In this article, we will go over the necessary starting points when recording your vocal tracks, whether you’re recording classical, pop, rock or hip hop. Follow a few of these tips and your vocal recording sessions will go smoother, quicker and more importantly: FUN!

1. Make sure you have a good singer.

2. Try to find a singer with great vocal character.

3. Use a singer that feels relaxed in the recording studio.

4. Try to use a condenser microphone instead of a dynamic.

5. Rent several microphones and try each one. You may find the perfect microphone that matches your vocalist’s sound.

6. Keep the singer 6-12 inches away from the microphone.

7. Use a pop filter, or wind screen. If you don’t have one, make one from pantyhose and a coat hanger.

8. Use good sounding 24bit audio converters.

9. Try to record without compression or EQ. You can always add more during the mix.

10. Keep your input levels peaking around -3dB.

11. When setting your input levels, keep them lower than you think. Many singers ‘warm up’ much quieter than they will perform.

12. Warm up the singer by getting them to sing a few verses, and take this time to adjust your input levels and check all your settings.

13. Try switching the pick-up pattern of the microphones between cardioid and omni.

14. If you’re picking up too much ‘room’ sound, switch to cardioid.

15. Hang some thick blankets, or stick your singer in a closet to isolate the microphone. Computer fans don’t sound too good in a song!

16. Have plenty of water on hand for the performer. Discourage any coffee, tea, milk, pop drinks until the session is finished.

17. Try to comp vocals together from full verses, rather then getting the singer to punch in one or two words.

18. Keep the singer from moving around too much. Ask them to stay as still as comfortably possible.

19. Use a sturdy stand for their lyrics, and have plenty of pens, pencils and highlighters available.

20. Make sure you get their headphone mix perfect.

21. Try to record the vocal tracks dry, and add effects and reverb during the mix. It’s almost impossible to comp a vocal track in Pro Tools or Cubase when it’s swimming in reverb.

Most Importantly

22. Have fun! Make sure everyone in the studio is having as much fun as you are and you will always get the best takes possible

By Richard Dolmat

Mastering is the last stage of production, right after the recording studio session mixdowns and before the master CD is sent to get duplicated and distributed. It is extremely important to your product and can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your recordings.

Since many musicians have a home recording studio, it is more important than ever to get your final CD mastered properly. For indies trying to stand out in a world of big recording budgets, this level of mastering art can make a huge impact on the quality of your home music studio recordings.

Some of the processing done at the mastering stage may include:

* Equalization and harmonic balancing for consistent sound throughout your entire album.
* Adjusting micro/macro-dynamics (volume changes) of your songs for consistency and loudness.
* Checking inter-channel phase and polarity for mono compatibility.
* Final CD layout with proper song spaces, segues, fades and crossfades snapped to CD frame boundaries.
* Sample and bit rate conversion with dither to Red Book Audio CD Standard.
* and a few tricks up our sleeve

What you get at the end:

* Proper final master CD burning with relevant paperwork (PQLists, BLER print-out etc.)
* Full QC (quality control) on all final masters (C1/C2/CU/BLER error checks).
* Individually printed master CD with your name and contact info.
* A studio that takes it’s time (may take 1, 2 or more days; until you’re happy)
* A kickin’ album!

It’s amazing how a good mastering job can bring out the width, depth and dimension of a song. You’ll hear sounds that used to be buried in the mix, the vocals will shine through, the reverb and effects will be heard, and the whole CD will be more enjoyable over a varying range of playback systems. But of course, this all depends on the mix of your songs. The mastering engineer isn’t a Jedi and can not create or change something that isn’t there. I like to use the analogy that it’s like trying to take the eggs out of a finished cake. Not possible!

Most professional mastering studios can accept audio CD, data CD (wav, aiff), DAT, ADAT, DA-88, Mini-Disc, cassette tape, vinyl, and USB/Firewire hard-drives.

Here is what you should do when sending your music to a mastering studio:

* Use their available Mastering Order Form to send all your information.
* Include all ISRC codes along with your songs, if you have them. We need these before burning the final master disc.
* DO NOT add any processing to your main mix bus (ie: compression etc). We can’t undo what you’ve done. Keep it natural and clean.
* Do not clip your files, keep your peaks somewhere around -3dB and you’ll be safe. It’s nearly impossible to remove distortion.
* Leave space before and after your music (ie: 2-3 sec at head and tail of each song)
* If you have, include the UPC number of the disc.
* Make sure ALL your song names are in full. No abbreviations please! The engineer needs full names to add as CD-TEXT (which some CD players use to show your band name and song name)
* Give a track list of the order you would like your songs to appear on the final CD.
* Include your CD album title
* Include your FULL contact information (Band Name, Album Name, Contact Person, address, tel, fax, web, email etc). The engineer will use this information to print onto your duplication master disc.
* Send along a few of your favorite songs as reference.

