 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. You know the last thing I would want is for you to feel foolish or silly over mistakes we've all probably made, including me. What I do want to do is give you a head start by telling you about 5 beginner recording mistakes you should avoid. I quickly want to thank the sponsor for this video, DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link for them in the description down below, you'll get 7% off an already incredible price for distributing your music. Now let's talk about this first mistake, which has to do with recording vocals. One mistake that almost all beginners will make when recording vocals is getting too close to the microphone. Now I've swapped over for this Studio Condenser microphone. This is the more common type of microphone that we'll use to record vocals. And I've popped on some headphones as I would if I was recording vocals. I'd have the backing music in here so it wasn't picked up by the microphone when I was playing it. And this is where I'll start to hear the sound of my voice. Now at the moment, I'm around about six inches away from the capsule of the microphone. But when you first pop on your headphones and you get close up to the microphone over here, it's going to sound like this, okay? And you're going to think this sounds really, really nice. Me too, okay? When we're close up to the microphone like this, there's a lot more low end energy there. There's a lot more low end frequencies. It's bassier if you like. That's called the proximity effect. When we are back over here, it's not quite as bassy and warm. But although this sounds OK when you're listening to it all by itself, when that's in a mix, it tends to be a bit muddy sounding, okay? And it loses definition. So although, as I say, it sounds OK by itself, but not so good when you're in a mix. So this is the first problem with this sound, but there's more. When we're this close to the microphone, any small movement of our head when we're singing will result in quite a drastic change in volume. So as I speak, la, la, la, la, la, la, and I've just moved back one inch here or so and I'll get closer again. There's quite a drastic change in volume. And if that was happening while I was singing, then there would be a lot to fix later on. Now, when I'm back over here at a much more ideal distance of around about six inches or more, you will find that with movements of the head of one or two inches when people are singing, what have you, the change in volume is not as noticeable. OK, it's a lot less. So here, big changes in volume, not so great. Now, there's another couple of problems with being this close to the microphone. The first one is plosives. Now, I do have this pop filter here. And I'm being very careful to speak off to the side. But if I was speaking here or singing here and I say a pop or a pop sound, you know, and I've had this in recordings before and I thought, where is it coming from? I'm hearing a sudden thump in the low end. Maybe I didn't notice at the time, you know, with different headphones of different speakers. And later on, you can hear the boom, boom. Sounds like someone's hitting, you know, hitting a kick drum or something. And you'll want to get rid of that. It's irritating. So that can be quite a bad sound. The other thing that we pick up is sibilants. OK, so they get really, really harsh and really sort of in your face or in your ears, if you like, when you're this close. OK, and again, there's something you'll spend time getting rid of. Also, you're going to get sloppy sounds from the mouth, depending on the singer. That kind of sound, I'm sure you didn't want me to do that. It's not a very attractive sound. So back here, again, although first off, when you try this, you'll think, oh, it sounds a bit thin, hasn't got that nice low end. What you'll get when you're further away from the microphone is a much more natural sound, a lot less fluctuations in volume, less plosives, less sibilants or less noticeable sibilants. I'm not saying you won't need to use like a DS or something. Probably still need to use it, but it'll be a lot easier to control it. So I reckon six inches is good, but you could even go further than that, depending on the singer and depending on that particular performance. If you're really bellowing it out, you may want to pull away a little bit. But, yeah, try to avoid this mistake. You will be enticed to making this mistake by that lovely sound that you get here, but try to avoid it. One really common technique that we use in recording is something called doubling, often used on vocals or guitar. And the basic principle is we take a performance. We have the performer re-perform that a number of times and will pan some of those extra performances left, some of them right. OK, we end up with a nice sort of wide sound and also a little extra impact. But it's essentially the same performance. It's not harmonies or anything like that. Now, some beginners try and take a shortcut with this and it doesn't really work because they're not really understanding why it's working. We'll get back to that later. But first of all, let's see how to do it correctly. I'm here in my door, and I just want you to have a quick