How To Get Great Vocals From A Budget Mic [Tutorial]

hey chris lippe here for the recording revolution can a budget dynamic microphone hold its own and serve you well in your vocal recording sessions do you need to spend a lot of money so that your vocals don't sound bad well not necessarily in fact not [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] cause you're never too far away to join me for another day [Music] if you'd like more help dialing in the sound of your vocal recordings click the link below and download my free vocal recording setup cheat sheet i'll help you with all sorts of goodies make sure that you've got your bases covered so that you can get into recording maximize your performances and do it without spending hours and hours trying to get the right sound let's make a budget microphone sound great but first and very importantly a bit of perspective listen to this in my eyes in this pose in disguises no one knows chris cornell from black hole sun these are wave files so non-compressed from the original multi-tracks listen to how colored those vocals are in my eyes they're bright they're really compressed there's a lot of reverb listen to him later as he's doubling in the chorus and colored most rock vocal recordings especially the mixing engineer is squashing them and processing them way more than we think and so when we go to record our own vocals and get our own vocal sound there's this mental block that happens oh i can't possibly use that much compression or that much whatever it is follow me here perhaps you can relate to this process and discouragement you start recording vocals after listening to lots of great sounding vocals like what we just listened to you don't really connect all the dots as to what makes that vocal sound so good the vocal performance uh the production behind it and of course the microphone but you're not taking all this into consideration really even if you don't know you are and you uh you plug in the mic that you can afford your budget microphone and you uh you get something like this i've been searching i've been searching for so long for a microphone it's dry it's through a apogee ensemble thunderbolt into that preamp leveled but really nothing else is on it and you think well okay you know let's let's you know listen to it with the track [Music] and it doesn't cut it doesn't sound right it gets lost in the mix you know the the louds are too loud the quiets are too quiet and of course okay well i need to put some compression on there i need to eq it maybe actually it just doesn't sound very good i need to go get a nicer microphone you get that nicer microphone and you do the same recording and you get [Music] this [Music] and then you realize because the dynamic range is greater on the more expensive microphone and it's more responsive you actually have more trouble getting the the condenser microphone to sit in the mix and it doesn't sound you know when you a b them raw i have been searching for soul doesn't actually sound that much better and then you go back to listening to something like this very colored and of course professionally produced [Music] in this pose we all know how good that whole recording sounds i spent the extra three grand after messing with the budget microphone and not being totally happy with what i was getting and this one isn't really doing what i thought it would do well it's time for you to come to the realization of why vocal performance arranging and production are going to help you get the sound you want way before the particular microphone you choose let's first start with plug-ins and effects let's dial those in in a way that you may not have thought about previously oddly enough we're going to start with a more expensive microphone get that dialed in and sitting reasonably well just the single performance for now then we're going to go to the sm57 we're going to use stock pro tools plugins with the exception of the sheps omni channel and we're going to look at multi-stage compression and multi-stage eq in other words we're going to use a lot of things a little bit we're going to start by using this compressor [Music] i'm going to put this first in my chain i'm going to use a relatively steep knee and i'm going to use a decent amount of compression up front look what's happening here [Music] so 12 db of gain reduction you know not a lot but not a little either then we're going to use a basic eq and we've notched out a couple frequencies here that make it sound less shrill i have been searching for less boxy too i've been searching for souls takes out a bit of that room sound that you you hear in the condenser because my room isn't perfectly treated [Music] you're hearing that nice sizzly sound from the condenser microphone now but here's the thing that's where most people stop with their dynamic and eq they do as little as possible because hey i got a great sounding mic then they put it back in the mix [Music] and it still doesn't cut it remember our example how saturated that is listen to this again i have been searching for soul there's way more dynamic range in my little version on the expensive microphone than there is on cornell sample right enter a plug-in like the shep's omni channel which you can use any plug-in for this but this allows you to do many different things within one plug-in which is really nice so i've introduced a good amount of saturation this is a natural sounding distortion so if i uh we're going to a b the whole plugin and then i'll walk through what i've done here but the main thing here is that i'm hitting multiple plugins i'm hitting a compressor twice i'm hitting an eq twice and then i am using saturation which is another sort of form of compression and then i'm hitting a limiter which is another way of compressing and decreasing dynamic range i'm doing all those things so i'm doing essentially four stages of compression and that sounds crazy but a lot of times similar things are done to get that sound up front and working for you i have been searching for soul listen to that listen to this in my eyes we're getting closer it sounds almost as colored so we've got our