Welcome to the next installment of "Tech Talk." This monthly feature will hopefully help you understand about certain sound and musical gadgets that everyone sees but are just not sure how they operate in the real world.

This month we will be talking about recording vocals.

The main goal to recording a solid vocal is to get all of the performance. It's not easy to set levels with a good, dynamic vocalist. As soon as you think you have the level pegged, they do something like move a few inches and you find out they are louder than you thought and meters are in the red. So you lower the level and find out that the meters are barely moving at all. If the vocalist is nervous and moving around, you might spend hours and never find an optimum level. The human voice is extremely dynamic, from soft whispers to piercing screams. If the level is too low, you will be bringing in noise and hum if you amplify it later. However, if you record too loud, there will be times when the file goes "over" which will likely result in damage that cannot be corrected later.

One solution to this madness is to use a compressor in the chain after the preamp. The compressor, essentially, automatically lowers the volume when the input exceeds a certain threshold. It's like an invisible hand on a volume control. This allows a vocalist to get louder without going into the red. One of my favorite settings is to have the input to the compressor boosted so that all the "soft" words come through with a strong level. As soon as the vocalist gets louder, the clamping down begins and if they scream, it clamps down hard. The ideal is to have more consistent loudness no matter what they are doing.

The other solution is to record at such a low level the highest peak will never break through the roof. It can be argued that a compressor is not needed in the process of recording vocals, particularly since we now record as 24 bit digital audio. What is needed is that you work with care, and never let your signal clip at 0dbfs, which is the highest signal possible digitally. Keep it well under 0db. The "average" signal should be about -17db fs, which means the signal may rise to about -9 at its loudest and dip to far lower on a soft. Can you record too soft? With a nice preamp and a clean signal path you can record way down like -32dbfs where you can barely see the waveform and it will still work. But if you have cheap, noisy gear and preamps, you do not have this luxury. You must make sure your signal is loud enough to mask the hiss of the preamp and the garbage on your mixer strip. Record too low and you'll have these nasties to contend with later.

Til next time,

Roger

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