Recording vocals & saxophones
Key answers from:
How can you support singers in recording vocals?
André / What you should never forget is that the best miking is useless if the vocals themselves leave something to be desired. It is very important that the artists hear themselves and the playback well. He or she must feel comfortable singing. Good headphones are a must, such as the RØDE NTH-100, designed specifically for studio musicians. And you should take enough time to adjust the headphone mix perfectly. And another special case: There are indeed good, experienced live singers who find it difficult to use a condenser microphone in the studio - simply because it is unfamiliar. It often helps to hand them a dynamic vocal microphone and let them sing as if they were on stage. Ideal for this is the RØDE M1, which sounds surprisingly „hi-fi“.
How do you get the best results when recording vocals?
André / That‘s almost a banal question! Just the way you know it and have seen it many times before: A large-diaphragm microphone on a tripod, a pop filter in front of it, and you‘re ready to go, right? That‘s true, of course, but you should still rethink the whole thing. What does close miking - we‘re talking about a distance to the microphone of 5 cm to 10 cm - look like in practice? The fact is that close miking causes a lot of problems. The first is the crashing explosive consonants, mainly the „P“, against which you take the pop protection. The second is the proximity effect, that is, the unnatural boost of low frequencies. If this is not desired (the exception being, for example, professional voice actors of commercials who deliberately use this effect), one must either activate a high-pass filter or counteract it with an EQ. Third, you often have to deal with annoying sibilants, as they often occur when singing „S“and „Sh“. To reduce these sibilants, you need a de-esser plug-in in the mix. And finally, level jumps: If a singer moves his or her head during recording and increases the distance to the microphone, the recording level decreases significantly with close miking. In this case, you have to adjust the level dynamically in the mix or you can try to repair the level jumps with a compressor.
What is the alternative to close miking?
André / If you dare, you should try it with a distance of about 40 cm to the microphone. If you don‘t have a folding rule, take an elbow length, that fits. With this distance you have no annoying pops, no proximity effect, no unwanted level jumps and no hard sibilants - just pure vocals! Another positive side effect is that the vocals have more body in the mix, somehow sound „bigger“and can be better incorporated into the playback. Just try it out. It is clear that vocals recorded in this way can and should be carefully compressed with a compressor. However, there are cases where there is no alternative to close miking: for extremely quiet, intimate vocals and for recording rooms with unfavorable acoustics, i.e. with many hard reflecting surfaces. In general, large rooms are better than small ones, high ones better than low ones, and furnished ones better than empty ones. By the way, carpet, curtains, bookshelves, sofa, etc. are good absorbers that provide pleasant room acoustics. Otherwise, you should help yourself with panels of acoustic foam.
Which microphone should I use for saxophone recording?
André / Preferably a good one. As always, the important thing is that the saxophone sounds the way you imagined it afterwards. The conventional wisdom is to use small diaphragm mics for woodwind instruments. There is nothing wrong with that. Due to the smaller diaphragm area, the transient process of a sound is represented more precisely, the so-called „transients“. But you can also use a large-diaphragm microphone without any problems. But where to put it now? Years ago I read in a magazine that you should point the microphone at the bell, but ask the musician to blow past the microphone. Pretty crude, isn‘t it? The only thing that‘s true about this is that a saxophone actually doesn‘t sound good if you pick up the sound where it comes out for non-professionals. Live, a lavalier microphone is often clamped into the bell, but only because it gives you a certain amount of shielding from the ambient noise. It doesn‘t sound good, the man at the mixing desk has to intervene massively with the EQ so that the saxophone sounds good through the system. In the studio, it‘s always a good approach to point the microphone at the S-bow of the saxophone and set it up at a distance of 10 cm to 20 cm in front of the musician. This way you get a nice balance between the tone, the wind noise and the key noise, which are, after all, characteristic of a good saxophone sound, at least in soul and jazz. My favorite for saxophone, by the way, would be the RØDE NT2-A because you can switch the polar pattern. If you have a good-sounding recording room, you can experiment with the „eight“polar pattern. This way, the NT2-A is equally sensitive to the front and the rear, but does not transmit any sound signals coming from the side. From the front it transmits the loud direct signal of the saxophone, and from the rear the room component. The room must of course be suitable for such a recording technique, and you should definitely do a sound check, because you can‘t get this part of the room out of the mix later.