Vocals and Volume

[tbdrumit]

When recording vocals, what is the most effective way to normalize? I am constantly struggling to keep the volume consistent.

 

The beginning of a particular song starts off soft, so I am forced to raise the volume in order for it to be heard, but then as the song progresses the vocals become much more intense causing an ugly distorted sound.

 

What is the most effective way to keep the volume constant regardless of the projection from the vocalist?

[ski]

When recording vocals, what is the most effective way to normalize? I am constantly struggling to keep the volume consistent.

 

The beginning of a particular song starts off soft, so I am forced to raise the volume in order for it to be heard, but then as the song progresses the vocals become much more intense causing an ugly distorted sound.

 

What is the most effective way to keep the volume constant regardless of the projection from the vocalist?

 

Really, you don't want the volume to be constant. You want it to be heard balanced correctly with the rest of your track. Those concepts are two different things.

 

When dealing with raw tracks, nothing mixes itself. It takes work, like manually riding (automating) the volume of the vocalist. Or you can use a compressor in conjunction with manual volume rides. That said...

 

You mentioned that when the song progresses that the vocals start to distort. Where is the distortion coming from? Is the vocal itself distortion in the recording? (If so, scrap the vocal and start again, as there's no way to save it). Is the vocal recorded correctly but as you ride it up your main output (stereo output) is going into the red?

[Eriksimon]

When recording vocals, what is the most effective way to normalize? I am constantly struggling to keep the volume consistent.

 

The beginning of a particular song starts off soft, so I am forced to raise the volume in order for it to be heard, but then as the song progresses the vocals become much more intense causing an ugly distorted sound.

 

What is the most effective way to keep the volume constant regardless of the projection from the vocalist?

 

You cannot take the projection of the vocalist out of the equation, it is probably 90 % of the problem.

So, better miking technique by the vocalist. combined with some hardware compression before the signmal hits the Audio Interface. You really can't do this by on the fly altering the input levels, unless you now exactly in advance how loud certain passages are going to be.

[fuzzfilth]

Several ways, not mutually exclusive.

 

You can ride the gain knob during the take. Only works if you are good at it and if the knob doesn't crackle. A good way to ruin a take, but can give great results if done well.

 

You can work with low gain for clip protection and bring up the parts later using volume automation.

 

You can use a hardware compressor upfront.

 

You can add a software compressor later but this only makes sense if your levels are in the ballpark already, otherwise it will run idle during the quiet parts and distort during the loud passages.

 

You can automate the compressor's threshold and/or input levels. Or route a fader into the compressor and automate that.

 

Christian

[David Nahmani]

as the song progresses the vocals become much more intense causing an ugly distorted sound.

 

It's nice of all of us to give you techniques or share solutions, but the truth is we don't know everything about your problem. So before you do anything else, you really want to listen to ski and answer this:

 

Where is the distortion coming from?

 

Trying out techniques before answering that question would be like randomly starting to change parts on a car because it makes a noise, without trying to at least determine where the noise is coming from.