Do you enjoy singing, are pretty good at it, but do not like your recorded performances? If yes, you are not alone. As a singer, you gave your 100% to the performance and it felt pretty good but the recording may sound unsatisfactory. What went wrong here? Most singers tend to believe that it is due to the quality of the mic they used, and better sounding recording is possible with a good mic. In reality, it takes much more than the mic to improve your recordings. Producing good music is not very different from preparing a gourmet dish. It needs all the right ingredients, taken in just the right measure, and cooked with the correct recipe; else it may turn out to be unpalatable. Like you learn to cook by practice, you can also learn to do home recordings.
My experience shows that most of us do not take time to familiarize ourselves with the techniques of home recording. Over the years I have worked on recordings more than 1000 songs and I can say it without doubt that for a singer, learning to record is not only a useful skill, but a vital one. I have also discovered that it is possible to do pretty decent recordings with modest budget without spending a lot of money on the professional gear used in sound studios.
So, here is my recipe for home recordings, which is not very difficult to replicate. I hope it would get you interested in trying it out yourself. It covers singing with a Karaoke track for background music. If you are singing with a band, the steps are similar, but it is a lot more complex to record various musical instruments well as they play together.
My recipe involves the following six steps:
- Prepare your song and sing well
- Record in a quiet room with good microphone
- Clean up the noise
- Create a rough mix
- Enhance the vocals
- Cooking the Mix - Mastering
Step 1: Prepare your song and sing well
There is no substitute for good singing; so, you should be ready to put in the required effort in preparations. Listen to the original of the song several times to get a feel of it. Download the lyrics of the song, make sure to use the right lyrics, and try to remember them. Practice with the Karaoke track till you get the pitch and tempo right. Particularly check if you are getting short of breath at some places. Correct it by marking places where you can draw short breaths. If the song has high notes, it may be tempting to sing at a lower scale (key down), but I strongly recommend singing the song in the original scale. If you find it hard to scale the peaks, it is better to change the song. Pay attention to your pronunciation if the song has Urdu lyrics. Spend as much time as needed on this step and proceed to record only when you are satisfied with your performance.
Step 2: Record in a quiet room with good microphone
Choose a quiet room for recording and close the doors and windows to avoid external noise. Switch off AC and fan to make it quieter. Use a good quality microphone for recording. I use Behringer C-1U condenser microphone with a pop filter. Other good microphones are - Blue Yeti, Samson C01U, Rode NT1. Remember that if you use a USB microphone, you can plug it in directly into a USB port of your computer, but if you use a microphone with XLR connector, you will need an Audio interface like Blue Icicle or M-Audio Fasttrack. In the beginning, you can also use a Dynamic microphone like OnStage AS400 directly plugged into the microphone input of your computer with reasonable quality.
You also need a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software for recording and post processing. I use Reaper, which is a reasonably priced DAW with powerful features. However, you can use Audacity, Kristal, Garageband on MAC, or Pro tools depending upon what is available to you.
Connect the microphone and headphones to your computer, play the Karaoke music track, listen to it on the headphones, sing with it and record your voice using the DAW. The reason we are doing it this way is to make sure that the recorded track has just the voice, and not the background music. We will mix the two of them later, but having them separate allows us to do interesting things to these tracks before they are mixed. Take time to get familiar with this multi-track recording process as it is the fundamental technique used universally in the production of any kind of music these days.
While recording your song, do not worry if you make a mistake. Discard the recording and start over to do another take. Repeat the process till you get it right.
Step 3: Clean up the noise
You recorded the vocal track in a quiet room, still it contains some small background noise. If you amplify the track by 20db, you can listen to the background noise. To remove this noise, I use a noise remover plugin ReaFir in Reaper. This plugin samples a few seconds of silent part on the track to get the noise profile, and then it uses digital filtering to subtract this noise from the track. The effect of this cleanup on the sound is simply amazing. Next, I use a plugin ReaGate to remove the breath noise. This plugin mutes the track as soon as the vocal sound stops, thus the breath sound during the pauses is filtered out.
