How to Record Vocals - Warren Huart: Produce Like A Pro

hi it's Warren Hewitt here and today we're going to talk about recalling vocals the most important thing really getting a vocal performance a great vocal performance is making the artist feel comfortable which means you know have water available have a nice bottle of water ready to go have hot tea hot tea is really great because hot water really keeps the vocal cords supple and if they're singing a lot you know having a sip of Tears is quite nice and it doesn't have to be caffeinated just a regular hot drink would be really really good one of the best techniques honestly I've learned through the years of recording vocals is distraction make your vocalist feel get a little bit out of the moment make them feel relaxed you know make it a light-hearted time you know if there's I don't you have to be a comedian but at the same time you know make them feel comfortable try to take them out of their head a little bit because nothing is worse than when a singer is doing everything to wrote whether they're basically what I'm saying is they they're reading every lyric off like this and that's worrying so much about pitch and and timing that it sounds really mechanical learn like this you know you want this to be relaxed you want the vocal to be relaxed you know as a listener we respond to when a vocalist feel when we feel the vocalist is talking to us and the best way for that is for them to feel comfortable and we will respond to it and we'll find that vocal compelling so if you want a great vocal performance make it so that your artist feels comfortable while working with you a couple of things you should be aware of when trying to keep your microphone chain clean are distortion that you might get from the capsule or distortion you might get from your mic preamp now if you've got a simple IO that came with your Pro Tools or logic or whatever system or you're going directly into your laptop using any number of different devices just give yourself enough Headroom on your gain stage so that when you come up and lip Stingers like ah like screaming like that it's not pure distortion but at the same time don't have the signal-to-noise ratio so low the gain sir loh that what happens is you're picking up all the ambient noise around it takes a little bit of time to get used to that so here we have a mid price microphone a blue bottle rocket it's about a thousand dollar microphone I think it's a pretty wonderful sounding microphone you can use microphones anyway for about four hundred dollars up that give you great results Lou it makes a great great microphone at about four or five hundred dollars there's a rode nt1 that I love that a lot of people use and then of course the sky's the limit you can get vintage Neiman's for fifteen thousand dollars and you can get AKG c12 there's all these incredible microphones but the reality is is that you don't have to spend that much money you'll still get wonderful results from select microphones from like four hundred dollars to about fifteen hundred dollars so that's a really good range for microphones and if you are going to spend a little extra money that's probably the one thing that it's okay to spend a little extra money on at first because even a four thousand dollar mic preamp means nothing without a good microphone in front of it now as far as proximity when you get close on a microphone you're going to get the warmth when you pull back it's going to be a little thinner so what I would suggest you do is when you're doing say quiet versus have your artist come forward when he's wailing what he or she is wailing have them come back a little bit it's really a combination of understanding then the mic now obviously a lot of your artists are going to be in the studio for the first time they're going to never have recorded a vocal in their life so some of these techniques they may or may not know so if you just want to stand back you know six eight inches back for 90% of the time you know then you really just have to watch your gain staging and make sure that when they are wailing you know maybe just click it down once on the gain so you're not getting Distortion there's lots of little techniques that you're going to learn I would suggest putting on a pair of headphones plugging in your mic to your D aw and practicing some different ideas and get used to different gain settings so here we have a pop filter on this microphone the pop filter gets rid of some of that pop up excessive P sounds that you're going to get people would make these out of clothes hangers and pantyhose which of course you can do if you like but I think an inexpensive pop screen pop filter is probably you know 20 bucks upwards it's it's something you can keep forever and this one's probably 15 years old and the only thing I would suggest you do is you wipe it down with you know you can use mouthwash and just clean it down because otherwise it gets tend to get a little stinky when you've had like 15 different people singing on it over a couple of months now talking about rooms and ambience if you don't have a sound booth you know a vocal booth to record in maybe a technique is to get into the corner of a room you don't have to be right pressed into the corner but if you're in the corner maybe take some like couch cushions and put them up at around this height now I've seen baffles round here all that really does is maybe stop some sound coming in here you don't want to baffle around here as much as you want to baffle behind the singer because the microphone is pointing this way so you're singing in this direction it's picking up everything behind so when you're baffling baffle behind the artist so there's some recording vocal tips if there's any other questions you have please feel free to leave me some comments below please subscribe subscribe to my email list and i'll send you some information and feel free to email with any questions you may have and i'd love to try and answer them in future videos thank you ever so much for watching

Channel: Produce Like A Pro

Views: 245,102

Rating: 4.9334965 out of 5

Keywords: Recording (Industry), warren huart, audio, Recording Studio (Industry), recording, vocals, warren huart recording, tutorial, how to record, produce like a pro, how to record vocals, pro tools, Blue Microphones (Business Operation), home recording, home recording studio, budget recording

Id: x_Zsn8wq5Js

Length: 5min 45sec (345 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 21 2014