And on the software side…
coat hanger. Failing that, a kitchen sieve will also do a reasonable job.
Another thing to watch out for is the proximity effect, where the bass frequencies will be wildly accentuated if a singer moves their mouth to within a couple of inches of the mic. Therefore, if you’re recording someone who keeps creeping forward during a session, try adjusting the distance between the pop shield and the mic so that they physically can’t get close enough to fall prey to this effect.
Screening for noise
One additional option is to use an add-on screen that fits onto your mic stand and encloses the space around the back half of the microphone, such as the Aston Halo, Reflexion Filter or Primacoustic VoxGuard. These enclose the space around the back half of the microphone, preventing some of the room reflections from entering the mic from this angle. They can be relatively pricey, however. Alternatively, hanging a large blanket down from the ceiling or moving a tall piece of furniture (in turn covered with a blanket) behind the mic will help you get a drier sound into the computer.
Lastly, try to minimise any unwanted sounds that may ruin a recording. If your computer’s cooling fan is quite loud, for instance, think about buying a few extension cables and moving your machine outside the room or at least as far away from the microphone as possible. And, more obviously, close all windows and doors, turn off any electrical equipment you aren’t using and place a ‘Recording’ sign on the outside of your
Your computer setup is obviously vital to recording a good vocal sound. First of all, you need the best audio interface you can afford, as this will have an impact on the overall quality of the signal being recorded. The two main things to consider are the preamps and whether or not you require phantom power (note that all condenser mics need either phantom power or an internal battery, whereas dynamic mics and the majority of ribbon mics do not).
In this tutorial we’ve used a Focusrite Saffire interface, mainly because it contains some great-sounding preamps, which are important for getting a decent signal with minimal noise into the computer, and has phantom power for our Blue Microphones Bluebird condenser. There are plenty of other fantastic audio interfaces on the market though, so shop around until you find the right one for you and be sure to check out previous reviews at musicradar.com.
In the past, engineers often used hardware compressors to ensure that vocal signals didn’t clip. However, these have largely been made redundant for this purpose by 24-bit recording, which provides enough headroom to capture both very loud and very soft signals more than adequately. Remember that you don’t need to have the loudest signals at the upper limits of your interface’s input meters – in fact, with 24-bit recording, it’s usually wise to keep the loudest sections around -12dBFS. If your system can only capture signals at 16-bit, however, you’ll need to set your levels a little more carefully, otherwise very quiet signals could be masked with noise and hiss.
You should aim to have the signal level peak at around -6dBFS to provide you with a decent margin of error, just in case your vocalist accidentally moves closer to the microphone at the wrong time and ends up with a clipped signal, for example. Then, if there are some particularly quiet moments in your track, you can always try recording them as separate takes and adjusting the input gain accordingly.
Next you need to consider the buffer size setting in your DAW, as getting this wrong can cause problems with latency. With lower settings, the latency between a vocal line being sung and being heard back in the headphones will be minimal, although if it’s too low, the backing track and vocal recording may glitch every now and then.
With higher settings, playback glitches should be eradicated, but the delay between singing a line and hearing it back in the headphones might be offputting. Therefore, you need to get the buffer size as low as possible without causing any glitches. For the purposes of this tutorial we thought a buffer size of 188 samples was just about right, but feel free to experiment until you’re happy with the results.