listen to the beginning of this chorus where there's a female vocal. We'll listen to it in context. So let's strip that right back. Let's just solo the vocal here. We'll turn off the reverb, which is on there. There's a little bit of delay on there as well. And we will mute the doubles. We'll get back to that later. So now we'll just be hearing the vocal by itself as it was recorded. So I simply had the vocalist re-record that part two times. I panned one to the left and one to the right. And we end up with this. Now you can either use this as a kind of an effect which can really be heard, or you can use it much more subtly so that the listener wouldn't really notice it, but it would add some impact and some width. OK, so you just need to take a little extra time to do some extra takes. It's the fact that we have some small differences in timing and also in pitch, which makes this work. You can make it work even better by using slightly different EQ settings or perhaps using different microphones. It's the differences in the performances, the subtle differences which will make this work. Now, what some people do is they think to themselves, can't be bothered to do that. I don't see the point in doing that. And they simply copy and paste or duplicate the track. So let me just mute those doubles. Take the original vocal, right click here. I'm going to go to duplicate track. I'll do two copies of this. I'll just make sure I include the original recording, click on OK. So now we've got, as you can see, three copies of the same vocal. I will pan one left and one right, perhaps reduce the volume of the copies and then have a listen because I've given all you want. You've taken all you can. There's really no effect to be honest with you. It's maybe a little bit louder than it would be, but it's essentially still a mono recording, but that's OK. We can just add some delay here. So what I'll do is I'm just going to grab the first of these. I'll do a little sort of nudge in the timing with a keyboard shortcut here. I'll do that to the left one. I'll do it to the right one as well. And now let's have a listen because I've given all you want. You've taken all you can. I'll take it on the chin. I'll be your fool. Essentially, what we've done here is add delay, OK? And that's fine if that's all that you want. But it doesn't really add the same amount of width. And to be honest with you, you can end up with a sort of phasey sound with it. So in my mind, this shortcut really doesn't work, unless that's the end result that you want. Now, you can get plugins to which do this. There's doubling plugins. I'm sure waves have got one and also I know the isotope have got one. And they do a pretty decent job because they will do some modulation on the pitch and they will do some changes and delays in the with in terms of timing. However, it tends to be a little bit too uniform. I would suggest that the plugins are better than using this beginners technique, if you like, if you can call it a technique. But the best thing for my mind in terms of getting a really good result from this is to actually record separate performances and then pan them. Of course, you may be doubling any part of your performance or you may choose to collaborate with another person, perhaps harmonies, etc. Talking about collaboration, our sponsor for this video, DistroKid, has some great tools for splitting revenue from income of sales of music automatically between collaborators. Let's imagine I'd worked with my good friend, Joe Blogs, on a recent single I'd released through DistroKid and I want to make sure that he gets paid for his part in the project. Here on my DistroKid account, I'll just go to splits up at the top here, click on that, and it brings up this page where I need to select a release. So Joe worked with me on this song, I'll never know, and I click on next. OK, so it brings up this page. At the moment, you can see that I'm getting 100% of the revenue share. Woohoo. I do want to make sure that me and Joe stay friends. So I want to make sure he gets his part for the project. So I'll click on add collaborator and then add in Joe's email address like so. Now, I can select an amount of revenue share to be paid to Joe with this dropdown. So let's say, look, Joe was getting 20% here for his input. It automatically adjusts mine to 80% here. And then if I continue with this split, if Joe's already a member, he'll get an email, but if he's not a member, he will get an email. And he'll have the opportunity to join DistroKid for 50% off of the normal fee, so it's going to be less than $10 so that he can go ahead and collect his share of the revenue. Now, apart from regular percentage splits like that, we can also do recoupments. Perhaps Joe paid $100 up front for some piece of equipment for the recording, in which case we can click on add recoupments here and we can reimburse him his $100. Let's make sure we get that correct. And then after that, he will get his 20%. Very easy to do here on DistroKid. One thing I commonly hear from beginners is that they avoid using buses for their effects. So instead, they've got all of their effects as inserts on each channel. Now, there's nothing really wrong with using inserts, but the fact