saturation going on here i've been searching for so we've got our de-esser we've got a bit of eq i'm boosting the highs quite a bit of compression again here i have been searching for so i've got my output cranked here at 7 db and i've got a limiter and i've got my input on the plug-in crank because this plug-in and a lot of plug-ins these days are you're able to hit them pretty hard so we've added more saturation now we're going to add in a bit of a reverb [Music] so we've narrowed the gap with our expensive microphone by using multi-stage compression and eq and adding some reverbs now we're going to tweak these basic settings and we're going to account for the fact that the dynamic microphone handles things differently same compression setting i've been searching eq settings now we've goosed the high end here it's not going to be the same kind of sparkle but it's okay that it's not going to be the same we can still work with it and we can work with it also in arranging to help us bring out good qualities in this microphone then we go to the sheps i've done a couple things here to account for the lower quality in the 57. we're using about the same amount of saturation but we're using an expander because a lot of times when you add this much compression you get if we uh if we don't use the expander here you get this out of it lots of noise as you're bringing that noise floor up they don't operate nearly with the signal to noise ratio so put an expander on it why not i've been certain next we're using two different de-essers instead of just one one to get rid of some of the shrillness around 4 600 hertz and the other one is up there in the higher sibilance range and we're boosting uh the overall highs a bit more here as well a little bit different eq and then a lot of boost just like we did on the other one adding in the reverb listen to our cornell example here in my eyes in this pose listen here i've been certain it's not exactly the same but it doesn't need to be there's some really neat things happening there it's kind of a vintage sound but we've dialed things in in a way that takes advantage of what this thing does well less room noise i don't have to notch as much when i'm compressing that much with my first eq i can actually drive it and take advantage of that saturation in a slightly different way i can use an expander to get rid of that extra unwanted noise which a lot of times you could argue you don't even need to do that because you could just selectively go in and remove parts of the file [Music] so now i'm gonna do a bit of vocal arranging i'm gonna use both microphones i'm gonna add some doubles and some subtle harmonies i'm gonna place things in the mix and i'm gonna help the overall vocal performance sit in the mix really well and i'm going to do it with both mics now i'm going to do things sort of wrong on purpose i'm going to sit down i'm not going to use a popper stopper for either mic i'm going to hold the 57 and i'm going to do this to prove that you don't need to have an ideal recording environment you don't need to have everything lined up and be an exact certain distance from the microphone and you know cross all your t's and dot all your eyes for you to have a really good sounding vocal you need to pay more attention to being comfortable loose and performing well and if that's done holding a microphone in the back of your studio like so many other people have done like james hetfield or if you need to like chris cornell have the monitors blaring at you and sing in the control room all of these things are fine don't get caught up on what's right do what's comfortable do what's free enjoy the journey with me [Music] i've been searching for soul for a microphone [Music] [Applause] for a microphone i have been searching [Applause] [Music] for a microphone i've been searching [Applause] [Music] for a microphone for a microphone okay so i did a bit of leveling adjusted the high pass filters up on the background vocals the lead vocal is tripled and panned out not all the way to give it some width the doubles have a bit more of a high pass on them than the lead vocal to give the outer edges a bit more presence and less mud the harmonies are doubled and lower i've increased the highs on those for a bit more definition because they're also sung with a more subdued performance and those screams i've placed a little bit more drive on at the end and also adjusted the high pass filters as well let's a b the 57 [Music] ma300 [Music] [Music] the condenser microphone is definitely smoother and more spacious it sounds great but the sm57 has this gritty vintage sort of sound that works well with this style and these layerings and i realize there's a lot left unsaid and unexplored and we're dealing with a style of music where a grittier mic works in a lot of ways but i want you to hear this before you spend a lot of money on a microphone work on your arranging ideas work on your layering work on your multi-stage compression realize that you have lots of power and flexibility within the digital domain using free or inexpensive plugins to put an inexpensive dynamic mic to work for you and there are advantages less room noise to have to compensate for if you're in a room that isn't well treated a bit more natural compression as we saw in the initial demonstration you don't have to do quite as much to it from a dynamics point of view because the mic just doesn't have as much dynamic range to begin with and particularly when you start doubling adding and layering things doing vocal arrangement and considering how the sum of all the vocals sit in the track having an inexpensive mic or an expensive mic starts to make a little bit less of a difference because you're hearing a whole movement of vocals so i hope you find freedom in your experimentation with your microphones again if you'd like more help dialing in your vocal sound click the link below and get my free pdf this has been chris for the recording revolution we'll see you for more [Music] you

Channel: recordingrevolution

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Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021