Bzean123

I see that BZean liked these posts. I vote we invite him also. And Adolph................Good thing I am not much of a talker, Just get Ronws talking and kick back.

I could go hog wild about recording instruments and may well do that but I wanted to concentrate for a moment on just singing against karaoke track. Especially for those of us who do not play an instrument or or not well enough to produce a music track for what we want to do.
So, in that case, you bought a track from the link Robert has at this forum. And I would always recommend that link and not for the reason of being on Robert's good side. I mean, it is always nice to get along with your brethren in singing. But also because it is a really good site and you can order the track to your custom order. With or without BV. With or without guitar solo, in case you want to noodle some guitar, as well. And all for about a buck or two. And it is professionally mixed and tight.
So, you drag that into a track in Reaper or Logic Pro, similar actions.
Then all that is left is to sing. All you need is a mic. If you only have money for one mic, get a large diaphragm condenser. Or get one of the home recording bundles on the page in this forum that Robert has provided. The price is right, trust me. If you bought that stuff separately, it would cost you more.
So, how do you make a recording as well and professional sounding as the recordings from Felipe? Well, you have to be a little bit like him. Or a lot. No, you don't have to dance salsa, though it couldn't hurt. 
Here is the Felipe "secret," if I may be so bold to reveal it;
Don't keep crap. Everyone, Felipe, Ronnie James Dio, even you, make mistakes. A bum note. Slightly off time. Garbled word in a lyric. Don't keep it. Do it over. This may take some time. You will get no awards for recording, editing, and posting within one hour by the clock. I have recorded stuff in one take and it was well received. And I have recorded something twenty times over two weeks and it was not well received. And all the variations in between. So, if you think you have crappy recordings, be aware that I am the king of crappy recordings and just offer this advice as a fellow miscreant.
So, 400 takes or partial comps later, you finally have a vocal that sounds like you want. Use shift and tempo tools in your DAW that makes sure it is on the beat and not dragging. And then, to save on processing power, render that comp'd track to a new unified track. With one exception. In Reaper, each section of lyrics or sound can be a separate item. And you can do effects and stuff on each item. If that is not important to what you are doing, then create the new track of pieces into one. This saves processing power and speed.
Now, you are going to do all your mixing stuff. EQ, delay, reverb, or both. And we could go way deep into that and probably will but for brevity, I wanted to talk about the workflow, in general.
Take your time. I have read so many books on recording and mixing and more than once. You really should not record and mix on the same day. Your ears are tuned one way for singing. They need a rest to be tuned to mixing. Don't spend too long mixing. You start second-guessing and doing drastic things. Better to give it a day or two and then listen with fresh ears.
That being said, let me sound contradictory and say that you should set a deadline for release or posting. Here is why: no mix is ever "finished." Especially in the day of digital editing. You could edit and mix forever. Pick a stopping point and let it go. This will cause you to focus on major moves and sounds and not get bogged down in minutae. So, spend maybe a week total on the project but not more than a month.
Don't talk about how long or little it took you to do it. It does not matter and I promise I am not going to be impressed if you recorded in one shot. Because I have done it, too. So, big whoopie ...
Or how long. I don't need to know how dedicated or perfectionist you are. All that matters is how it sounds. I am not a technical reviewer. I want to be entertained. So, make me want to sing along.

