Sunday, September 1, 2013

4 Basic Audio Tweaks To Improve Home Studio Vocal Recordings

By Frank Lubsey


You might invest a lot of money buying the perfect beat for your next hip hop track, but if the vocals don't match the beat quality, you might just end up creating a track critics will enjoy tearing apart. Hip hop is as much about great vocals as it is about beats and instrumentals. You can never find the perfect excuse for buying great beats only to mix them with horrible vocals. It can be difficult producing high quality hip hop tracks using the cheap equipment found in a home studio but it is not entirely unachievable. Here are 4 audio changes that will set you on the way to creating great hits.

Noise gates are a must. The truth is that there will always be some noise within your home studio no matter how hard you try to eliminate it. Modern technology has enabled the development of software that can help you minimize noise. The noise gate is the primary tool to use for this purpose. Most music production software come with noise gates. A good example is Audacity, a popular open source recording program. Noise gates eliminate any noise present during silent periods during recording. This noise elimination program is especially useful for noises within the studio such as an overhead fan. Turn the noise gate on when going through a silent interval. Caution must be taken when using this tool as use might result in unnatural sounding records. A background noise that's too loud can result in an unnatural sounding record once vocal recording is complete.

Tweak #2. Employ Noise Reduction. Just like noise gate, this tool is present in most recording programs but you have to use this with caution and ONLY when necessary. Noise reduction makes a record sound as if it was taken underwater. To make this tool work for you, you have to indicate how noise sounds like, but this only works well if noise is not that audible because if it's pervasive and loud a huge portion of the record will sound bad.

Learn to use compression. This feature is designed to regulate loudness within the track without constantly adjusting volume. As with the nose reduction tool, avoid using the compressor too much. This tool gives you freedom to select maximum loudness of the vocal recording. You can afterwards use volume controls to increase volume above the selected maximum loudness. This gives you better control of the voice recording volume while at the same time regulating track pitch. This tool displays the track in the form of waves. Your aim is to ensure that the waves occupy as much space as is possible within the display without touching the edges. If this is allowed to happen, distortion of the recording will occur.

Understand normalization. The normalization feature can be used to increase sound to its highest point without any distortion. This feature is useful in instances where the track volume is low and, volume faders or gain can't be effectively used to increase track volume. In such instances, track recovery is the only option to get the right volume. This tool is also useful when you want to set the peak level of your recording.

It's best to first decide which tool to use and why it's necessary before using it in your recording. The choice of tools to use depends largely on your recording. Use these tools wisely to ensure that the vocals and beats blend in perfectly.




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