Rip a couple of songs from your favorite CD and add these in with your original files. This can do wonders in helping the mastering engineer understand the ‘sound’ you are striving for. It’s always easier to ‘hear’ an example than it is for you to explain it.

If possible, we at Digital Sound Magic Studios, prefer to receive 44.1 kHz (24bit) data files on CD-ROM (24bit wav or aiff). This gives us the best source material to work with.

Errors

Each and every audio CD in the world has errors on it. That’s just the nature of the game. But each and every audio CD player has built-in error correction. The CD player fixes these errors on the disc before you can hear them, giving you perfectly clean audio playback. According to the Red Book Audio CD Standard, an audio CD is allowed up to 220 errors per second!

Well, at http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com we like to think we have better quality control than that. We like to keep our error rate to no more than 30 per second. But we quite often average around only 5 per second. Which just goes to show, you DO get what you pay for!

And last but not least, always always ask questions. If you are confused, the mastering engineer will be more than willing to help. If not, take your money and run.

Oh yeah, NEVER EVER EVER use a mastering studio that asks for your songs in MP3 format. EVER!

Copyright 2006 Richard Dolmat (Digital Sound Magic Studios)
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Richard Dolmat is owner, engineer and producer for the Vancouver based recording studio Digital Sound Magic. Visit his site at: http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com

by: Richard Dolmat

You know your songs are great, and you finally decided to record an album in a real studio. That’s great! But what actually happens when you get there?

When you finally do pick the perfect studio, one that you feel comfortable at, there is a certain routine that must be followed in order to get the best performance and the best recording for your budget.

1. Tune Your Instruments – This also includes your drums and any tunable percussion instruments you may have. There is absolutely nothing worse in the world than to have a perfectly written song with a perfect performance be ruined because someone didn’t take an extra 2 minutes to check their tuning. Tuning takes a few minutes; a recording lasts forever.

2. Be Well Rehearsed – You’ll be surprised how many bands suffer shock when they get the final recording bill. The main reason for this is because they confuse rehearsal time with recording time. Rehearse at home, in the garage, at your uncle’s house; anywhere but at the recording session. When you arrive at the studio, you should know your songs inside-out and be ready for the red light.

3. Practice with a Click Track – A lot of drummers aren’t able to play with a click track. Make sure yours can. A click track is essential in getting a good basic rhythm track that the rest of the band can lock in to, and to sync- up loops and delay times.

4. Be Early – Many studios start charging their clients from the exact time agreed to in the contract. Just because you decide to show up late, doesn’t mean that the studio should give up that time for free. Be early and be ready to go.

5. Get the Sound Right – Never, ever try to “fix it in the mix”. It doesn’t work like that. Take an extra few minutes to tweak the sound before recording it. Turn that knob, tighten that string, have another sip of water. Remember again, tweaking may take an extra minute, but the recording will last forever.

6. Know When To Quit – Recording often leads to diminishing returns. Spending 20 hours in a row at the recording session isn’t going to make your song twice as good as spending 10 hours. This rule also applies to mixing. If you’re tired, call the session and come back the next day fresh and ready.

7. Record Alone – Don’t bring your friends, family, parents or anyone else into your sessions. As fun as it may be, you are there to do a job and record the best music possible. If you are a millionaire, then by all means, have a party at the studio, but don’t count on getting anything done.

8. Mix and Match – After letting the engineer do the first rough mix alone (which he should) do an A/B comparison of your mix to some of your favorite CDs. Remember that the production CDs you are listening to have already been mastered. But it’s a good way to compare levels and panning.

9. Bring Spares – Always bring spare strings, drum heads, bass strings, water bottles, throat lozenges, etc to a session. You’ll always need the one thing you forgot to bring, so bring it all and leave them at the studio until your recordings are finished.

10. Have Fun! – This is THE most important point of all. Creating and recording music isn’t rocket science. Although there is a science involved, you should let the engineer worry about that. If you’re not having fun, then you’re in the wrong business!

Copyright 2006 Richard Dolmat (Digital Sound Magic Studios)
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About The Author
Richard Dolmat is an award winning producer and engineer. Visit his recording studio site at: http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com

By: Richard Dolmat

Now that you’ve spent hours and days and weeks and months recording your musical masterpieces (and you’ve also read my article “Tips for a Great Recording Session“), you have arrived at my favorite time in the studio; The Mixdown.