Step 4: Create a rough mix
Now, I load the vocals and Karaoke music track in Reaper to prepare them for mixing. An important task here is to align the two tracks perfectly with each other so that they are in time sync. A small shift at this stage can make the song sound out of rhythm. Also, now is the time to adjust the volume of the two tracks so that they sound good together. The DAW allows you to listen to the mix and make adjustments. It is also necessary to make room for the vocals in the mix so that it can be heard clearly and does not get submerged in the music. This can be done in a number of ways:
a. Panning – Using stereo panning, I move the music track 20% to left and the vocals track 20% to right. This separates the two sound in space, so they can be clearly heard separately.
b. Ducking using Equalizer – Ducking is the process of reducing the volume of background music to make space for vocals. One way to do it is using an Equalizer plugin on the music track, a filter that reduces the gain by a few db around 250 Hz, which is where most of the sounds on the vocals track are present.
c. Ducking using Sidechain Compression – It will be nice to play the music track at full volume during the prelude and interludes, but gently suppress it when the voice is on. I do this with a Sidechain Compressor plugin added to the music track, that gets a feed routed from the vocals track as well for controlling it.
Step 5: Enhance the vocals
The rough mix obtained in Step 4 starts sounding reasonably well, but the recorded vocals track is somewhat flat and distant. Next, I use the following two plugins to enhance the vocals:
- Compressor – The compressor plugin reduces the dynamic range of the sound. It has the effect of amplifying the quieter parts of the track. This is the most vital vocals enhancement, which brings the sound forward in the mix, and makes it fuller. There are many compressor plugins available, and after some trial and error. I have latched onto Blockfish compressor. When you apply compression and the quiet sounds gets amplified, you will realize the importance of the cleanup we did in step 3 above.
- Reverb – The reverb plugin adds the ambiance of a nice room to the vocals. It gives a nice warm feel to the voice. Use this plugin carefully though, since excessive reverb will spoil your track. The golden rule is that the reverb effect should not be plainly audible – just lightly felt. Again, among the various reverb plugins, I have selected Kristal Reverb for this purpose as it sounds really nice.
Step 6: Cooking the Mix - Mastering
The mixed track is nearly ready, but you may still get a feeling that the vocals and music are playing separately. As a part of Mastering, we will apply some gentle processing to cook the mix on slow fire for some time so that the sounds merge together well. This is done using the following plugins:
- Stereo Spreading – This plugin spreads the sounds to increase the stereo width slightly.
- Equalizer – We use this plugin to make slight cut at bass frequencies to reduce the boominess, and slight boost at high frequencies to increase the clarity.
- Multi-band compressor – applies mild compression to different frequency bands
- Limiter – This plugin ensures that the signal does not go above the limits to avoid clipping.
That’s it. The mixed song is ready now. At this point, I listen to it carefully, and identify any areas of improvement. Then I go back to adjusting the settings of the plugins described above till I get it right. This is an iterative process that needs a lot of time and patience and a keen ear for bad sounds. When I am satisfied, I finally push the button in Reaper to render the mix into an mp3 file and I am ready to share the recording.
Notice that all this post-processing became possible only because
of multi-track recording. If you record vocals and music mixed together
on one track, there will be no gaps of silence and hence noise removal and breath sound elimination is not possible. You can not apply enhancements to vocals, adjust
relative volumes, do panning or ducking if the music and vocals are mixed on a recorded track. Therefore you should learn to be comfortable with multi-track recording as a first thing in this home recording process. Agreed that it does not feel as natural as singing along with a loud music playing on a speaker, but you must get used to doing it.
Read next post in the series -
Tear-down of a Music Band Performance
- Home Recording For Musicians For Dummies by Jeff Strong
- ReaMix: Breaking the Barriers with REAPER by Geoffrey Francis
