Recording Great Vocals At A Home Recording Studio

Creating excellent vocal tracks alwaysstarts with a great vocal talent. Having the vocalist calm and at home is actually the very first thing to do. It is only normal for anyone to have some nerves before a recording session. To keep the vocalist relaxed, have some room temperature water and keep the temperature of the recording room comfortable.

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Here are a few techniques that you can also try.

• Select the mic thoroughly. Your choice of mic will affect the general outcome of the recording so it is essential to match your mic to your vocalist. Never hesitate on making short trial recordings and getting a good dynamic mic without the high frequencies that inexpensive ones have.
• Positioning and setting up the mic is another thing to consider. Make sure that you use a pop shield with your mic so to minimize the possibility of having plosives and pops going into the recording. Plosives are difficult to edit after the recording so they are best avoided. Some microphones are more sensitive to plosives and other vocalists are more conscious of these pops than others. Pop shields should be placed 3 inches from the mic's front and can be adjusted according to the talent's vocal powers.
• Your recording room's acoustics can also affect the quality of your recording. Because of this, you can try constructing a tentative booth type room, which can be created by hanging up blankets or thick sheets in order to ?deaden? the room. Deadening the room can allow you to cleanly use artificial digital reverb in mixing tracks. Alternatively, you can also hang sheets or blankets on the walls of the corner of the room and have your vocalist perform into that space. Make some trial recordings to determine what the outcome would be.
• One commonmistake in recording vocals is recording them at high signal levels, which can actually lead to distortion, a problem that you should never have in the first place. For this, you can arrange your computer, software and sound card to 24-bit recording and make sure that vocal peaks hit at about -14dBFS. You can also use a hardware compressor unit (if you have one) to compress the vocals by 2-4dB in order to let you manage the signal easily.