Okay, we now have an idea of how to care for instrument what parts we need to recall we now need to actually, we actually need to track vocals. Now the first lesson is get as nice a mic, as you can generally connect some mic will give you a better result than a dynamic mic. Will there plenty of records that you have used sm 58. So, you know, a similar kind of microphone here, but if you want that bright present, kind of airy vocal hearing on your favorite requisite condenser mic will probably your best bet you can spend thousands and thousands of projects to do is you can get a lot of mic for a few hundred dollars, but most applications, I wouldn't see much bang for the buck going above you know $1,000 so we have a mic and if it's a condenser mic like this, it will need power either in the case of a built in battery or battery pack or more often than not, it will need phantom power supplied your mic cable here.

Now nearly all professional recorders or computer interfaces will have a switch to supply a phantom power to your condenser mic. Big thing to remember here make sure that phantom power is not turned on when you don't need it. Most notably, with certain types of ribbon microphones, you can actually fry them so check with your microphones, literature, and spec sheets for details. Okay, so how do we address a mic? So look at the literature that came with your mic and see whether it's a front addressed mic or a side address mic, in other words, is the dye diaphragm perpendicular with the body or parallel to the length of the body in the case of a mic like this like an SM 57 type, we have a front address microphone in this microphone here. It's a side address microphone.

If for some reason you don't know just throw some headphones on and move around until you can. You can hear where that sweet spot is. Certainly To understand how we should address this mic, let's switch over from this mic over to this mic. So now we've got this mic up, up and running, I'm going to move this pop filter out of the way. And the way I would address this microphone and set this up is the lips should be about the same height as the diaphragm so you can normally see where that is, again, throw some headphones on. And that way you'll just really be able to understand exactly where the sweet spot of these microphones sometimes around the back of a microphone, it can be a very dull part of the microphone, maybe it's a figure eight and it's it's brought on both sides, but just try some headphones, look at your microphone lit.

Let's show and work all of that out there. Now another thing is that I have this microphone upside down. If you ever want to kind of understand where all your poses are your PS you PS KS, all those things. If you put your hand down here and you go pee pee p p, I put your hand up hearing I pee pee pee. All of those come out lower from from your mouth. So flipping this microphone upside down really helps with that.

That way you're not any of those plosives are not actually hitting any part of the microphone. So the same business part of the microphone is right here, depending on whether the mics down there or up there, it's the same thing. I just like to have it upside down that way. All those poses will just go into thin air, you know, down here, rather than hitting the microphone. If you have some sort of shock mounts, that's a great way to isolate your microphone, particularly you know, from if you you know, trading around, then if you're connected directly from the mic stand to the microphone, you can pick up some of those things, they can be very kind of low frequencies there. So shockmount works out quite well there.

Now one thing I will mentioned is the proximity effect. If you get closer to a microphone, a cardioid microphone in particular, then the the lower end will get pronounced. So here I am, I'm just talking, I don't know, maybe four inches away from the microphone. But if I, if I bring the level of my, my, of my voice down and I get way up here, then that gives you more of a, you know, a radio announcers voice. So if you want to add some low end, then you can bring your, your physical level of your singing down and get up on the microphone that will give you that proximity effect. Another thing to handle some of the poses is if you have some sort of pop filter here and this can do a couple of things.

First, it can help cut down on those poses because this can slow down some of those very positive parts of our voice, but also So if you're able to move that back and forth, it can actually kind of set you up with a consistent distance from the microphone. So let's imagine if I if if one track that I recorded was me about here and the next track I recorded was made out here with with a pop filter set to a specific distance, then I can always just get right up on this. And that way, when I feel that just on my chin there, that means that on the same level away from my mic, and that will give me very consistent results. Okay, we have a mic set up now we need to set levels and obviously setting levels too high will result in unwanted unwanted distortion.