But don’t think your job is done yet! The mixdown is just as important as recording. As an artist, you have to approach the mixdown from an artist’s point of view and stay on the ‘creative’ side of the fence where it’s still possible to shape your songs throughout the process.

Remember the old “Yin-Yang” principle which states, “whenever you turn something up, something else disappears. Furthermore; whenever you turn something down, something else gets louder”. This applies to EQ, levels and almost anywhere you have two or more tracks.

First of all, let’s “zero the board”. This is simply the action of bringing all the faders to the bottom (-8) and centering all the pan knobs and effects sends. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “but our mix sounded good when we were tracking!”.

OK, but did the mix actually sound good or were you just accustomed to hearing it that way? That’s why zero-ing the board is important. It flushes your memory and allows you to start from scratch. It might even be better to mix a song that you finished recording a while back.

1. Get Kicked. – This is where I prefer to start. Other people like to start with the vocals and build around them. But I’m more rhythm based and prefer to start with the kick drum. One tricky part of any mix is getting a good gain-stage structure where you don’t clip the master faders at the end of your mixing session when all your instrument faders are raised. We must be careful to keep watching the master bus clipping lights to make sure they never get into the red. Here is why the kick is a good place to start. Play your songs and watch the master bus VU meters. This is probably the only time you will mix with your eyes. As you’re watching the master VU meter, slowly raise the kick fader until the master meter reads about -7dB. If you are a four piece band, then you can leave the kick there and move on. But if you have a really dense tune, then you may have to lower the kick to -8dB or -12dB (to leave room for all the other instruments as they come up). Now you are set to mix. The kick should be the only channel that you set levels by watching. Every other channel mixed into the song will be with your ears relative to the kick.

2. Moving On – From now on, it’s pretty much a free-for-all. Some like to move on to the bass next, in order to find the balance for the low-end of the song. Other people like to keep working on the drum kit “as a whole” before moving to other instruments. I prefer to move onto the drum kit over-head mics. They say that a great drum kit sound can be captured using only two over-head mics, and a kick mic. And it’s true. Some of my tunes only use three mics on the final mixed versions, even though we had used up to ten mics for the recording of the kit.

If you placed your over-head mics properly (i.e.: so the snare sounds centered in the stereo image, and not skewed to the left or right speaker) then you will have a better stereo image of the drum kit when the mix is finished. Otherwise you might have to do some fancy panning or EQ to get a balanced image with the drum kit.

You can now bring in the rest of the kit underneath the over heads to fill out the sound. I prefer to leave EQ and effects to the very end of the mix, after all of the instruments are playing. Try to place your toms in the same panning position as the overhead mics recorded them. If your floor tom in the overheads is to the right at 3 o’clock then pan your individual floor tom fader to the same position. And don’t forget to check your phase between your mics pointing down and your mics pointing up.

3. Big Bottom – Now I like to add in the bass. Nothing too important here if you have good source audio. I’m also a huge side-chaining fan. I LOVE to side-chain the bass with the kick so the low end frequencies wouldn’t fight for space in the mix. It just makes things sound “tighter”. Sometimes you may have to eq the lowest of the lows out of the kick in order to make a little more room for the bass to sit in the mix.

4. Pads and More – Here is where I add the “pad” type of sounds. These are sounds that usually have longer sustains and hold the chords of the song. Sounds like strings, sustained electric guitar chords, synth pads, and maybe even some rhythm acoustic guitars are great foundation instruments.

I like to lay these instruments on top of the drums and bass tracks we have already mixed. You can get very creative with the panning of these sounds and create a wide stereo field. This will help make your mix interesting by allowing your lead instruments and vocals sit in the center of your stereo image, attracting attention to themselves.

5. The Vox – Let’s finally add the vocals. (Hopefully you already know how to sing I usually start off with the lead vocal, and then place all the harmony and background vocals underneath the lead. Sometimes, you can end up putting the vocal a little too high in the mix, and a great way to check this is to turn your monitors way down and listen to the mix at an almost inaudible level. This way of listening to your mix will surprise you, but you have to be confident and trust your ears. If something sounds disproportionately loud at this quiet level, then it is too loud. If you must, then you can compress the vocals too, but that really depends on the song’s style. Maybe a few fader rides are a better choice then some static compression.

6. The Rest – You can start adding effects and other fancy shmancy things to your tune. Get funky with automating some pan knobs, fade-in some pads etc.. Here is a good time to get creative. It’s also a very good time to actively listen and re-adjust your mix. Is the kick too loud? Should I put some higher frequencies on the bass? Should I compress the backing vocals more? Is the coffee finally ready?

