How To Record Vocals

The most common mistake is recording vocals too loud or too soft. The main goal to recording a solid vocal is to get all of the performance. It's not easy to set levels with a good, dynamic vocalist. As soon as you think you have the level pegged, they do something like move a few inches and you find out they are louder than you thought and meters are in the red. So you lower the level and find out that the meters are barely moving at all. If the vocalist is nervous and moving around, you might spend hours and never find an optimum level. The human voice is extremely dynamic, from soft whispers to piercing screams. If the level is too low, you will be bringing in noise and hum if you amplify it later. However, if you record too loud, there will be times when the file goes "over" which will likely result in damage that cannot be corrected later. The solution to this madness is to use a compressor in the chain after the preamp. The compressor, essentially, automatically lowers the volume when the input exceeds a certain threshold. It's like an invisible hand on a volume control. This allows a vocalist to get louder without going into the red. One of my favorite settings is to have the input to the compressor boosted so that all the "soft" words come through with a strong level. As soon as the vocalist gets louder, the clamping down begins and if they scream, it clamps down hard. The ideal is to have more consistent loudness no matter what they are doing.