And in the digital realm distortion is really a pleasant thing. So too high is a no no but setting your levels too low will give you another another set of promise in any signal. We have inherent noise, the low level buzz, hiss and junk that we want to avoid. If, for example, this was your clipping up here, and a noise floor was down here and record at a low level to avoid that distortion, we would need to bump up that level of the track bumping up the noise floor as well. Now, I've always explained it this way. Do you remember the old one megapixel cameras if you had to basically frame people very carefully, because while you could zoom in after the fact you get really really bad results because of all the crappy noisy you know, picture you get it's very pixel pixel, amplify or zoom in after the fact brings up the noise in the picture.

The same thing goes with audio recordings. If you record without any regard to headroom, thinking you'll amp it up later, you'll bump up the noise floor too and we can actually learn something from our digital camera analogy as well. Remember, I said that a crappy one One megapixel camera afforded you basically no grace when you try to zoom in after the fact. Well, all the 16 bit audio interfaces were pretty similar new interfaces with higher resolution give you much more leeway in terms of amping up that signal after the fact in fact, didn't realize that at a 24 bit interface has 256 times the resolution of 16 bit ones. So all that to say, we don't have to stress so much about being in the noise boys we used to it's still good to stay away from it. But dislike we can zoom in on 20 or 30 megapixel camera shots without degradation, we can always bump up the audio track in high resolution interfaces than we could in the past.

So that's a lot of jibber jabber to guide you to getting the hottest possible signal you can without distortion. So basically get to know your audio interface really, really well. By making a A bunch of test recordings at different levels until you see and hear that distortion on your tracks. So typically, I'll make a bunch of those recordings, and then at each level of my audio interface and now I'll go right in and look at that waveform and see if there's any clipping on there and really listen. Well, I mean, you really need to do that only once so that you can get the best signal to noise ratio out of your audio interface. So we are about to record our first vote vocal we are totally hydrated with pink glitter and have some room temperature, water to topically hydrate as parents or throat remember that in the act of swallowing water, our larynx is actually protected so trying to douse larynx topically is is a total waste of time.

The time to properly hydrate your larynx has taken place in the last hour. Okay, so one more thing is say be in a confident place when you record your vocals. And this comes from knowing that you have prepared you have warmed up, and you're about to kill your vocals, right? That this is going to be a great performance and you know, not if you're recording yourself, then there shouldn't really be any stage fright. But if you're recording someone else, then do that vocalist a favor and don't put them in what I would call a fishbowl, if you can seal them from being seen by all the other folks that might be in the room. That would be a good thing.

If you have a vocal booth with a window, drop a curtain or rug over the window, and you'll get a much, much better performance. When you think about all the other tracks have been done. They've all been laid down. And the last thing is singing needs is to have the band or producers or engineers just gawking at them, as you know when they're trying to relax and really get there. The best part performance, there can be a lot of pressure there. Okay, so let's drop in LA vocal.

Okay, here we are in my dw. I happen to be using reason here. But you could be using Pro Tools or Cubase, or logic or anything like that. It's obviously gonna look a little different depending on what da w had. But basically, what we have set up here is our lead vocal track here. And I've set up that to look at my first input in my IO box, which happens to be a Focusrite Sapphire, which goes in through FireWire.

Now, these levels here, I've already set up the levels I'm at I'm actually off axis of that mic. It's kind of behind my head right now. I'm speaking into an aeration mic. So the levels here and not the I'm not speaking to that microphone right now. hope that's clear. Anyway, so what we'll do is when I start, hit record, that I'll turn around to that microphone, and these levels will be the true levels.

We're checking out so let's have a Look and see what we're dealing with and listen to these backing tracks. The vocals are coming right here. Okay, so you can hear what we're going with there, I won't need to have a count off because there's a couple of measures before the vocals come in. And they weren't really needed click either because there's a lot of rhythmic cues from the loops and also the drums as well. So let's go back to the top of the song. We're all set to go.

