Fundamental: Vocals

Continuing our best selling series on the Fundamental production techniques for dance producers comes Fundamental: Vocals.
We don’t all have access to specialized vocal booths with top-flight studio equipment so what’s the point of creating a vocal tutorial around them? For this tutorial we left our studios and went out into the field to show how, with some prior knowledge and a modest budget, its perfectly possible for you to capture hit vocals in a dance hall or even a small bedroom.

You will start with an introduction to electronics and microphone technology where you will learn about the different styles of microphone alongside the different pick-up patterns and discuss which is commonly best to choose for any given situation. You will then move on to cover pre-amps, pop filters, mic placement, sound cancellation, cats cradles, baffles and the use of reflexion filters.

Using numerous audio examples, we supply you examples from a couple of different microphones and the difference both reflexion filters and baffles can make a vocal recording. We also provide an audio comparison of the cheaper solid-state vs the infamous Focusrite ISA unit.
With the technology covered, we then move onto a track produced for the tutorial and examine the principle and theory behind lyrical content. We discuss ideas on how to produce lyrical melodies, rhyming, and rhythmical patterns and also look at the most popular method for writing lyrics.

Finally, using some modest equipment we go on location to record two session singers; one in their home bedroom and another in a dance hall environment. We show how to position the microphone, pop filters, baffles, and reflexion filters based on the room to receive the best vocal response. With these vocals recorded we then return to the studio and show how to tune, edit, effect and process them into our example track to produce the finished article.

Fundamental 5 also includes complete plans in PDF format for constructing the same baffle system we use in the tutorial.
Note: for this tutorial, you should already have a basic understanding of musical scales, as discussed in Fundamental: Music Theory, Bass.