Recording Vocals

goreill2

I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for recording vocals, specifically with Cubase. I'm using a condenser mic w/ Cubase so the sound quality is excellent but i can't find the right filters to get a julian "i can't sing properly so i'll distort the sound and make it sound good" casablancas touch to it. Or for that matter the kind of distorted sound jack white/ zack de la rocha gets sometimes. Any ideas on this or any other techniques to make vocals sound better?

squibs

So basically you can't sing and want to hide the fact? Welcome to the club I've been at it for years

First point - you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

After that, if you are going the lo-fi route, use EQ or preferably lo-pass/hi-pass filters ( or preferably a band pass filter) to cut the lows and the highs. Start with the center frequency at 1KHz (as the frequency band you want to let through) and about 1KHz wide (so runs from 500Hz to 1.5KHz) and adjust to taste. Add a tube saturation or tape saturation effect to get a warm distortion (play with some ampsims as well - especially if you can disable the eq sections). You might also want to try a bit cruncher - try 10bit resolution.

Have a look at isotope vinyl for general lo-fi mayhem. It's free IIRC.

Don't overlook double tracking, ADT, chorus and swathes of verb and delay. Engineers have used these to help cover up sucky singers for years!

QuadLeo

They're good suggestions. I've tried most of them. They take a bit of tweaking but sound great.

Also, try recording the vocals onto a new track with a few ms delay (4ms, no feed back) and a lot of compression from a nice plugin but distort the signal by boosting the input gain on the compressor. EQ the new signal as squibs said with the filters until it sounds the way you want it. Then mix the original vocals with the new one. Works really well on hardware compressors, dunno about pluggins though. The distortion might sound crap cos it'll be digital. Give it a shot.

jtsuited

you want that julian casablancas sound? Do what he does then. Send the signal through a guitar amp (or software amp emulator). I stick every non clean vocal through a Vox AC 30 (emulator) and it sounds just beautiful.
Check my sig and you'll hear it being used very subtly, but obvious all the same.

teamdresch

Hm. Anything I can think of to recommend involves analog gear, but PSP's vintage warmer plugin is my favourite for roughing sound up inside a computer.

CmX

light distortion with a filter is pretty cool and a little touch of delay afterwards