We'll be a southern version of "two and half men" with ages approximately close to the actors. Actually, Charlie Sheen is a few years younger than I am and Ashton Kutcher is a few years younger than that And MDEW is one year older than I am. You are probably around the same age as the young-un, though a whole lot smarter, which is not saying much. That is, not much effort is needed to be a whole lot smarter than the kid in the show. Kind of backsided compliment, sorry about that.
The only trick is transportation. I live in a little town with 1 stop sign and 4 or 5 churches (I lose count) about 60 miles north of Dallas, a few towns south of Oklahoma. As I like to brag, if I sneeze to the north, it is raining in Oklahoma. Actually, Ok is a beautiful state with a widely varied scenery from a rain forest in the east to high desert in the west, home of the majority of tornados in the world (partially due to trade winds that create this varied topography, more on that later.)
Greyhound does make stops in Sherman, the biggest town nearest to me. Actually close to the border of Denison. You can catch a taxi to my place but there are no bus stops. But the nearest airport for transcontinental is DFW Intl or Love Field. I mean, here in Grayson county Perrin Field is big enough and Air Force One landed there last year so the pres could visit the Choctaw Nation near Durant, Ok. But that was a military op and it just does not get a lot of long distance traffic. It is used mainly for military training exercises.
But I live close enough to DFW and everything here. With minimal traffic and my cruise control set at 80, it would take just about an hour to get to DFW Intl. That's because Rayburn Tollway (sh 121) goes right into DFW. Love Field, near Mockingbird and Inwood takes more time because of traffic and lights. Love Field is only about a mile or so from where I work.
So, now, we're talking what? Plane tickets or bus tickets or train tickets? Union Station is in the downtown Dallas area but is accessible.
It's either that or we get skype and I have to ship my wonderful smoked brisket. Brisket so good it would tempt the faith of a vegan. Yes, being a vegan is a faith and I would be tempting that faith with brisket that nearly melts in your mouth.
Talk me in to it and I will make the homemade barbecue sauce, though I have some store-bought that is pretty good. Then I can do something with shredded slaw, and steamed corn on the cob. I get the unshucked and break them in half for easier eating. I'll cut mine off the cob when ready. Any choice of spices. Seriously, we have spices everywhere. A cabinet I bought, just to house the spices and mixes. On of the few shelf places in the house not loaded down with cook books.
Still, you really need to be here to smell the burning of mesquite wood chunks in a true smoke. Get a snootful of smoke, choke a little, grab a Shiner Bock to clear the palate.

Hahahah man you are crazy.  All this talk of Greyhound buses and road trips is unnecessary.  Surely an event that included two TMV moderators would justify the use of the official Modern Vocalist Private Jet.  We'll just have Adolph leave us the keys for the weekend.  We can all get together and back home in under 12 hours.  

Really fun guitar song because the entire thing is a deep, swampy, shuffle groove. (E - C#m the whole time sans a few B chords.)  Hope it grooves with you guys as well.  http://picosong.com/xquQ/

Wow, what a change of pace! Is this one easy to play?

Way cool, Bzean and you have the perfect voice and style for that song.

OK, this is it.......... You will have to put up with the out of tune guitar until someone buys me an expensive one. Capo on the 5th fret doesn't help things. Cowboy chords, Folk Style.
I am Keeping this microphone.

I have been there, done that, so many times. I may have to force myself, but things turn out better if I record the guitar first. Then record the vocal separately, on another track. Difficult for me because I have always been used to playing guitar and singing at the same time.

And one other thing for a good sound all together. It helps if you can listen to the results on something else other than the headphones you wore in recording. I have a sneaking suspicion that Felipe does that. He may have a set of speakers or monitors, expensive or not, even house stereo speakers. But at some point, he gets the playback into an acoustic space outside of his head and changes balance from there. My car has a USB port. So, I can hear stuff in that, the place where 90 percent of americans hear music. If I have something that sounds good on that, it is good on headphones. The same cannot be said of the converse. Something that sounded okay on headphones does not always sound good in the "real world" of my car, which has a 6 speaker sound system and media center that also takes TRS cable from an ipod and also can link bluetooth to something.

