You hate your vocals. Do something. Open your master and put an eq on your vocal. Not any eq. You want a shallow u shaped cut. So you can take a few db off a narrow band of the vocal. You might make five cuts. Start making cuts and see if you can improve your vocal. Nothing below 60 is valuable so you can cut all of that. Low mids has power. Narrow upper mids have important intelligiblity powers. Don’t boost. Cut only until you are dizzy. I eq every instrument and vocal until it sounds right. After a while you know what to do and it becomes unconscious habit. Roger Nicoles of Steely Dan fame created the eq settings we use today. Research his methods online. His wisdom has been made available since his demise. John Lennon famously hated his singing voice. He used the Shure 57 with the broken handle to record his vocals at Abby Road, all of them. Each song has a slightly different John voice. Use your ears. Feedback on this part of making recordings is fine with me, is welcome, but remember this, no one knows how to do this but you, but not everyone has ears. How’s that for mystery?
Thank you for this post! I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing with EQing so this is a helpful place to start! I will definitely look into Roger Nicoles
Make cuts in the parts of your vocal you don't like. Sounds so easy. Then try to do it.
If your ears are the problem there are people on this site with good ears. Ask for help on specific tracks.
Asking me will get you all kinds of help and I will probably take your project over if I start to "hear it".
I hate to work on stuff I don't like. I have to feel the track. Once I am responding to the experience it's almost automatic.
This will happen for you. Dyl, Mike, Steve, toneStone Steve, and Tom all have great ears. Each has a different style. None of them mix like I do. None of them will mix like you do.
Mixing three pieces and a vocal is very different than what it takes to mix three keyboards, drums, guitar, horns and vocals. And make it a girlie vocal, well let's just say that special care must be taken.
I cut my teeth in the analog studio, but I remember when digital arrived. I still prefer analog sound.
One of the first records I produced was of a certain Dr.'s wife singing a pop tune. Back then a house band that could play stuff off the radio quickly was valuable. Anyway this lady had to be high and drunk to do her vocals and then locked herself in the bathroom to avoid listening to the playback. I think we made 80 or so corrections to her performance. She burned the master tape with a cigarette lighter when she finally worked up the nerve to listen to her track. We still got paid.
One more.
We don't have real drummers. I use digital drums. I prefer addictive drums. It doesn't matter. I eq drums hard. I create my own presets, don't use factory sets. My drums always sound like me. In the analog studio the hardest thing to do was get good drum sounds. ****, by the way, is a recording environment where YOU are required to make the ***** sound good on an ancient Gretch drum kit. Anyway, eq is the basic thing that separates people with ears from the rest of us. Very easy to prove. Listen to any Steely Dan record. It sounds too good, beyond perfection. They had the best ears. You don't have those ears. How did they get them? Focus. Working beyond perfection takes super human effort. Listen to Dan drum tracks. 'Nuff said.
