Okay, so taking what we've learned in this session, let's make this practical and look at the first part of the equation. And that is the actual tracking of your path. We'll look at mixing and mastering later on in our own session. But for now, let's just concentrate on capturing the cleanest possible recordings, ones that are stripped down to the bare essential essentials. Basically all the good stuff, we have the bad stuff. So what's the what the good stuff a clean signal that is a true representation of the original sound with the bad stuff things like noise, distortion, and wanted sounds unwanted environments.

So let's go ahead and start with the source. If you have a drum machine or a synth or something that you want to record, just plug them in with some quality cables, set your recording levels, right, and you're pretty much good to go. There's really not a lot to screw up here. But if you're recording an acoustic sound like vocals or acoustic guitar or something then we need to use some microphones. Now, if you haven't noticed, there are a ton of mics out there. And each is designed for a specific application there are big Norman u 87.

For vocals and little short sm 98 so the perfect for miking up Tom's. Now I'm not going to make a stupid assumption that you need or have the budget to buy a massive locker full of microphones. I absolutely hate those studio snobs that look down their noses at you and I anyone know those kind of guys. I mean, unless you're going to mic up complete drum kit then I would suggest that you have the fewest number of mics that you can afford and get get good ones. Now, I would probably suggest probably a good book condenser mic and a rugged dynamic mic kit. I mean, let's take a poll here.

How many of us record vocals maybe one track at a time acoustic guitars or guitar amps. There's probably most of us and the rest of have us attractive probably imported drum loops or drum machines or since so let's take this down to brass tacks. If you can only afford one mic that should be a condenser mic, something like this. Now with a mic like this, you can record really clean vocals, acoustic guitars, maybe some light hand percussion, a quiet guitar amp, that kind of stuff. The only thing that a mic like this probably won't record well is a really loud source like a loud guitar amp or kick or snare drum recording loud sound source, a dynamic way is the way to go. That, let me tell you what the characteristics of a good mic is.

And we'll just cut to the chase and make some good recommendations for you. So what I look for in a good mic is things like low noise, a good flat frequency response, a fairly tight pattern, which rejects a lot of the environment around you. Let's kind of work backwards and look at dynamic mics first, a good dynamic mic should be able to be thrown in front of a Loud guitar amp, or close mic snare drum and not miss a beat, you should all it also shouldn't be so precious that you can't drop it a few times without it breaking. Now, I'll gloss over this decision because the solution is so ubiquitous and inexpensive. It's kind of like a no brainer. You want to take a guess that my pick would be absolutely the shore sm 58 or 57.

If it's just Ben Smith, it's been around 66 you can get them under 100 bucks and probably less than 50 bucks on eBay if you're gonna use one. There are alternatives like maybe the Samsung q seven that's about 60 bucks now, but the price difference is so small that I'd rather just go with the proven industry standard that sm 58 now in terms of a really nice vocal condenser mic, there's a lot more options out there. condensers My job is to more accurately capture the more subtle nuances and overtones of set of vertical or an acoustic guitar. It converts sound into electrical energy and saw a different wave in a diner. mic, I won't get into all the details but a dynamic mic kind of works like a speaker. in reverse it picks up vibrations in the air and moves back and forth in sympathy, which moves a coil of wire over a magnet back in school if you weren't sleeping through this, this class science class A why moved over magnet produces an electrical charge.

So a dynamic mic is kind of like a brute force way to turn a basic way to turn sound electrical signal, a condenser mic use air pressure on a plate was more analogous to how at his work. And the end result is a more accurate representation of the original sound, especially in terms of the overtones and the harmonics that make a sound like the human voice. Really, really rich. So in terms of providing some recommendations in this area, there are four there's a lot more choices. If we're going to be having this conversation 10 or 20 years ago, then the choices would be pretty small audience spent a fortune on a Norman u 87. Or maybe a little less with perhaps a AKG 414.

But then underneath that you just buy a crappy condenser microphone or three m dollars. Things have changed now with a ton of studio quality condenser in this price range, I'm gonna recommend a couple of mics in his under $300 category. Now for about $100 I'd go the MX l v 67 g and if you wanted to need to go any lower and Excel has a large range of low cost connectors if you want to get a slightly better mic on the road NT when I comes in at about 230 bucks and all the demos are recording this course and on the bonus disc are done with those two microphones so you better hear exactly how that will work. These are not the only two mics and you know, out there it's fun to pull the trigger and choose some of these so that you know that if you get these ones you will get these same results.

