condenser Microphone
vocal booth
I live two different lives, or let’s say 3 lives. Lucky me to be able to live 3 lives in just 1 life,1 as a recording artiste, 1 as a producer ,and also as your everyday office guy.
Back to the topic of my blog. this write up is actually for small studio and home studio owners, but it would do well for both producer and recording artiste alike.
Making a perfect recording doesn’t come that easy, to avoid making a record that you are not so pleased with quality and production wise entails quite a number of things. Usually it involves a level of planning, a minimum level of hardware quality, having your equipment properly set up, getting the artiste prepared for the production, and some basic checks carried out. Each of these issues would be given a brief overview.
Planning for a production job comes first on the list, its necessary as it enables you to know what you expect, set time limits, carry out proper rehearsals, set up equipment and get you in that state of mind that you need to be to record that killer song you have always wanted to .
A producer needs to plan his work-flow, which could include the kind of mics he intends to use, the audio hardware i.e compressor, mixers and other outboard equipment that he feels might be necessary for the production job, he should also schedule the job at periods when he is well rested, nobody wants a grummy producer that keeps complaining and would tell you not to re-take a verse even when you sound really bad.
On to the next factor, which is the minimum level of audio hardware.
3 tools are of the utmost important when recording.
The Microphone and connecting cables.
The vocal booth and the pre amp.
Finally the audio interface devices; mixers and sound cards.
First thing you need to be on the look out for in any studio is the kind of equipment you see, Be it an analog or a digital studio. If a studio is using a kchibo dynamic mic, you are very well on your way to making a hit mess.
That is not to say dynamic mics are totally bad, some professional dynamic mics such as the shure SM series are actually used by big bands, dynamic mics are actually better for back up vocals. Dynamic mics have skewed EQ meaning it boost up some certain bands especially the low bands and are prone to the proximity effect. Instead be on the look out for solid condenser mic brands like AKG ,SONY, NEUMANN all make wonderful mics. the advantage of condenser mics over dynamic mics is that it provides a flatter frequency response which in turn means higher fidelity.
Vocal technique is also key to expressing the various nuances in your music. Move closer to the mic to get that warm bass feeling. Getting to know what mic suits your kind of voice is key.
Also the connecting cables matter, as they degrade the signal passing through them due to attenuation, different kind of cables exist from XLR to 1/4 inch jack cables , Gold plated jacks are actually better to avoid un necessary hum and noise. My best advice is to read up on this. For producers working in home studios, ensure that you don’t have unnecessarily long cables because the longer the cable the higher the signal degradation.
Now we talk about the vocal booth and pre-amp. When you go into a studio booth and you can hear some sort of reverb or echo of your voice that’s a big no no, in fact NO NO. To achieve a high quality recording, what you intend to capture is what is called a #DEAD SOUND . That’s a sound that has little or almost no reverb or echo, else you risk your vocals sounding thin , shallow or plain hollow,a time difference of about 13 milli seconds is perceptible to the ear, and would sound like a delay effect. If you want some reverb, delay, echo or flanger on your vocals , that can easily be done using an outboard effect module or plugins. To make a good recording you need a compact, full maybe warm sound. Not a sound that reverbs so much like the score of a ghost movie.
Alternatively if you can not afford to pad your room. You can make what I call a “death box”, its a box that’s well padded and the mic is placed in the centre. It works.
Now the pre-amp, the input from the mic should first go to a suitable pre-amp. The pre-amp ensure that you set your gain and pad at the right levels, and warns you when the signal gets hot or is clipping, the appropriate signal level should not be more than -0.3 DBFS ( DBFS means full scale decibel level) but you should normally set it not to exceed about -5 DBFS to give room the mixing and mastering engineer.
The pre-amp helps to avoid that crackling sound that you hear when clipping occurs. A pre-amp is actually fitted to a lot of new audio interface device like mixers and the sort
Now to the final part; the audio interface devices. These are the gears that are used to transport the sound signal from your mic to your recorder or DAW ( digital audio workstation, if its a digital studio), they could be mixers, sound cards… Companies like M-audio, Motu, Behringer, Yamaha make excellent devices, for low budget and home studios , the M-audio fast track series are wonderful. Factors such as THD ( total harmonic distortion) , sensitivity,sample resolution and their latency should be examined. Any equipment with more than 1% THD might introduce some sort of noise or hum, almost Zero latency is what is required ( latency is the time taken for an input to be gotten at the output).
Not to bore you with too much technicality, the basic need for a home studio if I may say is, a good condenser mic, a nice sound card/ audio interface(s), properly padded vocal booth , a good DAW.
My advice on recording software is , non really is the best, it depends on how well you can use it. Pro tools though is an industry standard. Cubase, Sonar, Ableton live ,logic, Nuendo, fruity loops are all ok though. Ensure you are not recording on less than 48Khz and 16 bit depth to ensure higher fidelity, that’s if you don’t want to make a soundtrack for a game or animation.
But ensure that your hardware supports the parameters.
I hope this piece has been informative. You can always reach me at www.reverbnation.com/loudlumi
Follow me on twitter @loudlumi www.twitter.com/loudlumi
Or send me an e-mail on loudlumi@gmail.com
death box
