Squonk
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ALAN, NEPS etc. What's the best effect to use when recording vocals. I have tried and it sounds like Pea Soup!
AlanRatcliffe
What does pea soup sound like? LOL!
There are many ways to do it and everyone will come up with different stuff.
- Firstly, a good performance, good mic and good mic technique are paramount.
- Record with low cut switch on (unless you're recording the Crash Test Dummy singer). If you don't have low cut, use a highpass filter somewhere from 80Hz to 125Hz.
- Vocals are centred around the mids, so try boosting somewhere between 1K and 2K (depending on voice) by a few dB to make them stand out and clear the same frequency in some of the other mid frequency instruments, especially guitars.
- Compressor at 3:1 or, if it's a bad vocal anywhere up to 5:1.
- Resist the urge to thicken up a voice with too much reverb. Use sparingly and rather double track the vocal part for thickening.
...that's all I can think of of the top of my head.
Neps
Squonk.. if you record, record it dry without any effects on it.. except if you have an outboard compressor.. That will help quite a bit. But as for the mixing stage. Thats quite an open area. I tend to use a bit of reverb, and then have a high-cut filter on the tail of the Reverb to not make it sound 'whassy' but rather adding ambience.
Alan has a good ratio setting on the comp, the gain reduction I aim for on a comp will be between 3-6dB's, which you can change with the threshold.
As Alan pointed out, the vox is quite a midrange baby. So to find space for IT and the guitars will be a juggle of EQ'ing, and there a lot of time can be spent to 'carve' out a spot for each part.
Squonk
Thanks Neps and Alan ?
Will give it a bash, but remember I'm a real wombat when it comes to recording. You might just have to explain the midrange thing as well :-[
But it does make sense to record the vox clean!
