...and, more by luck than judgement, we came up with this arrangement while we were setting up:
That stereo pair (AKG C1000S x 2) picked up some
lovely ambient natural reverb, and it sounded bloody fantastic mixed in with the main Rode NT1A you can see there.
My conclusion is that the conventional wisdom amongst most bands that vocals have to be recorded in a dead-sounding room is absolute bollocks. We've recorded like that at studios any number of times, and these vocals sounded so much better it's no comparison.
I've had my smug face on all day, because our singer was convinced it'd never work and that everything we were doing would sound shit because we're not paying £200/day for the magic professionals to do it...
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We use quite a treated, but not dead, room. However I generally don’t have our singer that close to the mic - and the further back the more the room reflections and tone influence the sound. So the room has to sound decent to begin with. It looks like you have curtains behind the singer - that’s going to help a decent amount.
Also I’m guessing you’re panning those ambient mics - that’ll sound bigger than just a mono mic assuming everything is in phase.
To be honest much as the technical side matters it’s pretty much 90% in the performance of the singer themselves... my own philosophy is my most important job is to not screw up capturing their good stuff.
Being fair tone isn’t the primary reason you’d do vocals with a pro. Or at least not the reason I’d do it anyway.
In my mind the vocals matter an order of magnitude more than every other instrument, so getting the right performances and arrangements down are pretty much what makes or breaks the song.
Someone charging £200/+ a day probably has done a bunch of albums and know what’s good enough and have a good idea of how to pull it out performance wise from the singer.
Not discounting that it isn’t possible to get this out of self produced stuff, we self produce too, but I personally don’t think it’s that easy. Takes being both brutally honest and also tactful/constructive as so much of it is psychological with singers.
Yeah, I totally get that. The thing is, we've never got the results we wanted from any of the five studios we've used, hence doing it ourselves. Even when we managed to get the stems (only the last two), the recordings just sounded lifeless.
This band's been going for about 7 years (I took a three year break in the middle due to throwing my toys out of the pram) and three of us have known each other for way longer. We've got a very solid idea of what the songs need to sound like, and we're all comfortable enough with each other to be able to be honest without problems...also, I seem to have a knack for getting good performances out of people. Very likely more luck than judgement, but this will be the third band I've done this for and every time all involved have said the results were exactly what they wanted it to be.
I'm no professional, but...for me, 90% of it is understanding the core sound of the band. None of the professionals we've worked with have taken the time to properly "get" that part and tried too much to force their own sound on us, and consequently completely missed the point of what we were trying to get across.
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Absolutely.
To an extent this depends on luck and budget if you can find someone within a reasonable distance who gets the sound you're going for. If you can't, you might as well do it DIY unless you can justify paying to travel for the right person, which realistically most smaller bands just can't.
However, I wouldn't usually bother recording ambient mics for a vocal, I'd just add artificial reverb later.
So yeah, this is a traditional band - http://www.blackhawkdown.org.uk
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It's not all heavy
Bear in mind that I'm still in the early stages of learning to mix stuff, and I'm still working out the best way to use the ambient mics (they're far too prominent in some places).
I would also try a compressor on the heavy guitars side chained from the vocal....that would allow the vox to cut through a lot more.
Great mix anyway...
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Bear in mind I'll probably delete them tomorrow, 'cos nobody's supposed to be listening to these yet