VOCALS:Hi All. This last week was dedicated to tracking Lead Vocals, associated double tracks, and some harmony tracks as well. This band does not have much in the way of "background vocals" as there is only one singer in the band.
Our lady singer's name is Trish and she can sing pretty damn good! So there was not much for me to do in the way of coaching etc.... just stayed out of the way on that.
Initially I had intended to go with one of two mics: One of My Rode NT2000's, or my Bluebird mic from Blue. So we set up the two mics into my two Brick Pre-amps, and I had Trish do a short take into each mic.
Well as fate would have it I did not like either mic on her voice, which was a drag because I didn't have much else to try.
The Rode was nice and bright but lack "fullness" in the mids. The Bluebird had all the fullness that I wanted but lacked sizzle in the high end... oh what to do...
So we used both! ... I set up the two mics with the capsules aligned by eye and ran off another test take. (see pic) There was a little "hollowness" to the sound indicating that I had not got the capsules as close as I had thought, and was causing some phase issues. So, with Trish singing I crawled around on the floor bumping one mic stand forward a bit and listening until things felt "solid" and not "tubular".
This worked out quite well IMO because now I have two tracks going to disk. One bright , and one full bodied and midsy. This is great when it comes to mixing because I can pretty much "EQ" her voice by blending the two tracks differently. This is not a new technique, and I have used dual mics on may sources with excellent results.
Trish has extreme dynamic range so the Rode was run through my DBX160 compressor, to tame the peaks.. about 4db of reduction at 4:1 ratio on the peaks.
The actual tracking went smoothly over a period of four days. On Sat and Sun we booked 4 hours each day so that we did not burn out her voice with extended sessions. We got the bulk of the lead tracks done on these two days (6 songs) and tracked the remaining two songs on Tues afternoon. (2 hour session) Then we had her double most of the choruses on Wed (2 hour session).
I should note that I used an Audio Technica 4033 for the double (ing) tracks in order to set them apart from the lead track and hopefully give some depth. Same pat
These sessions were different for me in that I am normally coaching the singer to get better performance from them. But in this case Trish is classically trained and is pretty much note perfect,... So I almost had to try to get less than perfect takes. I tried to get as many first takes as possible in order to capture that elusive emotional one.
Anyway this brings us to the end of the main overdubs, and I will do a quick "board mix" (no effects or eq) and burn some CD's for the band and I to listen to for a week or so, to make sure everyone is happy with he performances. We still need to tweak a keyboard track or two etc. but other than that, I am confident that the takes we have will be the ones that go on the record with little or no tweaking.
So I will be taking at least a two week break from posting in this blog while the tracks age to perfection before mixing. It is a good idea to spend as much time as possible NOT listening to the tracks during this time. I want to come back to mix with no preconceptions.
As usual, questions / comments welcome.