Recording vocals

Plosives and pop shields#

A good vocal mix starts with a good recording, and a good recording starts with a good performance. The fastest way to turn a vocal recording into crap is plosives: that wind noise in the microphone every time you say "P", plus all the breathy noise. You are not going to save it in the mix with some fancy plugin.

So I would always use a pop shield. It does not need to cost anything. You can bend a coat hanger into a diamond, pull a long sock over it and gaffer tape it to the stand. This definitely isn't rocket science, and it dramatically improves the recording right off the bat. Buying one is also fine, of course.

Eating the mic does not sound intimate#

Some people think that singing right up against the grille sounds more intimate and detailed. It doesn't. It just sounds bad, unbalanced and muffled. If you back off to a moderate distance and level-match the two, the further one invariably sounds better.

The usual objection is that you need to be close to keep the room out. But you do not need your lips touching the metal to exclude most of the room. I recorded a demonstration in an attic with a bare concrete floor and reflective walls, probably worse than most bedrooms, and a modest distance still kept the room low. If you go much further back, you do hear the room, and that does not sound good.

A vocal can sound closer with distance#

If you want a vocal to sound really intimate and close, the first thing people think of is recording it bone dry in a vocal booth, eating the mic. But that gets you that muffled, weird sound. You can actually get a better "close sound" with the microphone a bit further away.

Sibilance, plosives and mic placement#

Sibilance is a bit singer-dependent with the gap between your front teeth and the way you pronounce certain words.

If you rotate the mic slightly off-axis, you get a bit less sibilance and fewer plosives. If the singer looks down when he sings, it helps to move the mic so the air is not aimed straight at the capsule, and the opposite if he sings with his head tilted back.

For my YouTube dialog I often use a mic with no pop filter at all, angled so I am not speaking straight into it (see microphones).

Recording level#

The recording level only has to do two things: not clip, and not sit so low that it is noisy. There are no magical optimal levels that sound best unless you are using a vintage class A transformer based mic preamp or something exotic, and then it is just a judgement of the amount of distortion you want to capture. In which case, it is important to remember that that "tone" is literally distortion, and not "magic".

Far away is unconventional, not wrong#

A vocal recorded with the mic far away usually sounds weird and echoey, and in a normal context that is technically worse. But it is not objectively wrong. If I said you are not allowed to record with the mic further away, people would rightly disagree, because artists break that convention on purpose and to great effect. Phil Collins's amazing, influential drum sound was based on the microphones being further away, then gated. Where convention ends and taste begins is a question for subjectivity.