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Producing Vocals

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to employ several useful techniques for strengthening your songs and instrumental tracks. You’ll acquire skills in prosody, focus, and an intelligent approach to repetition. You’ll also learn to craft better melodies, write better lyrics, and construct a musical form that best suits the emotional contour you are trying to accomplish with your recording. You’ll understand the principles of getting the most out of feedback on your recordings, in order to gather valuable perspective to better convey your intended response. You’ll incorporate notes from your colleagues to further refine your recording and re-post an updated version.

Explore the art of record production and how to make recordings that other people will love listening to. This course will teach you how to make emotionally moving recordings on almost any recording equipment, including your phone or laptop. The emphasis is on mastering tangible artistic concepts; the gear you use is up to you. You will learn to develop the most important tool in the recording studio: your ears. You will learn to enhance every aspect of your own productions, both sonically and musically, by employing deeper listening skills. Assignments will include posting your own recordings for peer review, and reviewing your classmates’ work by employing specific tools and strategies. If you use a digital audio workstation to record and mix, that’s great, but as long as you can record into your computer and post an MP3, you can complete the assignments. As you learn about the art of record production in this 4-week course, you will also learn about yourself and who you are as an artist and producer. It is not necessary that you read music or play an instrument to take this course.

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Compétences que vous apprendrez

Audio Production, Music, Music production, Songwriting, Music recording

Enseigné par

Stephen Webber
Director of Music Production, Technology and Innovation

Transcription

[MUSIC]

Let's talk about producing vocals.

When you get to working with a singer,

saying you're producing a singer perception skills are key.

You want to really use the feedback that you're getting from your signer,

now just what they're saying but also their body language.

Are they comfortable,

are they not comfortable, what can you do to make them more comfortable?

Sometimes it's as simple as getting a better headphone mix.

Let's talk a little bit about the technical side.

One thing that does help quite a bit is to find a microphone

that really works well for the singer that you're working with.

Now, if you're recording on to your phone at this point, or you're recording,

you only have one microphone then this is something for you to aspire to.

This is something in the future for you to think about.

But if you have a project studio and you're starting to acquire different mics,

one of the reasons that you want to have a variety of mics

is that different singers sound much, much better on specific microphones.

The way that you find out what kind

of mic a singer sounds best on is by doing what we call a vocal mic shootout.

And the way you do this is you will set up, say three mics

right next to each other, and I've done this with as many as seven or eight mics,

and I've done this with even as few as two mics.

But set up three mics right next to each other, and

usually I'll use microphones that are quite a bit different.

I'll try a dynamic mic, like an SM57 or even an SM7.

I'll try a the condenser mic like a U87 or

a 414 or any of the less expensive condenser mics that

you can get by manufacturers like Road or MXL.

And the then maybe a ribbon mic.

The wonderful thing is now that there are many ribbon mics out on the market.

And ribbon mics tend to be a much warmer sounding mic.

They work great for some singers, other singers sound terrible on them.

So what I'll usually do, and it's not just me but

this is a very common practice, is to set up multiple microphones.

Have the singer come in and sing just like a verse and a chorus into each mic.

So they'll sing a verse and a chorus into the dynamic mic.

A verse and a chorus into the condenser mic.

A verse and a chorus into the regular mic.

And then you actually try to mix them up.

And if you have somebody that can come in and kind of mix them up for you, so

you don't really know which one is which, that's the best thing if you can.

And you make sure that you've listen to them and play the back at the same volume.

And I tend to like to take notes while I'm doing this.

And I'll do it with the artist.

And we'll talk about how we like their vocal in the different mics.

The interesting thing is for

some people, they sound drastically different on different microphones.

Other people it doesn't make that much of a difference.

Looking for the right mic through a microphone shootout can be a nice way of,

especially if you're making an entire album with someone,

of making sure that you're giving it the best shot than you possibly can.

Now, if you're producing yourself, if you are producing your own vocals,

which I'm sure a lot of you are doing, it's hard to keep perspective.

But it's something that you just gotta fight to do.

I would encourage you to go ahead and let themselves emote.

And, art, is different than polite conversation.

And most of the time we're hanging out.

And we're just being int he real world.

And I'm talking just the way I'm talking to you right now.

But when you flip that switch, and all of a sudden you're talking about art,

you're talking about singing a song.

Especially if this is a song that has to do with genuine emotions.

You really do want to put those emotions forth.

The other thing is diction.

Almost all singers really need to over enunciate more than they're doing now.

So when you're recording something try to really put those words out there.

Those consonants at the end of the words.

Get the words out to where we can really understand what the lyric is that you're

telling us and then, as we were saying before,

inhabit the role; really inhabit the meaning of the lyric.

Of course you want to try to sing in tune, you want to try to sing in time.

Really getting into the groove and into the pocket is important as well.

All these things kind of combine.

There are some times especially with singers

where it's just not going to happen that day.

They're not in the right space in terms of their voice or

in terms of their head space.

And it's really a good idea just to call it and try it the next day.

If you get a markedly better performance doing it one way or the other,

then you should really go there, rather than think that it's got to be technically

this way, and this is the only way we could possibly do vocals.

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