Original Articles

The problem that has came to pass because of this is massive amounts of songs(mostly hip hop) with poor vocal performances captured and/or bad mixes where often time the vocal is way too high in the mix or way too low in the mix and many times the entire mix is distorted.

The reason for this comes down to a few things that this writing is proud to offer solutions to. The first issue is the aspiring rappers are buying the beats then recording the songs without any input from a producer, not to be confused with the beat maker which is many times referred to as a producer. A producer does produce the music a lot of times however the main job of the producer is to coach the rapper in order to get the very best performance out of them & captured as a recording. The Producer lends another set of unbiased ears and a total vision for the finished song and is like a guide through the recording process.

The second issue that the aspiring rapper & home recording artist fall victim to comes From not knowing how to capture the best vocal recordings on their mic. The rapper should try to keep the microphone about 3 to 6 inches from their mouth during recording and always do a mic level check & adjust the mic input gain (in pro tools the mbox) so that the recording input never hit’s the red on the meter and averages about the middle of the meter. This will ensure that the vocal recording is loud enough without any distortion.

The Home recording rapper should record their vocals in a room with little or no hint of echo or zing… a garage is not a good place to record vocals, you DO NOT want the room sound in your vocal recording. Blankets can be placed on walls around where the mic is to kill any echo zing from the room & will improve the vocal recording. The artist should always memorize the song before recording so that they can record the performance with confidence & swagger rather than the “reading from paper” vocal performance.  When recording vocals, the rapper should capture at least 1 flawless take of each verse that can stand on it’s own with every word pronounced and clear before adding any overdubbed adlibs which should be used to accent key phrases not to fix badly pronounced words.

When putting together the vocal mix over the beat keep the main vocal tracks panned in the center, then pan accent adlibs slightly off center left & right, then any additional adlibs/reaction words (whether done by the rapper or a girl or a different person) pan those further left & right . On all vocals put a high pass eq filter on the vocal channels set at 80db. This will keep out any of the rumble from the mic stand & generally will clean it up a bit. Start using these tips right away & you will notice an instant improvement in your finished songs. You can start using these tips right away in order to obtain recording results comparable with real (commercial)studio recordings.