by bones » Tue Jul 27, 2010 12:37 am
You do those things the same way you do them anywhere. The most important thing with vocals is getting them down as best you can in the first place, so use a good mic [hire one if you need to] and find a good acoustic space to record in. No background noise is probably the most important thing, as even distant traffic will come through when you start processing. Depending on the style and content, you may want to use some light compression on the way in but it is usually just as easy in a digital world to bring it in clean and work on it from there. On stage it is important to get it all as good as you can in one take, but in the studio I normally do at least 4 or 5 good takes, then cut them up and use the absolute best bits from each [or maybe layer them up].
For a good, clean mix, use the fewest number of effects possible. Dynamics effects are OK but try not to use things like chorus too much, as they might make one thing sound good but they can muddy up a mix. Same with reverb and delay - try and get away with just one of each, as send effects, and only use more for very specific things, like a big, short reverb on your snare or something.
The most important thing for getting a clean mix is EQ. Use it to carve out a niche for each part, so that you minimise one thing getting in the way of another. Compression can also keep things under control but if you pick your sounds well, you shouldn't need to use it too much. Also go through your synth patches and make sure you don't have anything with unnecessarily long release times. 95% of our sounds have no release at all, yet 95% of synth presets have a lot of release because it makes for a richer sound when you are soloing an instrument to find a preset to work from. While you're at it, go through and turn off all the on-board effects, then just turn back on the ones a sound really, really needs. If you use good synths, like the ones that come with Orion, you probably won't need many effects at all. If you look at anything on any of our albums, the vocals will almost always account for 50% or more of the effects used, because vocals are a raw sound that requires more work, where a synth or sampler sound can be tailored to work better in other ways.
Mostly though, it is just a matter of putting in the effort required. I would never consider a song finished and ready for an album unless I had spent 3 or 4 months working on it, which would be 80 to 100 hours of hard, boring, methodical work [I hate it], after the initial excitement had died away. I certainly wouldn't judge it until I was completely and utterly sick of hearing it. It is too easy to get caught up in the initial excitement of a great new song but you need to be 100% objective to finish it properly and there are no shortcuts.
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