When you feel you have a good mix, burn it to CD and listen to it EVERYWHERE! In the car, in the bath, at home, on the TV set, at your friend’s place etc., and make a lot of notes. And at the end, if all your notes cancel out, then you are finished! Click here to increase your own recording studio business!

Copyright 2006 Richard Dolmat (Digital Sound Magic Studios)
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Get more recording studio tips and mixing tricks at Richard Dolmat’s Vancouver based
recording studio Digital Sound Magic. Visit his site at: http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com

By: Richard Dolmat

Today we will discuss helpful Internet tools that indie artists and bands can use to promote themselves. And we’re not just talking about having a website. I’ll try to cover a range of lesser-known yet helpful tools to keep you in front of the competition. It goes without saying that you should have good songs! Click here for some songwriting secrets!

Paypal

Now it’s even easier to make money! If you don’t already have one, I would suggest you get a free Paypal account (www.paypal.com). Consider Paypal as one huge world-wide bank. You can pay for items online (posters, stickers, blank CDs, mastering and more) to anyone with an email address in more than 50 countries. What’s even better is that Paypal does all the currency conversions for you (whether you’re buying or selling).

You can also upgrade to a Premier or Business account and accept all major credit cards with no setup fees or monthly merchant account payments. You can start selling your CDs, t-shirts and other merch directly through your website for a measly %2.9 commission. That’s all it costs for you to accept credit cards. Whereas if you were to get a real merchant account through the major banks, you would pay a setup fee, rent a processing machine for about $35/month (whether you use it or not), plus pay the commission on all purchases. If you don’t sell enough wares in any one month, you’ll have to pay another minimum fee. And then you’ll have to pay a web designer to implement the online processing functions into your band’s website.

Once your Paypal business account is up and running, you can start selling anything from your band’s website (t-shirts, CDs, bootlegs, stickers, cups, pens, blah blah).

RSS

RSS is an online news distribution format. The advantage of setting up an RSS system on your website is that it makes it easier for your fans to get your latest news releases. RSS is more of a passive distribution of news, where the headlines go to your fans (instead of your fans having to go to your website). All a person needs is an RSS aware program called an aggregator. These are freely downloadable from the Internet and can sit on your fan’s desktop. The second you add or update a headline in your RSS newsfeed, it will show up immediately in your fan’s RSS aggregator.You can get more info from these sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS or http://news.yahoo.com/rss.

Blogs

Blog is a short word for Web-log. Very simply put, it’s an online diary. These are great if you have Internet access during a tour and want to keep your fans updated with each date of the tour. You can post your thoughts on your shows, hotel room experiences, the bad food you’re being forced to eat and more. Each entry is dated and your fans can even comment on the entries, giving you feedback and support along the way. It’s an excellent way to keep your fans closely involved with your daily happenings. You can go to www.blogger.com to start your own free blog site. Or if you can find a way to include a blog directly on your home page, all the better!

Mambo

Mambo is an amazingly FREE and easily installable website content manager. If you’re used to making web page in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, Mambo will be a godsend to you. The difference is between offline webpage designing and online management. If you were to create a webpage in Frontpage (or other offline webpage designer), you’d have to upload the page back to your server and hope that all the links are valid, make sure the pages point to each other, make sure your images and mp3 files are in the proper sub- directories etc.

But with Mambo, you can just log in to your website, change any part of any page, and the system will automatically update all the relevant pages. That change will now be permanent. Unlike the offline editors, where you would have to ftp into your site, download the html page, open up your editor, change the words, save, close the editor, login to your server with ftp again, and then re- upload the page. What a hassle!

The best thing about Mambo is that there are programmers all around the world constantly creating add-ons. Mambo directly supports all the above Internet utilities already we talked about, including; blogging, RSS, Podcasts, Forums, online group calendars, newsletter emails, internal messaging between users and much more. And the super administrator of your website can assign different password levels to anyone else, allowing them to add to or change individual webpages (ie: current newsflashes etc).

To get a free download of the Mambo CMS, go to: www.mamboserver.com

And remember, there are infinite resources online for band and artist promotion, link exchanges, myspace.com, mp3 hosting sites and more. Take advantage of them and watch your careers take off.

Copyright 2006 Richard Dolmat (Digital Sound Magic Studios)
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Richard Dolmat is owner, engineer and producer for the Vancouver based recording studio Digital Sound Magic.
Visit his site at: http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com