I'm going to clear that clip indicator right there. And let's record it at first. We're going to record the first verse, and also the first chorus Here we go. D your heart was open and you willing to believe the grace was leading you god Okay, there we go we have plenty of headroom there I did a did a trial before and I was just getting one or two little peaks bring it back down with 24 bit Intel processing this should be all good to go. So let's have a quick playback with some of the D you have and you willing to okay so we have all that record I think I screwed up one of these lines right about here was it Along the way, but at the end of the day data set should have been at the end of the day. So I've got to go in and fix that pop the rest of the stuff I'm pretty pleased with.

Now once you have the performance that you want, think about recording variations to give you options later on, mixed down when you're editing. Maybe alternate versions with belted out vocals or maybe more breathy you can get a lot of variations from stepping back and belting out of vocal versus leaning in and getting a more kind of breathy version. Obviously everyone makes mistakes, but we can go back and correct mistakes in a few different ways. The most common way of doing this is punching in. Now in my experience, there may be times when chasing down the perfect punch of a single phrase becomes such a pain in the past that the performance can really get stilted and unrealistic. If you're having a hard time punching in on a single little word or short phrase, start kind of zooming out and start trying to replace maybe the line.

Or you might even just want to do the entire chorus together. Just because you can edit exactly on a dime doesn't mean that'll be the best thing. For the same particular case, we use the pre roll and post roll so you can get, you can kind of sing along before the punch and make that pencil a bit more believable. If you're doing this all by yourself, then check out your recorder or the AWS documentation about how to auto punch where you can specify exactly where to punch in and do that totally hands free. Now another technique that is closely related to punching is comping vocals, and it works this way. You can basically set up a section of a song like a chorus, for example and this loop around and around and set your recorder if it has this function to record layers of ultimate takes every time it loops around.

You can start fishing through all of those tags and get the best phrases across all of those takes in kind of a Frankenstein way of putting them all together. Let's see this in action. Okay, so we're going to take this little portion of the will, this is basically the chorus between this point and here is where it starts up, look into my eyes, and you'll see in the reply right there, what I'm going to do is loop this around. And before I do that, I need to set up my left and right points or my loop points. And so let me grab my left locator here, I happen to have this snap on two bars, so it'll snap exactly, I don't want to start there, that's right in the middle, that phrase, so probably 18 would be the good start point of the loop. And then out here to 27 would be the good end point.

Now depending on your da W, you're normally set up your left and right points in your need to put the loop on and off that's different between each da W's but it's pretty It'll work out. So now this will just loop between these two points. And what I want to do is add new recordings each time it loops around. In fact, I'm going to chop off the start at the stuff that I've already recorded. And we will start right about here. And as long as loops on in this particular da W and I hit record here, I can record different takes as we go around.

Now, to make this painfully obvious what I'm going to do instead of going look into my eyes, and you'll see, I'll just say this is take one, take one and then as it goes around and around and around, we'll drop in three different takes. And we'll get to see how we can shop and basically slice and dice and put them all together for the perfect take. So here we go. I don't think I need to click off I think I count off I think we're ready to go. This is take one Take one, take one take. This is Take two.

This is take three. And as long as we stopped before we ended that loop then we're just be left with three takes and in this particular da w it has this little icon down here. showing you that There are multiple takes and then right here, we just double click on them. And here they all are. Okay, we're ready to slice and dice, we have all of these three takes, in this particular da W, I've gone ahead and name them take one, take two, take three, depending on what is going on over here. If I've done multiple takes that, then these automatically named source, you might want to change that, by the way, a lot of this is done with playlists in in Pro Tools.

But if you just look at whatever da w you have, just look into loop recording, or copying vocals and there'll be some sort of way and in any modern toys, you've got to do be able to do this. So here we go. And if we play this with take three, highlight it should say take three, take three. Great I select this one we'll take one Okay, so you get the idea. And what we can do is just go through and just make some notes and say, you know what I really liked the first part of take three, but then this part was kind of out of tune. Let me start scouring through all these other takes and find a better version of that particular phrase.

