Hearing Effects While Recording Vocals

[stephentayler]

I believe it is quite important what a singer/performer hears in their headphones. For starters it is really unnatural to have to monitor onesself in headphones, so developing an understanding for the individual is paramount.

Years of engineering, recording and mixing many, many different artists have given me a vast amount of experience, but I am still learning, as no 2 individuals are the same!

There are so many variables. Some singers cannot abide any compression, others completely respond to having their dynamic range reduced to nothing. Some prefer dry, some prefer wet, and others respond to levels of both the voice and the reverb/delays being ridden to respond to the dynamics of the track.

So if you are simply recording yourself, hopefully you can respond to your own needs and experiment with what works best. If you are recording others, be prepared to adapt and respond to what seems to help..... I often wear headphones and monitor the same mix as the person I am recording..... can be enormously helpful.

Sorry for rambling!!

Cheers

Stephen

[HCMarkus]

Good words Steven.

I almost always track vocals in the control room. Artists enjoy the intimacy, we both hear the same mix in the headphones, and the room sounds great for vocals. (My CPU and HDs are in a machine room.)

[Shooshie]

You're right, of course, Stephen. I come at it from the point of view of having been a performer all my life. I can't tell you how many concerts I've played, then heard the tape and couldn't believe it was even the same concert. The cardioids were just a few feet away, picked up no reverb, recorded dry, often left other instruments (like accompanying piano) way in the background, and made my sound feel rather naked, capturing all the noises, and none of the nuance. In a big hall, you play an instrument differently. You aren't as careful with the attacks, and you let the reverb help with the releases. Scalular runs have to be separated a little more to avoid blurring into a big portamento, and the technique of breathing or bowing are just different in each hall. In a control room, you'd use a whole different manner of playing, and there close-miccing would be appropriate, but to really let go and use your full range, you'd need some of that reverb. But miccing a hall performance has got to capture how the musician is playing the hall. We play for our ears, and that immediate feedback governs our each and every move -- most of which are so developed as to be unconscious as we focus on the music itself. To be given a recording which captures only the stuff that is not heard beyond about 10 feet is very disconcerting, if you'll pardon the pun.

As an engineer, I have far less experience than you, I can almost guarantee, but I can capture the sound of a concert hall and the music the way the performer heard it, and that's something that not one engineer ever delivered to me. In fact, it's the very thing that drove me to learn the art of recording!

At first, I thought it was just me, but then I heard a video recording of Jascha Heifetz playing in his practice room, and it was the scratchiest, noisiest thing you could imagine. Put him in a hall, though, and that noise turned out to be the very thing that articulated the sound and carried it to the back row. Smooth as silk. Thus the old adage: play for the audience or for the microphones? It never seemed right to me to have to make that choice. (and it's not!) Why not mic what the audience hears? Of course, the better engineers do exactly that. I was just not fortunate enough to work with any of them.

You, on the other hand, sound like a very sensitive engineer who knows how to work with an artist and deliver what they want. I commend you on your open-mindedness. I'm sure that you, like me, have no problem with spending hours if necessary to find those mic positions that capture the presence of the instruments while retaining just enough of the hall to do it all justice. When a client did not want to pay for that time, I took the day off and spent the entire day finding the "perfect" mic positions for some piano recordings we were doing. I'd rather not be paid for that part of the work than to get paid for something I wouldn't want my name associated with. Here are some of my notes from that session:

Mic-Test Positions (jpg)
Mic-Test Comparison Notes
Mic-Positions 7-12
Mic-Positions-19-24

Shooshie

[cbergm7210]

I often wear headphones and monitor the same mix as the person I am recording

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