Hi All.
I have been working on doing some vocal recordings and I have a question...
Sometimes when I am singing into the mic, I can hear myself take a breath or exhale when I play back the recording... Am I too close to the microphone? Or is there a way to remove this? Its almost like a push of air into the mic and it mumbles up the vocal track. What is the optimal setting for recording vocals (in your bedroom)... Is it just trial and error until I get the mic setup correctly for my voice / room dynamics?
Is this something that compression would fix? Any suggestions on how to make sure that I get a nice clean & clear vocal recording?
Right now I have a condenser mic & I record right into cubase or ableton. Does anyone have any reason why I should use cubase over ableton or ableton over cubase? I like being able to use the warp markers in ableton, but cubase seems to do a better job of recording.
Does anyone have any suggestions on some free plugins or cool DAW things that can be done to mess around with vocals?
My other question is... how do I record a vocal... and then use it as a sample so that I can map it out to my midi controller and play a beat using the vocal as the sound? I have Ableton & Cubase... What is the best way to accomplish this?
Thanks in advance for the help.
For the breath thing, have you tried putting a gate on to the vocal track, this will silence anything below a determined threshold, which unless you are a bit rapey, I imagine will be the case with your breaths Versus vocals.
As for the vocal, you can either drop it into a simpler/sampler in Ableton as you probably know, or as I sometimes prefer:
Have an instance of Impulse in one track and the vocal in anoter audio track in Arrangement view. Highlight a section of the vocal and then drag that onto the impulse track (without letting go).
Now when the impulse appears at the bottom, you can drop the section of clip you are dragging into one of the 8 squares. Repeat this 7 more (or however many) times and you have the vocal sample chopped up into 8 “hits” that can be triggered rhythmically by programming in some midi in the impulses midi section.
about 5-7 inches is normaly where i would place the mic from my mouth.
you can also try having the mic slightly off access… like pointing in from the side. a pop shield is a must and will help with pops and a some breath bursts.
deepening on the type of vocal your after you can either leave a bit of breath inhale in our out. for popier stuff i take it out if i was recording a singer songwriter id leave some in.
I dont use gates that often as they can be hard to set one setting that works through a whole take… i generally edit manually going through with volume automation and editing exactly how i want it.
You also have to know your microphone. For instance, my microphone will give me more warmth if I tilt the head down. It might also give me a bit better frequency if I tilt it up. Just little things you can do…
I think breaths in vocals are really nice, it really depends on the type of track you’re making, but they can add more character and humanity.
For instance if you’re doing a techy track then breaths probably wouldn’t work, where as something with more live elements, ie: drums, guitar, piano, etc then breathy vocals are really nice.
Just manually go through and dip the volume of them by how much you want it.
Compression would only really raise the volume of the breaths to match the level of the vocals, it’s usually a good idea to compress your vocals anyways so that there arn’t quiet words and loud words, but just like i said, manually go through and automate the volume around your breaths.
Vocal production takes a long time but the rewards are massive.
[quote]roben (16/07/2010)[hr]I think breaths in vocals are really nice, it really depends on the type of track you’re making, but they can add more character and humanity.
[/quote]
Really? Where did you learn this?
I would love to read the article.
ive read that many times too. i think george michael says he likes to leave them in sometimes to add excitement to the tracks aswell.
i think it makes it sound like the singers really working/ getting involved in the track and emotive quality of the lyric.
He doesn’t have to have read it anywhere. Being an opinion 
[quote]bangthedj (16/07/2010)[hr]He doesn’t have to have read it anywhere. Being an opinion
[/quote]
oooooooo!!! fight fight fight!!
The comic intonation is lost due to the written medium.
Imagine it being said by Kenny Everett 
I think if you are using it for effect, I would rock it out. Otherwise, I guess its whatever you are looking for in your track.
[quote]phil johnston (15/07/2010)[hr]about 5-7 inches is normaly where i would place the mic from my mouth.
you can also try having the mic slightly off access… like pointing in from the side. a pop shield is a must and will help with pops and a some breath bursts.
deepening on the type of vocal your after you can either leave a bit of breath inhale in our out. for popier stuff i take it out if i was recording a singer songwriter id leave some in.
I dont use gates that often as they can be hard to set one setting that works through a whole take… i generally edit manually going through with volume automation and editing exactly how i want it.
[/quote]
this helped tremendously. I had to play with some features, but this distance was good for me.
replying to Howie… Tilting the mic downward was the key to getting it how I wanted.