And, you know, I just did three here because I knew you'd be bored out of your skull and hearing me go this is take 14, this is take 15 or whatever, you get the idea, but you could let this just roll around particularly things like courses, if you really want your choruses to be super tight, and just, you know, each phrase is just perfect. Just set up to loop record and just, you know, put your headphones on and sing for five minutes all throughout that chorus just again and again and again until it's all populates out and then you know, you're always if you had like, 10 different takes of This particular phrase here, you know, you're going to nail it on one of them, right? And this way, you can just take various parts of each. And how do you do that? Well on over here on reason, there's a little cut tool right here razor blade tool.

And here's how you do it. It's very, very easy. Imagine I like the first part. Over here on take one, I will just drag over that and say, that's where I want that first part to come from. I want it to come from take one. And then after that, I want it to switch over here.

And then then I wanted to switch over to here, and then switch over here and switch over to here, all the way out here until that particular part there. I just want to have from there and then it can go out from there. So just by using that blade tool, you can see what it's done. It's made these new little snippet parts that you can in this particular one, you can slide them around. So if you slide this around, and if you're singing perfectly in time, then you can quite often cut this on a concert. And have, you know, maybe the first part of the phrase was perfect until after the concert that went a little flat over here, then you can steal it from over here.

So once you've made those cuts, then you can slide them around anywhere you want. That makes sense. So let's imagine that was all there is another thing you can do. If you select any of these points, you can do crossfades. You can see that happening there. So if it's a little abrupt, you can do a little crossfade.

Obviously, something really wide wouldn't be the best way to do it. But if you did a fairly brief crossfade and you can see in this particular example how wide that crossfade is, then that might really help smooth out those edits. But then once all this is done, kind of behind the scenes You can disclose this, and it ends up being one track. And this playback here is not just one track, you can actually see behind the scenes if you click down here. All this is happening behind the scenes. So can you imagine how clean your recordings will be and how not just pristine every particular phrase would be, if this is maybe a Background Vocal.

I don't know maybe the six Background Vocal you have like that. You might not want to get this picky but in terms of a lead vocals, specially in the chorus, it's very useful to get in here and get very, very picky. And then once you're done with it, it just looks like any other track, and then it'll just play back that it's kind of like a playlist in the background. It'll play back those perfect takes that you've recorded. Pretty cool, huh? You could spend hours just trying to perfect a lead vocal track by Be warned that sometimes it's a you know, it's those little imperfections that make a vocal performance.

Great. So you get to judge whether you like the perfect timing of takes three versus the imperfect, kind of raw performance of tape one that maybe that sounds better. So a lot of Da, da Ws will allow you to crossfade the seams which will make those trans transitions much smoother. On By the way, listen to the vocals in solo and back in the mix, because sometimes you can make yourself crazy, you know, tweaking the tiniest little edit, when actually no can no one can end up hearing it in the mix. Okay, so let's do some doubling doubling is basically just singing the same part in again, on a separate track in complete unison, the same melody line, same timing, everything. We are trying to match the cadence of that performance.

Exactly. And because of this, you shouldn't really know how the phrasing goes. When did the notes start and stop. I would also avoid heavy vibrato and be gentle on the hard consonants as well, that can really kind of wreak havoc when trying to line up all those tracks later on. You have treaties for example, if they're not perfectly in time, instead of saying, that's what I want to try saying, that's what I want. And then just leave that hot tea from the from the lead vocal to do that trick.

Now of course, you can go ahead and chop out or move hard consonants in post letter on, but I just find most professional singers do this trick where they automatically kind of fade their hard consonants as they lay those vocals otherwise it ends up being like that. So all that to say, let's really rehearse and get the doubles and triples to be you know, really, really tough. But the fact is that we can't do it exactly. In other words, it might be slightly different, we'll end up kind of thickening up the track. It's just really those hard consonants that can end up having kind of a machine gun effect at the end of that, anyway, let's double chorus. Okay, we are under set up here, right the chorus, I think it starts right.

Look into my eyes. Okay, so we're going to be doubling this part right here. Now you can double your whole song if you like. But you know, the whole thing about musical composition is you want to create hills and valleys and contrast. And so just a single vocal right here, that then gets thickened and you start building up the chorus. And then, of course, we build out with harmonies all over here.

