Room for improvement
The acoustic properties of your recording space will make a huge difference to how your vocal recording sounds, so it’s essential to optimise it as best you possibly can. For an up front vocal sound, you’ll need the driest sounding, most neutral room you can find, as it’s all but impossible to convincingly remove the sound of an overly large or reflective space from a recording after the event. In the home, the bedroom is a good place to start, as the bed and other soft furnishings all help to tame the room’s reflections. They act almost as absorbers, reducing reflections in sound that bounce back into the microphone, so reducing the ‘effect’ of the room.
Once you’ve identified your recording space, ask your vocalist to move around the room and find the spot in which their voice sounds best to them. As well as benefiting the recording, this will also help the ‘talent’ feel more comfortable, which should result in a better performance.
Once you’ve set the microphone up, make a few test recordings to see how everything sounds. If the vocal comes across as too splashy or boomy, throw up a DIY recording booth using everyday items such as duvets, clothing racks and mattresses – again this is sure to get you a more direct, dry sound. The idea is to avoid the sound of the room encroaching on the vocal as much as possible, as this is often the main giveaway of an amateur recording.
Also, if your microphone has a hypercardioid setting, this will pick up less off-axis signal, giving a more direct sound.
If you’re still struggling to get your vocal sounding how you want it after all that, consider trying a reflection filter. This is a sort of miniature recording booth that sits around the microphone, deadening the first reflections substantially for a noticeably drier sound. You can pick up pretty decent filters from the likes of Aston and sE from around £50 to £300.