now when I do the same thing we're gonna still hear the beat so I'll solo the beat fine [Music] you get the point now we want to actually do this across the board I want to do this on all my effects tracks because ultimately when I'm soloing a vocal I will want to still hear at least in my situation I will still want to hear you know how is the reverb sounding when this vocal is so loud and then if I really don't want to hear it I can manually go in and just mute that reverb let's say so I'm gonna solo safe all of these as well and that should be good so to summarize solo safe your effects so all my delays and reverbs and solo safe your master tracks so your instrumental master vocal master and final master out so now that we've done that maybe let's test the vocal and see if everything is set up correctly I'm gonna bring my click track to the top just so that everything is nice and clean and organized I'm gonna bring in my microphone over here I'm not oh I'm not an artist nor do I play one on the internet but we can at least do a couple of Tanks and see how this is working okay so I got the setup my interface is already set up gain staging wise and as you see you can also hear a little double of my voice probably but you see the signal coming in right I'm gonna bring this record rack down and we just want to test the effects well before we test the effects look you see my vocal master see the channel working right youth is still going through yeah cool sweet no that's right correctly if I meet this we're not seeing it on the mastering level still okay right everything is routed properly let's just test out our send effects so if I go to my long delay hello hello you can hear the echo and hear the echo so the way yes mass mass mass right for delay haha actually really sure that's kind of awkward hey actually it's really sure it's pretty much like a slab almost we'll do our reverb yo yeah nice and walk our Hall verb you a little bit agree so we know that all of our effects are routed correctly as well I'm gonna bring this back up to the top I'll get this out of the way for a second yeah as you can tell everything is routed correctly and right now we're in a position to start a recording session quickly someone could literally walk in right now and now that I have it set up as a template I can always just call it up call upon it open it up and literally just press record as long as I import my beat and set the tempo I'm ready to go I could throw a reverb on right away delays right away I could do a lot of different stuff within this session and you can tweak this as well right this is just a starting point but yeah definitely try to implement something like this into your setup it'll make your life a hell of a lot easier you won't have to struggle when you're first sitting down to work on something or just to record in general and if it's of any value to you I will have a template available for sale if you are interested in purchasing my personal template it's not what I've shown you here it's a variation of this yes absolutely much of the same principles apply however I've beefed it up with a bunch of plugins and stuff that I use in all of my mixes I'm doing just a lot of general practices and good practices that I am showing you my tutorials but I could save you that time of learning and setting it up by just selling you this template directly so if that's interesting to you I'll keep you posted on that just stay tuned on my website and on my channel and you can buy that very soon and yeah that will conclude this lesson so as always guys please like subscribe comment and share if you got value out of this share with your producer friends artists friends anybody that you think will get value out of this especially people who are recording themselves and may not have the best habits yet so I hope you got a lot out of this as always as your boy 5-piece signing off see you guys five

Channel: 5piece

Views: 47,013

Keywords: vocal recording template, recording vocals, how to set up a vocal recording template, record vocals using template, record vocals, how to record vocals, how to record vocals in pro tools, recording vocals in pro tools, vocal template, vocal template pro tools, how to create vocal recording template, how to create vocal template, how to set up vocal template, vocals pro tools, how to create a template in pro tools, how to create templates for recording, pro tools templates

Id: X0VChcTbB8I

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019