Now if you really want to splurge I hear really, really good things about diamonds and new TLM 102 doors set you back about 700 bucks or so. Now keep in mind that dynamic mics are just plug and play, throw them in into any console and they just work. condenser mics have to be powered either through a little battery pack or more commonly through phantom power, and that there's normally a little button or switch on a lot of recorders, or mixes that send phantom power down that same mic cable that you plug your mic into. If you don't have phantom power, then you'll need to get a little box like these guys that provide phantom power. to power up your mic. You place your mic into them, and then that goes through your mixer and they're powered up.

Now let's go ahead and look at my placement. The placement of a microphone is surprisingly important. There are some instruments that require a little less care other than others, but the general rule of thumb is that you need to get in pretty close to breaking up run into the citizen That's really the first rule of mic placement The further you are from that source, the more you introduce the environment in which we'll start just making it kind of cheap. Listen to this example from a distance Did you hear how the sound of the room really starts to become apparent? I've been saying all along that we want to isolate the sound source because it's a lot easier to add some reverb into take it away you have an effects knob on your recorder that you can add effects but I've yet to see a knob labeled take away reverb let's hear it close.

Why can't breaking up. So obviously getting close also experimented with mic position change the overall tone of the instrument and being recorded techniques Apple here where we have Kevin acoustic guitar Did you hear how the sound changes as we move along the string might one of my favorite positions is around the 12th fret about a foot away. But I think we need to spend most of our time on the star of MX net as the vocals or really drill down here because the most asked question I get, how do you get a great vocal sound? Well, firstly, get a decent mic. But as I said in these examples in the companion DVD, all done with mics that cost me 20 bucks. The next make sure you have nice cables out riemeck recommend mogami cables or maybe monster cables.

And if you only have one vocal mic, I'd recommend splurging at least around 50 bucks because this may be your weakest If you only have one mic, then get a decent mic cable. Okay, so let's get real with miking the vocal. So now you have a decent mic and a cable a bit next thing is to isolate it from the ground not affected. So you need to get an isolation mount like this that suspends the mics from the footsteps and vibrations that come up through the mic step. Now, I would also recommend placing it upside down for the following reason. Have you ever seen ever noticed that mics and studios are often placed upside down this way?

Well, here's the reason. If you place your hand in front of you like this, and you say some peas and bees, right, can you feel those plosives on the hand, that's a lot of air pressure that will bottom out the diaphragm of that mic. And with the shape of your teeth in the roof of your mouth, these plosives the peas, B's T's and Ks tend to move out at a slightly downward motion. And if the body of your microphone is down here, then it's going to start rocking that motion. microphones around we've been isolating it from the mic stand but you're with the these places will jot your mic around after you turn it around the capsule at my friends in the same place, but you don't have any promise please, please please like that you can't drill on there. So if you place it at about lip height about three to eight inches away from your mouth, depending on how loud your singing is, I'd also recommend getting a pop filter to reduce the effect of any plosive that might might come through that microphone placed at about halfway between you and the mic.

And if you can't spring the 30 so backs for a pop filter, you can always do a MacGyver and make one out of a coat hanger and a stocking. Now one more thing to consider is this any mic with a cardioid pickup pattern that is one that rejects sound coming from the back will naturally have the proximity effect and that is the closer you out of the microphone, the more low end or base. It will be produce. Keep that in mind when you're getting in close, you'll need to train your vocalist to kind of keep the same distance to that microphone. So that arose that low end would really ramp up as he or she moves back and forth from that. Obviously, the exceptions when you do that diva move and you pull back that we talked about that, but unless you're moving back to protect your recordings, from a big note, try to stay an even distance from that microphone during your performance.

Go ahead and check out this video. Actually, before I say that this microphone and even plugged in this is the prop. Okay, I'm actually speaking into a shotgun mic here. So anything you're hearing about me with plosives and things like that, it's not even coming this microphone. shotgun microphone is used in production, which allows it to really reject everything except what's coming from my mouth mouth here. Anyway, that being said, check out this video.

Okay, let's spend a few moments talking about Microsoft position in terms of its position in relationship to the sound source in this case is my mouth. So I will start talking on the front of this is the MX lv 67 g cannot believe you can pick up a mic like this for about 100 bucks, so really nice sounding mic. And just a few years ago, you got to pick up anything on this primer thousand bucks, so it's a really good little value might have been a nice shock mount here. And you can hear this being a cardioid mic. As we start going around the back, you can hear how all the presence goes away and it becomes quite dull and muses around the back and then when you go around here, it's a lot of presence of your voice. That's the whole idea of a cardioid mic, it has a pickup pattern where it picks up from here and then really kind of dies away around the back of the microphone.

