You don’t have to choose the best take, meaning you don’t have to stress about getting best performance ever in one shot. Step 2: Create the Perfect Composite Track You need to hear all of the details of the vocals alone without interference. Steps 2 through 5 should be done with the vocals in solo mode, meaning you can only hear the vocal track and not any of the other instruments. The point is to get as many recordings as needed. In Logic Pro, for example, you’ll see the dropdown arrow on the top left that you can click to collapse the takes, and it will label the main take as a “Comp,” meaning composition, which I’ll explain next. Your DAW will add all of the takes on the same track of the multitrack as seen in the image above. You can loop a segment of the song you’re ready to perform and then do as many takes as you want one after another. You want your vocals coming in at an average volume of about -18 dB inside your software for proper gain staging and headroom.ĭon’t record one take. That means busting out your best gear, making a ragtag DIY vocal booth if needed, or heading into the studio.

This goes without saying, but the first thing you want to do is record at the best quality you can manage.

Step 1: Record the Highest Quality Takes You Can As you go through, there will be links to more of our articles where you can explore various concepts in deeper detail. You can even work along in your digital audio workstation if you wish. Let’s go through the process from step one all the way through to the final polish. But 50% of the battle comes in post-production with signal processing, otherwise known as mixing. People spend a lot of money on recording gear and acoustic treatment trying to improve their quality, and that’s good. It’s not hard once you understand the order of operations. The question is how to mix vocals to the point that they compete with the quality of professional releases and productions. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about music, podcasting, voice acting, podcasting, television and movies… What everyone focuses on is the human voice.

Mixing rap vocals fl studio