And because most of us do not have the money for a true studio build-out or access to a good studio, we close mic. And because of DAWs like Reaper and Pro Tools having plug-in and routing abilities, you can crank out sound as good as commercial releases. And so, take advantage of direct injection instruments, especially if you are performing on the instruments instead of using a karaoke track.
I am crap as a drummer. But I can play drums on the Casio keyboard. Even though I have a nice house, it is not really set up for me to have a full kit with even only one 24" kick. However, I do have room, should I save the scratch to get one, the Alesis Nitro kit. One of the owners of my company plays drums and he has three of these. It has all the drum sets in it you will ever need. You can MIDI control with it or instrument cord and play "live." It is an electronic drum set, so, all anyone else is going to hear is tap, tap. I make more noise washing dishes. All for $300 and free shipping nearly anywhere.
These days, all the pro studios direct inject the bass. A player may get snooty and want to play through a real Mesa Boogie and the engineer will let him do that, then use the direct inject track, anyway. Also with keyboard and synth parts. We are talking about us singers working in whatever spare room we have, not a pro label recording a 5 piece band with 5 mics alone on the drums.
Also, Reaper has inboard MIDI editor with a piano roll and you can program any musical instrument part and there are free instrument VSTi plug-ins everywhere. It just takes time to program it. Others, like Fruity Loops and Garageband, also have this ability. Then, the only mic you are worried about is for vocals. Word of advice in programming MIDI parts. In order for the part to sound as real as a human playing it, don't make the part so complex that a dummer, for example, with no more than 4 limbs could not play it.
Same if you are programming keyboard or guitar parts. Most guitar players are using no more than four fingers on the left hand and plucking with no more than 2 or 3 fingers with the right hand.

In addition to 2 mics on a guitar, which you can do with a basic 2 channel interface, there is another thing that can be done. For example, my Spectrum Acoustic has an onboard pickup and volume and 3 band equalizer. The mic is piezoelectric, what others call "the bug." It produces a type of sound different than a room. But you can plug in that to one input and a regular mic into the other mic. What kind of mic? Small diaphragm condenser is usually recommended for acoustic guitar, if you have the budget. Otherwise, any condenser mic will work better than dynamic mics. Then you can either pan or sum the inputs and do all kinds of crazy stuff from there.
Dynamics are better for really loud and high transient sounds like live acoustic drums, amplified guitars and bass guitars. Here is the funny thing, the cheaper you go in dynamic, the more iconic. Shure 57 is known to have a boxy sound that accentuates the mids and rolls of lows and some highs. And literally every famous guitar part you know of was recorded with this mic. And they are less than 100 USD anywhere. They are also good for really loud singers who like to eat the mic.
Again, I would like to repeat the wisdom of Glen Fricker. As a singer, do not cup the mic, if using a dynamic. The bottom part of the grill is covering tuned ports that are designed t cancel signal from side and rear directions. They are what makes the mic cardiod. Keep your hand off the grill and your voice will sound its best.
Condenser, especially large diaphragm condenser, has fixed back plate. The flexible sheet of metal that is the front plate picks up your voice. The fixed back plate tends to reject sound from anything behind it. If you put a dampener or something behind the mic, you defeat that purpose. Better to put sound shields to the side, if you must. When I sing, I have a piece of foam that was packing from a pool system controller (picked it out of our trash at work) and put it the right of my mic do deaden sound from the living room. Left side nothing, I am next to a curtain over the sliding glass door the back yard. Back of the mic faces the computer and what not. Then I sing through a pop filter about 6 inches away except for high loud notes.
Then I edit the track, deleting sections of "dead air" between lyric passages that may have other environmental sounds, even me clearing my throat.. What's left is a track where the only thing you can hear is the voice, and none of the rest of the environment.
Another thing about killing reflections in a room. Sound cancellation is about trapping rather than absorbing. So, a curtain over a wall or window does better than carpeting over the same surface. Because the low frequencies go through and around curtain but get trapped back there. The usual problem in a room treated incorrectly is that the highs are absorbed and the lows are not and you get a sonic mudpit.

And to answer G's question, yes, Felipe plays guitar. So, a handsome man with the beauty of youth on his side, a great singer, a multi-instrumentalist, awesome recordings and he could be a recording engineer or his own label, even. It's just not fair to the rest of us. Survival of the fittest, and all that.
Seriously, I do learn stuff from Felipe, even if I am old enough to be his father.

