Recording Vocals - Submix for singer?

[stxlm]

This year, I have engineered, produced and mixed an album for a friend. It was the first time for me, doing it for someone else. It was fun! As well as challenging and educational.

One problem we often ran into was getting a good mix for his headphones, so he could hear himself as well as the backing track properly. We never found a good method, and I used impractical workarounds - mainly putting everything but the recording track through a bus, and lowering it until he heard himself properly. I also put a simple plate reverb on his monitoring.

This was clumsy and unintuitive for a couple of reasons - I had to "reset" the mix after every take, setting the levels back to normal, and turning off the monitoring reverb.

I wonder if having a set track for recording, and moving the take to a new track would be a good method.
I can't think of an elegant way to create a submix for the talent without cluttering up the mixer. Dedicating a send channel and using the control room feature? I have a Saffire PRO 24, so I have multiple outputs to play with.

If you record your own or other people's voices regularly, how do you deal with this?

[Loque]

I am not much experienced in recording, but you could add a gain stage as an insert fx into recording channel to make it louder and just lower the overall volume.

[pushedbutton]

There's a control room output.... nobody knows how to use it....until the next post proves me wrong.

[selig]

This year, I have engineered, produced and mixed an album for a friend. It was the first time for me, doing it for someone else. It was fun! As well as challenging and educational.

One problem we often ran into was getting a good mix for his headphones, so he could hear himself as well as the backing track properly. We never found a good method, and I used impractical workarounds - mainly putting everything but the recording track through a bus, and lowering it until he heard himself properly. I also put a simple plate reverb on his monitoring.

This was clumsy and unintuitive for a couple of reasons - I had to "reset" the mix after every take, setting the levels back to normal, and turning off the monitoring reverb.

I wonder if having a set track for recording, and moving the take to a new track would be a good method.
I can't think of an elegant way to create a submix for the talent without cluttering up the mixer. Dedicating a send channel and using the control room feature? I have a Saffire PRO 24, so I have multiple outputs to play with.

If you record your own or other people's voices regularly, how do you deal with this?

I do one of two things…

The "down and dirty" way (if your sound card only has a single stereo output) is to put the vocal level all the way up (+8.06) during recording, and reset it to 0 dB (command/click on a Mac) for playback. That way there's no need to make any "adjustments", as it's easy to 'hit' both targets quickly. This assumes of course that you are working with a good amount of headroom on your mix bus, (I try to hit peaks around -6 dBFS). If you don't have the headroom to work with, simply lower the master fader by 8 dB or so for the recording process.

If I have more time (and my current sound card supports it), I will create a mix "plus", which is pretty easy in Reason. Basically you take all your channels feeding the mix bus (don't do this on the individual channels feeding any sub-mix busses) and turn on the FX Send 8, then patch the output of Send 8 to additional outputs on your sound card (and use these for the phones mix). On the vocal channel, you can simply turn it up 6-8 dB (or as much is needed), thus allowing you to keep hearing what you need to hear, and the vocalist to hear what they need to hear. This method avoids having to create an entirely new mix for them, using your mix as a starting point. You can of course turn up/down any instruments they need to hear more or less of, of just turn off any instrument they may find distracting. Adjust the overall level with Send 8 Master Level in the master section.

In Reason there are other ways to create a quick "mix plus", one being to split the master out with a Spider, and merge the split with a parallel out from the vocal channel. This adds 6 dB to the vocal automatically without using a send, but you won't have control over it's level. To do that, create a parallel channel instead, and route it's Direct Out to the merger above. Then the fader on the parallel channel is a "booster" for the vocal level in the phones.

[QVprod]

selig nailed it, but just to add, in addition to what's mentioned above ^ you can use one audio track purely for monitoring and record audio to other audio tracks. This is especially useful when recording multiple separate vocal tracks such as stacks of backing vocals in addition to lead vocals.

[selig]

selig nailed it, but just to add, in addition to what's mentioned above ^ you can use one audio track purely for monitoring and record audio to other audio tracks. This is especially useful when recording multiple separate vocal tracks such as stacks of backing vocals in addition to lead vocals.

Great tip - if you want to go crazy, patch the vocal input from the Hardware Interface into a Mix Channel and monitor from there. That way you don't need to mess with Reason's monitor modes to keep your main channel as a monitor and not accidentally record on it. Then create an audio channel with the correct input, mute it in the sequencer, then duplicate that track each time you need a new vocal stack track - this way everything from monitoring to rec arming is done automatically with a simple "command/D" (mac), making quick work of stacking vocals/harmonies/bgvs. The only thing you may need to take care of manually is panning, if you want to spread out your tracks for playback, as some vocalists like to pan the new vocal one way and the existing stacks the other so they can simply adjust their phones to hear more of one or the other, and to be clear which of the many vocals in their phones is the current take.

With Reason's many routing options, stuff like this is a breeze to create!