remains, there are some problems which can't be solved with inserts and you need to use a bus or an effects channel or an auxiliary channel. Let's take a look at this electric guitar part here. And I've got a plate reverb applied to this Arturia one here and pay particular attention to the part where some of the lower notes come in. You can hear a little bit of a sort of a low end build up there. It all starts to get a little bit mushy and muddy. Now, if you had this applied to several tracks at once, you can really get a lot of low end build up in your mix. So one thing it's really worth doing is EQing something like this. All right. The problem is, is how do we apply an EQ to the reverb and not affect the guitar part? So if I just grab an EQ, I'll do one now. Let's get a fab filter one here. Yeah. And I'll do a low cut. So I'll get rid of all of the low end frequencies here. Let's adjust it like so, reasonably extreme. Have a listen to this. I'll just put it just before the reverb. So we're EQing the signal going into the reverb. Have a listen to it now. Of course, we've lost all of the low end on the signal there. OK, so we haven't been able to affect the reverb separately. So we just can't solve this problem using insert. So we're going to make use of a bus instead. So if I go to the send section here, I'll just click on plus and go to create a new stereo bus. It's called bus D, put it over there. I'm just going to drag that EQ over to there. Yes, it's no longer an insert and it's over here as an insert on the bus. Yeah. And then I'll drag over my reverb as well and put it just after the EQ. Now, I'm just going to open up that reverb. You'll notice that this has a dry wet mix blend sort of control here. A lot of plugins have that when you've got as an insert and you want to blend the dry signal and the wet signal, then you need to use this control. But normally when we're using an effect on a bus, we don't need to do that anymore. We just want the wet sound, the reverb sound in this case. So what's happening here is the sound is coming from the guitar going over to the bus. It's then having the low end filtered out before it goes to the reverb. Importantly, the original sound, though, continues on down through the channel. OK, it goes to its output. So now we end up with this. Way less mushy than it was before. OK, this is just one of the just many examples there are of solving problems with a bus. Sometimes we would say want that reverb to be on the original guitar, but not being applied to say a delay effect we may have down further on the line, which case we can just separate those two sort of effects from each other, isolate them from each other. Another time you may use a bus is to apply one effect to many, many performances. Perhaps you've got many vocals and you want to make them all sound like they're in the same kind of room, OK, rather than having loads and loads of plugins that you would have to go in and adjust separately and just have one plug in on a bus, send them all to that. And, you know, it's done easier to change, easier to adapt. So it's really worth investing a little bit of time in learning about buses and sends to buses and then just figuring out as you get to solve each problem in your mix. Hey, could I use a bus for this or can it be done with just an insert? Let's take a look at this vocal part I have here. I want to make it sound better using some EQ. OK, so I'll go to my effects channel here. Click on plus, I'm going to insert a FabFilter Pro Q3 EQ here. And you know what, let's use a preset. So I'm going to go to the presets here in this plugin. And I'm going to look for female pop vocal. That should be good. I'll click on that. OK, this is something that beginners often do. They will use presets on plugins like this, an EQ plugin, for example. So what's it done here? It's applied this lovely looking EQ curve. It's taken a little bit of low end out. It's done a tiny little scoop with the mids there and it's done a couple of boosts in the high end, one at 1500 Hertz and one at 10. Now, the problem with this is what if there was already a bit of a boost in that area, perhaps the microphone that was used has particular characteristic where the high end is boosted or perhaps the room and the vocalist combined together that some of these frequencies were being boosted. We would be boosting something which is already boosted. Yeah, and it could end up sounding really, really horrible. My point is, is that for this plugin to work, you really need to be able to hear the original material and they couldn't do that when they were creating the preset. So I don't think this is a particularly useful thing to do. It's much better to listen to the material and apply the changes that you want to make. Another thing that we may do is use a compressor. OK, so let's add in a compressor to this vocal. Let's go to let's use the Sonatas compressor here. Again, we'll go to a preset and we will go to music and we'll go to vocal soft. What it's done here is it set the threshold, the ratio, attack, release, etc. We explain what a threshold is. A threshold on a compressor is a level, OK, in decibels. And what we're saying is once we go over that level, turn things down, OK, and turn