It's great for rejecting older reflections off the off the back wall and things like that. Now, another thing happens with a cardioid pattern. And that is the proximity effect. The closer you get to a microphone with a cardioid pattern, the base will start to really ramp up like back from here, if I just started talking pretty loud and then try to put some bass in my voice. It's not a lot that's changing, it's a fairly flat response from back here. If I lower my voice, and just come in as a whisper and really close, you can hear that all of a sudden I have a radio announcer voice and that is the proximity effect.

And you can use that for your if you need to get some bass into your vocal but be just be mindful of this because if you're doing most of your stuff here, and then you pull away, you can hear the tonal change in your voice. So just keep that in mind when you're using a mic and really trying to accentuate that proximity effect. Actually, let me bring up this is the SM 58 dynamic mic, you can hit The rejection of this guy here, Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, same thing you get on the back of the microphone and it really rejects a lot of your voice. It's really useful in a live situation because quite often you'll have your monitor down there so that you can hear your vocals coming up. Now if you're if your mic was hearing the sound of the monster really, really well then you would get a feedback.

So the whole idea of a cardioid pattern is really reject everything from the back. Let's go back to this guy here. So you can hear the difference between these these two guys that sm 58 is just a monster alive. Live vocals but in terms of just like a really crisp recording either. A condenser mic is a much better way to go. But you might have noticed a few times this has been bottoming out when I do the pays and the BS That is why.

Drop one of these guys in the front and then you can do peas and bees. And it will not bottom out that capsule, a great way to save your recordings from those kind of ugly places. So we have the placement between the vocal and the mic down. But what about the placement of the mic in relation to the room? Here our enemies, we don't want reflections off the walls to become part of the sound. So we need to minimize that as much as we can.

In a cardioid mic. The rear of the mic, as we said before, is less sensitive than the current His job is to reject most of the sound at the back of that microphone. So ultimately, we should just hear the sound of our voice coming in the front. But here's the problem. The sound of our voice is bouncing all around the room, and it has a habit of bouncing off the wall behind us and mixing them with the dry vocal coming from a mouth. So the area you want to didn't is actually directly behind you.

We want to capture Those reflections and slowing down and really the best way to do that is with absorbent material like foam or heavy drapes, you can spend a fortune doing acoustically treating your recording environment but we'll look at the techniques that will give you kind of the most bang for your buck here. Just hang a sled in a heavy sleeping bag or moving blanket behind you from these walls. In all our acoustic treatments, we want to give a little space but behind the baffles to help them do their their job. So you want to take it just off the wall but you also want to be as far into the room as you possibly can, avoiding the dead middle of the room, which can bring up special problems in terms of its standing waves and so on. So avoid the dead middle of the room to help catch the sound behind you.

Before it starts bouncing around the room. You can place a phone behind the microphone or you can buy ready made solutions from sE Electronics makes some like this. Check out the reflection filters like these that are available. A couple of different sizes, they really helped drop the sound of your vocal, isolating those reflections before they started getting too far into the room. Having said that, one of the best ready made solution in most people's living spaces the old walk in closet, you normally have a bunch of thick coats and sweaters that naturally soak up those reflections. And most of capital floors are really the ceiling is the only reflective surface that you're normally know that you're dealing with.

So you know, make a ticket. I'll be careful. If it's very small, though, it may introduce new problems and give you kind of a boxy sound. But if you have if you don't have a walk in closet in a living room, with some hung blankets, or down comforters behind you, a foot or two away from the wall is probably normally the best bet. Okay, so let's look at the big problems. These are the big problems that are waiting in the wings to completely destroy your recordings.

We looked at the signal path in the last section and that you want to in Invest in a nice mic cable with good solid connections, no hum buzzes or noise that will be basically impossible to to successfully tap that kind of crap out of your recording once it gets in. In terms of distortion, make sure that your signal levels are not too hot to induce distortion because once you distort, you kind of suck. Although you can always go back and punch in on that particular phrase, we'll look at pensions in a minute. Now, one safeguard that you can you might be able to employ here on some recordings, perhaps is you can split your mic input into two channels and set the second channel to be about 60 below on the first, you could then record that second lowest signal onto a safety track that you're always so you always have a non distorted backup that you could easily edit in an amp.

