A Quick Guide to Recording Vocals at Home

Before I get started, I have to note that I haven't had any professional training and I have little technical knowledge, so this process is the one that I've developed over several years, recording hundreds of hours of recording and more than 100 finalized and released tracks. It's not the most formal or fancy process, but it works.

1. Recording equipment: You'll need a laptop, headphones, a mic stand, pop screen and a good recording mic. There are many mics that work, but I use a Blue USB microphone so I can record directly to the laptop. There are other setups, but they are more expensive and more complicated.

2. Recording location: You need a good quiet place to record in, one with good acoustics. You should record a few different places around the house as a test and find which one sounds the best. If you can't find a completely quiet room, you'll need to edit out ambient sounds (like air conditioing) with a filter. These come free with the:

3. Recording software: Audacity is free and professional-quality. I'm sure there are other alternatives, but I've never needed them. Important tip: Once you have your microphone set up and plugged into the laptop, make sure to change the Audacity software to record from the USB mic, not the laptop's internal mic.

4. Music track: Vocals and instruments should be recorded separately unless you're working with a professional recording engineer. Generally speaking, I will import the backing track into Audacity and go from there.

5. Setup: Here are the steps:

a. Set-up laptop in your chosen recording space.

b. Set-up your mic stand and mic, attach USB. The mic stand should be set to your height, so that when you sing, you are looking straight ahead or slightly downward. If you have to look up or too far down, you'll stretch and/or strain your vocal chords.

c. Make sure you have a pop screen set up in front of the microphone to catch your excessive P's and S's. Any cheap pop screen will work and these simply attach to the mic stand and put a screen between your mouth and the mic. Also, the screen keeps your mic clean, and you should probably clean it regularly.

d. Plug in headphones. When recording, you only want to record your voice, not a second-hand version of the song along with your voice. This process will create two separate tracks (vocals, instrumental) that you’ll combine into one and export as the final song file.

e. Download, set up and open Audacity. Import your backing track. Make sure the program is set to the proper mic.

Now you are ready to record.

6. Recording process:

a. Audacity sometimes slightly moves your recorded vocals around in the timeline and you may have to adjust in order to get back to the proper timing. This is what happened if you play it back and it sounds terrible because you aren't in time with the music. This is fixed by simply sliding the vocal track left or right until the song and the backing music match up to the way you want them to. This may not come up, depending on your computer, OS, etc.

b. There are two basic approaches to recording a song that I'll take. If it's an easy song or I know it super well, I'll try to sing the whole thing straight through. That's rare, though, so there are two ways to get around that. One is to record each part (verse, chorus, hook, bridge) separately and piece them together. The other is to sing the whole thing in the proper lyric order until I get to a part where I mess up. I'll stop singing, go back before the error and start from that clean place and move forward from there. The other approach is to sing multiple full takes of the song and cut and paste the various parts until you get an entire song that you like. This last approach takes the most technical skill.

c. An important thing to note for recording is that if you aren't doing the whole song in one take, you have to be careful about how you fix it. If you make a mistake in the middle of a verse, you can't just start at that word with a fresh recording, because you don't sing words the same way in the middle of a line as you would at the beginning. So you have to start at the beginning of not only the line in the song, but likely several lines back, so that you get the full and proper melody and enunciation. If there are long enough spaces between sung lines, this isn't a problem, but if the lines are close together, you have to sing them in blocks in order to maintain the proper melody/rhythm.

d. A tip I use that helps with recording is to record the full song (regardless of errors) as a "guide track." This version is perfectly matched up with the instrumental track and then is MUTED. You never play this version, you use it to match up the waveforms, sliding the vocal part you do want to use to the exact spot in the song it should be. Visually, the instrumental track isn't as easy to match things up with as a muted vocal track is, since you’re matching the same thing to itself. If you record the full song in a take you don't need to edit, then you don't have to worry about it, but if you can't do that (I rarely can), then it's easier to cut and paste the parts together and matching the waveforms makes the edit SOOOOOOOOOO much easier than trying to match vocals to instrumental, an auditory thing, through visual processing. I may make a video on this part so it makes more sense.

There are more details, but I'm not sure what else is necessary to know at this point, so I'll leave it open to future questions...