vocal recording tips

[Nubus]

I noticed the other day that since we were recording lead vocals on the same day as the backups they ALL sound like leads. I am gonna try and get the backups all rerecorded on a different mic or in a different position. It seems like a better idea to get them recorded souning like they sound rather than fix it in the mix.
Does anybody else have any tips for tracking vocals?

Originally Posted by Nubus

I noticed the other day that since we were recording lead vocals on the same day as the backups they ALL sound like leads. I am gonna try and get the backups all rerecorded on a different mic or in a different position. It seems like a better idea to get them recorded souning like they sound rather than fix it in the mix.
Does anybody else have any tips for tracking vocals?

i know how that goes. are you recording on a computer daw program? i fix in the mix a lot, and it works out pretty good on my demos. bringing the backup vocal tracks volume down a bit will help seperate, as well as doubling the lead vocals and panning center, and doubling the background vocals and panning left and right on the seperate background vocals. that's worked well for me, but everybody has different opinions on that too... this might sound a bit weird, but i like to think of music as 3 dimensional, in terms of spacially, like, foreground and background. so i think the trick is to bring the lead vocal to the forefront, while pushing the background vocals back some, seperating them spatially (if that makes any sense to ya...)

although i dont use many different mics, from what ive read in recording magazine, different mics and different eq settings will help seperate the vocals too

[Bellringer]

I like to set up 2 vocal mics. One that the backup is singing about a foot from (sometimes a dynamic) and the other (usually a large condenser of some kind) about 2-3 feet back. When I mix, I can usually get a back up sound from the far mic. You will have to push the gain on the pre a bit but you end up with a sound that has some space between the mic and the voice. A different mic than the lead vocal mic will sometimes help as well. Toy with the distance a little bit and you will find a spot that will work for you.

[dagosto]

You can bring those vocals "back" in te mix a variety of ways. A low pass filter or some high shelving eq are the probably the most obvious ones. High frequencies get eaten up by the air so they don't travel as far. Bringing them down gives the perception of distances. Filtering the lows out can also help by eliminating the bass boost caused by proximity effect in directional mics.

Also obvious, reverb or delay. Try short decay and delay times to add early reflections.

Any modulatory effect can help bring tracks furthe back in the mix. I sometimes like to strap a light chorus across all of my backing vox tracks either as a send or an insert on a separate backing vox buss.

[Nubus]

What I meant to say was that I don't want to fix in the mix. I want to get the vocals sounding like backgrounds right off the bat as we are recording. So far the only tips I have are using a different mic further back and a little subtractive eq.

[Nubus]

I realized too those vocals were all really compressed to tape. Maybe all I needed to do was bypass that compression on the background tracks?