Recording Tommy

My friend, Tommy Hall, is a semi-professional singer and today he came over to my house so that I could record him singing.  Tommy sings pretty often for local audiences – he uses karaoke music and sings along with the tracks.  He has also performed with live bands in front of larger audiences.

Today I recorded him singing “Easy Lovin” by Freddie Hart, and “After the Lovin” by Englebert Humperdink.  I then worked on the tracks in my DAW (Sonar X1) for a couple of hours… you can listen to samples of the results:

After the Lovin:

Easy Lovin:

The setup

I recorded using two tracks in Sonar – one for the music and one for the vocals.  The first thing I did was to set the volume levels on the tracks to make a decent mix.  Then I started working on the vocal track.  Using Sonar’s ProChannel strip, I added compression to even out the volume using the PC-76 W-Type compressor. This is a nice and warm compressor which handled the vocals just right.

The recording, having been done in a room with Tommy standing right next to a wall, seemed to have a bit of an overload in the harmonics around 170Hz, so I used the ProChannel’s EQ to pull that down while boosting the bass some.

Then I added Cakewalk’s SpecraFX processor to put a bit of a chorus and stereo expansion on his voice.  This plug-in actually does a lot more than just that, but that’s all I needed to do and it sounded nice.  After that in the FX chain is the Sonitus:fx Reverb processor.  I used it’s default reverb preset, and tweaked it just a little bit.

For the music track, I added Cakewalk Studioverb2 to , and dialed it down pretty low – just enough to give a little sheen to the music to match the vocals better.  I also turned on the PC-76 compressor in the ProChannel, and EQ’d a wide Q around 183Hz down a little.

This song is a hard one for Tommy to sing cold because of the higher range.  Thanks to Sonar’s V-Vocal plugin, I was able to take a couple of spots in the song and (ever-so) slightly adjust the pitch of a note here and there.  Made a lot of difference, though!

Finally, I went through the track a few times, tweaking the volume of the vocal track (recording the automation) to make sure to compensate for spots that were a little too loud or soft.

I copied the track settings to the recording of “After the Lovin”, tweaked a few settings, and that song was done very quickly.  I’m very pleased with the results!!