If needed. I kind of hesitate to say this, because some of you setups may allow this. Some may not. Certainly all of us can punch in and repairs are distorted prices. And we'll explore that in just a minute. Now in terms of unwanted sounds, this goes to the principle that we talked about before where we want to isolate our recording from all the other stuff things like vibrations through the floor, they can be reduced by using a shock map plosives can be reduced by pop filters.

Low Frequency rumble can be reduced by local filters on the mic or on the mixer channel. Remember, we could take off 80 hertz and below. reflections can be reduced by treating the acoustic space with blankets and reflection filters are closed cup headphones reduce the amount of spill coming from our headphone mix back into our vocal mic. By the way, many vocalists like to leave one ear off of their headphones to kind of help with their pitch and discussing better make sure that the headphone cut off is solidly seated against your head so it doesn't bleed into the mic caught up and you can place the headphone connector this the jack about halfway into the jack instead of all the way in there. That'll cut out the sound of just one ear. So all of these precautions, served to strip everything back and leave us with the cleanest dry signal we can get.

And then and only then can we start to record. Okay, so once we're set to record the process of assigning the input to attract, it's different between all of our machines. So I'll leave that to you and your manual, or you can certainly pick us up one of our DVDs. That explains all this specifically for your model, I'll just assume that you can assign that mic into a shower and you can assign a track once you set the recording levels that the peaks are safely under the distortion level. By the way, you can easily test this by making a number of test recordings with different recording levels and go back and listen to those results. with headphones listening intently for distortion, take some time, it's really quite time consuming to fix distorted vocals.

So that being said, let's bring that later. To be done is just press record and playing record. The one thing I will say it is you might want to add as a hint of reverb to the vocalist headphone mix to help the performance but I would definitely not record that reverb. In fact, I'd keep the recording void of any effects, except perhaps a small amount of compression. And, like we said in the last section, although with a dynamic range of most recorders, now, I mostly don't record with compression at all anymore, you can fix that afterwards. Now with the popularity of auto tune recently, which corrects the pitch of vocals, please do not add any order turns the headphone mix as your vocalist will then lean on that technology and really put in a sloppy kind of performance.

It's better to have them hear exactly what's going on. You can fix that cheering later on. But it's best to give them a really a true representation of what's going on to help aid them in. turning it on pitch performance. And once you get a good performance You'll probably want to double the vehicle. And it's up to you whether you maybe want to double the whole thing, or just the chorus and bridge.

I mean, it can't hurt doubling the whole thing because you can always, you know, play that double part and up and just pull it in and out on the course the songs really up to you in terms of whether your booklet is fatigue or not. To hear an example of grit doubling, just listen up to this one. Because this just a single virtual right here. Check it out. Basically juggling difference when you double a vocal, it just really reinforces that lead vocal. But here's a couple of tricks you really need to think about think about is you really got to be in time if you're if your timing is even slightly off, it'll sound like two people singing.

So you really got to now your performance, particularly the consonants, you've got to make sure that they are right on their own sound like to vocals. Normally, I take my doubled vocal, and I just bring it down about six dB, so that you can't really hear this to that you just perceive it as just being a little bit more for some bright people might think, well, heck, why would I do all of that make sure my time is good one. Why don't I just copy and paste the track all at once? Work is going to be so identical that if you place them on top of each other, you actually get some comb filtering, things like that more sound weaker. You could do it if you want to copy and paste, but you really want to differentiate it from the from the original, just by nudging a few frames later or earlier.

No, I don't know, probably around 40 to 50 milliseconds afterwards. But you know what, I think the best results are normally when you double those vocals. Now, if you're in the software world, this won't apply to you guys in the hardware world. synchro arts vocal lines, synchronizes vocals automatically, it doesn't amazingly, it actually looks at the peaks of two separate audio tracks. And all those peaks would be those consonants typically, and it just nudges them up and lines up perfectly. Check out this example of a male and a female vocal.

Sing together to sing in unison. They've their timings pretty good. actually pretty good. Check this out. waiting. That was a pretty on time performance but check out what Berkland line does it automatically lines up perfectly waiting to hear how that timing is nailed is absolutely now Now you could do that if you went through your editor and cut and sliced all those little peaks and move them around but Berkland is doesn't automatically check the same results with a rap song when you typically have a second guy or a second vocal, doubling the rap in the back remember that now synchronization of those double parts were a little bit more slack than the original example that began the gap but check out what synchro Burkle line does with this rap song in the back by the strip is the trip.

Anybody want to do the job with their free no turning back remember that time is bad