If you’re recording a vocal, whether you’re an established artist or someone just starting out in the industry, you naturally want to ensure it is crisp, clear, and professional sounding.  However, getting a great sounding vocal isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Here are some tips to help you get the best possible vocal.

Gating

Background noise is the bane of all vocal recordings, especially if you’ve laid down a flawless vocal and hit every note while singing your track. If you’re unable to find a great studio, or have done so but still struggle to keep background noise to a minimum, then gating is your friend.

Most audio software platforms and workstations will have a noise gate included so you can eliminate and mute background noise. The hardest work you’ll have to do here is ensuring that your vocal remains natural sounding, as taking away the background noise, as irritating as it is, can actually make your voice sound more manufactured. It is easy to fall into the trap of overproducing your own voice when trying to get this right, so play around until you hit as close a sound as possible.

Low Frequency Filtering

This is by no means an essential part of getting an exceptional sounding vocal, but if you’re planning to really delve into the other aspects of production and use lots of plugins to create audio effects, you need to be filtering out the low frequencies in your track.

You should do this after gating but before everything else, as it will stop any unwanted noise leaking into your track later in the production process.

Compressing

Even the best vocalists can struggle to maintain their volume all the way through singing a track. On top of this, there are a whole manner of reasons why the dynamic variance of a track may change throughout. Typically, this will be because of the big difference even small moves away and towards the microphone can have, while you might also be dealing with changes in acoustics and dynamics as people enter or leave the room, for example.

Using compression to produce your vocals can help to not only make your sound consistent but also help you later when you need to mix and add a backing track or a secondary vocal.

Adding Reverb, Delay, and Effects

You can have a lot of fun at this stage of the production process, but you should remember to think about the type of music you’re creating. If you’re planning to release the track for sale but want to become a successful live performer, it probably helps to keep your vocal as natural as possible.

However, if live music isn’t a huge priority for you, or you deliberately want to create a much different sound with your recordings, then experiment away! You should still be careful of over producing and ruining your vocal, however. The voice should still be the focal point.

Produce professional, crisp sounding vocals every time by using these techniques to give yourself a brilliant track.