It provides a nice contrast between this correspond and just before the course in that verse. So I'll just bring it back. about hip By the way, these is typically a double pot will be in unison, exactly the same notes. Of course, the same phrasing, if you like, you can get some really good results by doubling in an octave. I can't think of specific songs but Peter Gabriel does this really well with there's a melody down here. And then there's a double up here.

And just if you double with an octave above with kind of a whispery kind of flavor to it, you can really get some just a theoretical kind of vocal is really, really good. In this case, I'm just going to be doing exactly the same nice in unison. I'll see if I can see things in time and hopefully in tune as well. Here we go. Okay, that I think I was good enough. Now we'll go up to a mixer here.

And in fact, let me turn off the monitoring of that track. And so here's our lead vocal here at about zero dB, the lead vocal double, there's no specific number here. But I normally start at around six to eight DB down. Let me set it up, you know, basically at unison, sorry, unity. And let's listen to how this sounds between the both of them. Look into my eyes.

Right, I think that needs to come down a fair bit. So let's back up a little bit. Look into my eyes. The danger between having it too low is this useless you may not, you know, you didn't even need to record it if you're placing it way, way down there. But if you place that here, then you'll notice some of those those imperfections and timing. So, you know, I just tend to bring it down until I sense a full vocal, rather than, you know, hearing, making it sound like this to people seen.

Just bring it down. You know, if you can't actually hear the second one, and you're worried about our need to make sure I can hear it and you bring it up there. Don't chase after that just chase after a feeling more than anything. So don't be afraid of if it ends up being it's like 10 Db down and you're like wow, really can't even kind of hear that. Don't worry, if it's something that's just sounding a lot more Fuller, then, you know, if it's 10 Db down, that's fine, I'd say between six and 10 Db down is a good kind of rule of thumb. And of course, this will become much thicker as we start adding harmonies to this.

So we could use the same tricks of punching in and comping that we use on the lead vocal, but because this double is going to live down probably 610 db, just to kind of reinforce the lead vocal, I'm generally the less picky with a double track, just watch the timing, and just get that as close as possible. Now, you might have a broad idea and think, heck, why don't I just duplicate the lead vocal track and use that as my double track? Well, I mean, it'll be so perfect, that you won't get that thickening result that you want if you place it actually perfectly in time. With the first you'll actually get phase problems and you know, comb filtering and If you delay it too much, you'll get a slapback echo like you're listening to Elvis or royal for some track. Now there was a time when this effect was really desirable.

It was called ADT, or automatic double tracking where a short echo of about 100 milliseconds was applied to the lead vocal. It's still useful as an effect from time to time, listen to some YouTube and you'll hear on some of this song, but generally, the more human feel of a real person singing along in unison, has the best results. So in listening to a song I've identified a part of the song in the first verse Well, I'd like to drop in like a three part echo let's see where we could put in these parts. So here's the part of the song is that know you've had your chair along the way? And that could be a nice little echo right in here. So lyrics no You've had your share of hurts along the way.

So let's listen and just share along the way. And then maybe everyone along the way, long, long way. Anyway, we'll start laying some of these guys down a lot of the times I just start off with these harmonies, and then just drop them down while they're kind of in my head. And that's why I've set up these six background vocal tracks so I don't lay down my my vocal and then start thinking another how many guys are going to make another track and I got to do all this stuff, and then you lose the harmony. So do all this work beforehand. So right now I have six vocal tracks here is gonna be three part harmony, each part is going to be doubled.

And because everything's set up beforehand, man, we can just knock these out really, really quick. So let's Start out with the first one. And this one is armed. Here we go along. Let me just rehearse and just share along the way. I guess here okie dokie just share along the way you got it.

Okay good enough to rock and roll. Let's go to the next one here and we'll just do the exact same thing and just share along the way you got it Okay, we'll go down to the next track. We're gonna knock these out lickety split and this one will go a long way along the way. Okay, we go a long way you got on to the next one along the way along the way along the way you got to trust someone