How To Get A Polished Vocal Sound With Minimal Gear

First things first: the singer and the space

As the old saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out”, and if your raw source material – in this case, the singer – isn’t up to scratch, then you can’t really hope to get a viable vocal, no matter how much processing you apply to it in the mix. So, assuming your vocalist is packing the requisite talent in the first place (and if they’re not, find one who is!), make sure they’re well rested and hydrated on the day, feeling positive about the project, and sufficiently rehearsed to be able to sing the song to the absolute best of their ability.
 
The space in which you record will also have a profound impact on the quality of your final vocal track, and the last thing you want is to capture excessive room reverberation, as this can be very difficult to remove after the fact. The goal, then, is to record the vocal as dry as possible, so erect a makeshift sound-deadening vocal booth by hanging duvets or heavy curtains in a corner of the room, and pushing the microphone stand as far back into it as it will go. As for the microphone mounted on said stand (the specifics of which we’ll come back to shortly), correct positioning is important, and very generally speaking, that means the singer’s mouth should be 6-8 inches away from the capsule, off axis at a 45º angle, and with a pop shield about half way in between.

Microphones and audio interfaces

Obviously, the two most important pieces of equipment when it comes to recording vocals are the microphone and audio interface. With regard to the first, don’t assume that you need to spend a fortune to meet any imagined minimum standard, as these days there are plenty of amazing mics to be found at surprisingly low prices. The perennial Shure SM57, for example, is as solid a solution for rock vocals today as it’s always been; while for less shouty genres, an affordable condenser mic such as the Rode NT1 or Lewitt LCT 240 will more than suffice.
 
As for that interface, the EVO 4 or Audient iD4 offer everything you need to make top notch vocal recordings without even putting a dent in the door of the bank. Both feature our pristine preamps with huge dynamic range, and ultra low noise and distortion, while the EVO 4 also simplifies your recording workflow with the innovative Smart Gain button, which sets the optimum gain level for your input signal at a press.

Setting up a monitor mix

For your singer to give their best possible performance, they’ll likely want a particular monitor mix in their headphones (which should be of a closed back design to avoid bleed into the microphone, incidentally) to sing along to, and some reverb on the vocal channel to make them feel suitably bedded in and ‘connected’ to the track. Take the time to balance the monitor mix as requested (perhaps they want more drums, or less guitar, say); and avoid performance-hampering latency with your reverb plugin by muting the dry input channel in the DAW and sending it to an auxiliary return with the reverb inserted, pre-fader, then mixing the return channel with the dry signal monitored directly from the audio interface. That way, the vocalist hears themself completely latency-free, with latency only on the reverb itself, which will be all but imperceptible if you set the audio interface buffer size as low as it will go before it starts to introduce clicks and pops to the signal.

Editing and clean-up

With your raw vocal recording in the metaphorical can, the next stage is getting rid of any background noise and dead air in between words and phrases by simply selecting areas of ‘silence’ in the audio part in your DAW’s arrange page or audio editor, and deleting them. Some DAWs incorporate a ‘strip silence’ function for carrying out this procedure automatically, but either way, you should aim to make any cuts as tight to the start and end of each waveform as possible, with short fades in and out if necessary for smoothness.

Building a vocal processing chain

Next, it’s time to imbue your beautifully recorded, neatly edited vocal with that essential ‘pro’ sound and finish, which is done using a fairly standardised series of plugin effects. Of course, the specific settings required will depend on the tone of your singer and the sound you’re after, but first up, you may find a high-pass filter with the cutoff set at around 80-100Hz effective for eliminating rumble and hum. As with any modern instrumental recording, EQ and compression will almost certainly be called for at the mixing stage to bring out the best in the vocal in terms of its frequency profile and dynamic range, and if the stock plugins in your DAW aren’t doing it for you, there are copious superb third-party options available at pocket money prices or for free from developers such as Klanghelm (the MJUC and DC8C compressors), Tokyo Dawn Labs (the TDR Nova EQ) and MeldaProduction (the MEqualizer EQ and MCompressor, er, compressor).
 
Sibilance – that is, overly harsh ‘s’ sounds – is a common issue with vocal recordings, and although you can set up a sidechain-enabled compressor/EQ combo to deal with it, or draw in volume automation to attenuate the offending syllables or phonemes manually, a dedicated de-esser is much quicker and easier. Techivation’s free T-De-Esser 2 is a no-brainer, then.
 
Finally, unless you’re shooting for a completely dry vocal sound, a little reverberation will be called for, and for that, the thrifty producer need look no further than the amazing reverb plugins of ValhallaDSP, and Togu Audio Line’s free TAL-Reverb-4. The broader mix will dictate what sort of emulated space, room size, decay time, etc, this should be set to, but run your reverb plugin set 100% wet on an auxiliary return channel for easy depth adjustment on the channel strip, and always err on the side of caution with the send level. A good rule of thumb is to raise it from zero until the ambience sounds appropriate, then back it off a touch.