On Wednesday the 13th of June 2017 I booked Pro Control to record the vocals with Lauren Walton. The session started at 16:00 but since Lauren had a tutorial since 17:20 I used the time that I had to set up the mics and prepare a logic project. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the recording session.
I used a TLM 103 by Neumann to record the lead vocal because Lauren has quite a high voice and because the TLM 103 is so bright and airy it really fits. I went for a very clear and clean sound so I used a pop shield to get rid of excess air and sibilants.
Because I wanted to try something new and experiment I recorded the sound of the room with the AKG C414 by setting it up further away next to the mixing console on the left to the singer, with this mic I planned to capture a duller and darker sound to blend with the crisp and clean lead vocal.
Because I wanted to try something new and experiment I recorded the sound of the room with the AKG C414 by setting it up further away next to the mixing console on the left to the singer, with this mic I planned to capture a duller and darker sound to blend with the crisp and clean lead vocal.
Since there was, unfortunately, a second band playing in Demo 2 I had to set up the mics so that they wouldn’t pick up the bleed of the room next door. I set both mics to a cardioid pickup pattern and pointed the front of them towards the singer (which in this case is the big round circle next to the couch. Because of the cardioid pickup pattern, nothing coming from the opposite direction which is where the door is will be picked up by the microphones. The singer is positioned as far away from the door as possible and the couch acts as soundproofing by absorbing sound waves and giving everything a damper dead sound. This will help me in post production as I because it’s easier to work with a dry vocal sound and then put effects on it.
I set up 3 audio channels in the logic project, the first one routed to input 1 recording the Neumann TLM 103, the second one routed to input 2 to record the Room mic which is the AKG C414 and the last one with the backing track with no input. I monitored everything through the headphones because I didn’t want any bleed from the backing track through the speakers. I then experimented with the headphone mix by turning up the aux a level on channel 1 to get some lead vocal in the headphones. Then I muted the output level of the studio monitors and turned up stereo output 1&2 until I had the right amount of volume from the backing track in the headphones.
I made sure to then ask Lauren to sing the loudest part of the track to adjust the levels so that the levels wouldn’t exceed 0db and distort.
After this, we two trial runs of the vocal then started recording. I was happy after three takes and then started with the mixing process.
I set up three bus sends to process the vocal, on the first one I put a reverb, on the second one heavy compression and on the third one an amp emulation with some distortion.
I routed the lead vocal only to the reverb and put some compression on the insert to control the dynamics. I used the Vintage Opto compressor because I like the sound of it which could be described as creamy. Before the compressor I added a parametric equalizer with the following settings:
I removed all the unnecessary low end up to approximately 100hz and slightly boosted the high end to add some more brightness.
Then I surgically removed some problem frequencies which were bothering me.
Following the EQ I added a noise gate to get rid of any excess noise in the parts where she wasn’t singing. Then I put on another EQ just to remove a hiss from the sibilants at 10khz.
I routed the room mic to bus 1, 2 and 3 to parallel compress it, add reverb and a little bit of distortion, drive and grit with the Logic amp emulator.
I inserted an EQ on the track smoothly rolling off the high and the low end. 
Today I exported the processed vocal and imported it into my backing track project file in FL Studio to rewrite parts of the instrumental in order to make it fit the vocal better because I feel like the two don’t quite match at moment.
Additionally, I need to make the instrumental shorter because the vocals end before the second chorus.
Current progress of the song:
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