Sound Engineering
A short shelf, but a useful one: rescuing a muddy mix, EQ'ing vocals so they sit, and why you should point a guitar amp at things that aren't guitars.
17 articles
Microphone Setup, Room and Technique
Treating the recording space, positioning the microphone, pop filters, distance and angle, gain staging and recording levels, and the singer's own mic technique.
Read →Doubles and Vocal Stacks
Double-tracking a lead, tight and loose doubles, artificial doubling, building BGV stacks from unisons, octaves and harmonies, panning and blending them, and keeping a stack from turning to mush.
Read →Arranging Backing Vocals
What backing vocals are for, the main types - harmonies, oohs and aahs, call and response, gang vocals, ad-libs - and how to arrange them across a song so they support rather than compete.
Read →Practical: A Vocal Production from Start to Finish
The Vox Pro practical - run a full vocal session and take it all the way to a mixed vocal: prep, recording, comping, tuning, stacks, processing and mix, with a checklist for each stage.
Read →Tuning Vocals
Pitch correction from transparent to obvious - automatic and graphical tuning, retune speed, formants, vibrato and drift, and when to leave a note alone.
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Vocal Processing: EQ, Compression and De-essing
The core vocal chain - clean-up, subtractive and additive EQ, compression for consistency, serial compression, de-essing sibilance, and saturation - with starting settings and the reasons behind them.
Read →Range, Vocal Vocabulary and Harmonies
Voice types and registers, finding a singer's range, the vocabulary of vocal technique - vibrato, runs, belting, falsetto, fry - and building harmonies in thirds, sixths and beyond.
Read →Mixing Vocals: Level, Space and Automation
Sitting the lead vocal in the mix - level and rides, reverb and delay sends, pre-delay and timing, making room in the track, managing the stack, and checking translation.
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Editing and Comping Vocals
Recording multiple takes, building a comp from the best phrases, where to edit, crossfades, breaths and noise, timing alignment, and matching tone between takes.
Read →The Vocal Session: Preparation and Warming Up
What happens before anyone sings - preparing the session, the headphone mix, the room, the singer's comfort, warm-ups, and the producer's role in getting a great performance.
Read →Microphones for Vocals
Dynamic, condenser, ribbon and valve microphones; diaphragm size; polar patterns; proximity effect; and how to choose a microphone for a voice and a room.
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Getting Creative with Vocals
Vocal effects and tricks - telephone and lo-fi EQ, octave and pitch shifting, formant shifting, vocal chops, vocoders and talk boxes, distortion, reverse reverb, and stutter edits.
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How to Clean Up A Muddy Mix
Katie Gilchrest If you’re working with a well-balanced band or high quality samples to begin with, mixing will be most likely be fairly smooth. However, a lot of elements in recording can provide too much sonic information, causing a mix to be crowded or boomy, with an excess of sounds overlapping i
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Audio Mixing Course | Music Mixing Courses | GARNISH
Anyone who does an audio mixing course should experience life 'out of the box'. Not only is it fun to have a play on a load of real analogue kit, we believe that your mixes in the box will benefit from this experience. Victor balancing up a backing track on the Neve. It is a different art and most o
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Guitar Amps Are Not Just for Guitars
Guitar amps forever changed the sound of popular music, and proper capture of physical amplifier cabinets or modeled amplifiers remains essential to producing a high-quality recording with electric bass or guitar. The overdriven electric guitar sound pushed back the frontier of acceptable textures i
Read →Recording Techniques – Putting The Courses Into Practice
Logic and Mixing learner Nick Burns (Captain Mermaid) tells us how he put the recording techniques he learnt on the Logic course and even the Mixing course into practice when he recorded and mixed this collaboration with singer Rebekah Anne Steele. "I used two SE small capsule condenser microphones
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How to EQ Vocals
How to EQ Vocals Katie Gilchrest's guidelines on how to EQ vocals. For most styles of music, vocals are one of the most important parts of the mix. Poorly EQd vocals can cause detriment and distraction to an otherwise great song. Equalization using a parametric EQ is a tool that can allow vocals to
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