it down by the amount specified with the ratio value. There's a couple of problems here. If we don't know how loud the original material is, then we don't know where to set the threshold. It may be that it's quite enough that it never even reaches the threshold. And therefore no compression will happen at all, despite the plug-in being there. Another question we have is how much do we turn that vocal down? Well, it depends on how loud the other instruments are in the mix. That's going to affect our ratio setting to some degree. OK, so without knowing what the original material is, how can we come up with these values? That's why I don't think that presets with these types of plugins are very useful. I'm not saying don't use them. They could be useful as a starting point or as a learning tool, but generally it's going to be better to learn properly how to use the plug-in and listen to the material and apply the changes you think you need. One thing music production YouTubers like me seem to talk about a lot is compression. And we may have given the impression that you need to use it all the time on everything. There's an endless amount of videos out there about how to make kick drums punchier and how to make vocals up front, et cetera, et cetera. Have you ever considered that not everything needs to be up front and punchier? Sometimes music can be a little bit more subtle than that. Food for thought. But there's some other occasions where you're probably using compression where you really shouldn't or you're trying to solve trying to solve the wrong problem using compression. Now, compression is a controller of volume, OK, or level. As I said earlier, once the level gets over a certain point, the threshold, we turn it down. OK, that's basically what a compressor does. But let's look at some examples where we want to turn things up and down. But we probably shouldn't use a compressor. Looking at this vocal here, you can see there's a sort of whole section here, which is verses, and then there's another section further on here. This is the bridge, OK, in the chorus. You can see, particularly with the bridge here, that the vocal is quite a lot louder overall. OK. Now, you could try to control this with compression. It wouldn't be a terrible thing to do. But I would suggest that this would be a great candidate for automation. So I'm not going to give you a tutorial on automation here, but this would be a great time to use volume automation. If indeed you want the whole vocal performance to be a little bit more sort of level or consistent all the way through. Now, you may want the vocal to be a little louder there, which case the vocalist has already done the job for you. But this would be a good occasion to think about, as I say, volume automation rather than compression. You may end up using both. You will also notice with these earlier clips back here with the verses, there is a reasonable amount of inconsistency, particularly all the way back here. Let's look at these two phrases here. Yeah, they are quite a lot quieter, aren't they? And some of the others, let's just zoom in so we can see them. We're looking at these two here. OK. How you do this is different in different doors. But what you may do here, and what I almost always do with the vocal part, is even all of this out by using clip gain. OK. Now, I'll just do it one way here. I'm going to switch the switch this over to clip automation to gain here. And I'm just going to take those two phrases there, create some nodes quickly just for demonstration purposes and increase the volume of those two phrases so that they better match the rest of the phrases in that performance. That might be another occasion where you'd be tempted to use compression. Yeah, to sort of compress it and then do some gain, you know, make up gain to sort of lift that up. And it probably wouldn't be the best tool to use, to be honest with you. Here, I would use clip gain. Now, I will say for things like vocal performances, when I finally, you know, sort of finish them in a mix, I've often used clip gain, automation and compression as well. When am I going to use compression? I'm going to think about compression as solving times when there are just peaks once in a while, which go up above that threshold, where I can reliably catch them with compression and turn them down by a particular amount, particularly when that happens a lot through the course of the performance. And it would just be super monotonous to go in and fine tune each and every single one of them with clip gain or automation. OK, this is kind of a rule of thumb. Of course, some compression plugins add some color, some saturation, et cetera, which add some character. Now, that's a completely different story than the core purpose of a compressor. So that's a little bit of a different thing there. Now, I definitely don't want you to feel bad if you're still confused about compression and how it works. This is probably one of the most common topics that people get confused about when learning about recording. I've made a video about compression. And hopefully if you watch this, you'll get a much better understanding about what the various different controls do. And you can watch that video right here.