Amazing Vocals

Unfortunately things can go wrong with even the most thought out plans, Luckily a hero by the name of Jordan Duggan who laid down what he could in the time we had available. We had booked the Neve studio for Thursday the 20th of October, while setting up the microphones in the room our vocal artist left the building for some reason. Suffice to say we will not be working with him again. This has taught me the importance of using reliable people, but also the importance of having a back up plan for when things can and do go wrong.

The vocals themselves took just over an hour to record, we would have liked a bit more variety however in the time available we weren't able to do that. I'll be looking into getting jordan to come in one more time just to finish this project, otherwise I can put more time into the vocals the way they are and get something close to finished. Unfortunately because of the 2 hour period in which Jordan wrote and recorded the entire song, the vocals were rushed to be recorded, we didn't get the 4-8 bar sections we were going for and had to chop up parts of different recordings to get a full section. The problem with this was that something was always different in the recordings of the first verse (different words used, different timing etc.) and that's really messed up the timing and timbre of the vocals, it would be much easier to re record this section (first verse) than to find a way to get the vocals matching.

We tested a few microphones, the Rode NTK the Shure SM7B and the Electro Voice RE20. We ended up recording using the Rode NTK, which is my favourite vocal mic so far. The frequency response is very flat in this microphone, which I had heard before using it but after trying the microphone out first hand the difference is clear as day.

Below you can see the frequency response of a very common Shure SM57, as you can see the bass drops off below 200 Hz and so does anything above 10 000 or so, also in the highs there is a significant boost in the 3k - 10k region in a comb filter-like pattern. Even the range is only 50hz - 17k Hz because it attenuates so much isn't not worth putting on the graph. This kind of microphone would not be the best for vocals because of these reasons

In contrast with the above image, below is the frequency response graph of the Rode NTK, as you can see there are many differences which sets these two microphones apart. For starters, the total frequency range is wider, 20hz - 20khz. The bass frequencies are barely cut at all, there is a very slight descrease in volume but only about 2db by this graph. This is important because of the Fletcher Munsen curve we know that human ears don't pick up bass as easily as the highs.

The 300 - 4k Hz range is your typical vocal range, you can see at 4k the SM57 is up around 5db boost, where as the Rode NTK is half that. Another very important frequency to look at is the 6-7k range, this is where most sibilance occurs, you can see that the NTK dips the volume around these frequencies, my guess is for that exact purpose.

After the tracks were recorded, Blake set to work bouncing each take and sending them over to me. I spent about 2 hours trying to string together a useable verse, only noticing the differences in the 4 takes then and there. The differences included using different words and how aggressive he was with the different takes, this all stems down to how quickly we rushed through it. In hindsight we should have had a lot more time with the vocals, the original plan was for a 4 hour Neve session and then 1 week of mixing vocals and another week of post. What ended up happening was the mixing of the drums got delayed 2 weeks, and the synths took longer than we had originally planned, all of which halted the process enough that by the end of it there was 3 days to mix. This was definitely not enough time to finish.

I plan to get Jordan back in the studio if he's able to re-record this first troublesome verse. I think the vocals needed a bit more EQ, and while I did eq the vocals I noticed that it was still very dull. I did like how the vocals sounded when layered with a second vocal track for just the 1 accented word, though this was drowned out by the disjointed cutting together of the vocals. This is common in rap and hip hop and suits the song well.