Another trick that is useful.
Shine (Kotzen/Mr Big) is a song that has a VERY powerful chorus on the Mr Big version, it calls out for belting the notes, but you absolutely can´t allow it to become plain shouting out.
Besides learning to control the quality so that it still assumes a "heady" quality so to say (covering simply does not work well), you can use doubling and when the sustained notes come together they create an effect that makes the end result a little bit softer on the listener (due to phase cancelation for sure). Its similar to the technique on the guitars:
https://app.box.com/s/zkjvizrrgb8xdq96ag4hud9yq7l54h9g
Unfortunately, I do not have a instrumental version of this song to do the mix, and these guitars I honestly can´t even understand, let alone play .
It works well for bridge/chorus, you must be really tight on the phrasing.

A sample of the idea I said:
Dry guitar + dry vocals:
https://app.box.com/s/gnkla8qx0blwxbc42y5rvfdjvrwdo3er
 
Mid-side processing on the guitar (same track from before was used for center), same vocals:
https://app.box.com/s/evu7b83rs41mi8hvtoatmb5sxtdzpx93
 
Of course if you do multiple layers of guitars it can sound better, but, this is way faster. There is no reverb here, and was just thrown together. If you do it more carefully, play it better, use reverb to glue it up, etc, it can give a rather nice result.

This was a contribution to the "Legends Lost" thread.  Glenn Fry passed earlier this year.
I found an old microphone while searching through my things and thought I would try it out. I am not sure how I ended up with it. It turns out that this is an Electrovoice 635A. An interview microphone used by reporters and such. I was using a Shure PE50 super pro(sm57 and sm58 were based on this) and I am not sure if the vocal improvement is from the Microphone or if Lessons are starting to pay off. Anyway I can tell a difference in the sound from this effort and songs recorded a week ago.
  Any comments welcome good or bad......improvement is the goal. I am aware of the harmony being flat in the final verse. It was getting late and time to stop. Still a major improvement from other efforts.
 

Take number 2. Starting to figure out where I want the embellishments now. Timing was a little quick in one spot. It's coming along. Gotta figure out how I'm going to do the part where I cut things off at.
 
 

Sounds like a decent approach. Some well-placed emphasis goes a long way. And if that's not a natural accent, you definitely had me fooled.
 
 
 
All good to me, MDEW. You've got a distinct voice, and I do agree that it's pleasant to listen to. And if you really could use an opinion on what to do next, I'd actually like to see what you would do with When Doves Cry.

I guess that is why I could not pin down the accent. There is a little Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky,Tennessee, Carolina..........in there.   Nice sound though.............
If you like older Country and Western, check out Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys a weird mixture of Western Swing and Big Band. Once you get past Bobs "Hoots and Hollers" that has no business being there, it is not too bad.

Loved it, Killer. Can always hear the passion with you, and you always implement a subtle accompaniment. Exactly the way I would do it, if I could play
 
 
Always so hard on yourself, lol. Another one I haven't heard. It wouldn't be a challenge if you chose an easy song to sing. Feel free to polish it in here.

Sounds Good Bzean. Pretty healthy Country/western accent you have going on. Is that from your home town or something you work on? I like it, My accent just trips me up and I have to "Do" something about it or it will take over.
      The "Sleepy" sound in my voice is something I have been aware of for a long time and as you said it seems that getting a "Bite"  helps out a little. The last recording of Peaceful Easy Feeling" was the best so far at taking the Sleepy sound out. I watched Glenn sing it a few times "Live" with minimal backing.
     So many good Eagles songs to choose from it is hard to settle on one. I may even try a Prince song just for the sake of doing it. "Purple Rain" or "When Doves Cry".  I had Forgotten that Natalie Cole passed this January. So many Good singers and entertainers have passed............

Here is one for Glenn. I decided to just go ahead and post it as is. The more I messed with it the worse it got.
Comments welcome anyway.............
 
 

"(guitar) play it properly (something I can't do "
Learn the Basics first.........Chords........Progressions.......Rhythm............    The rest is subject to opinion and choices.  First and foremost a single guitar provides a basic rhythm (beat) and basic chord structure accompaniment for the singing.  The rest is embellishment that is learned a little at a time while gaining confidence.  Much faster this way than trying to perfect the embellishments first.

Reaper here.
I noticed some folks record acoustic guitars to sing along. I have a tip that works wonderfully with any 2 channels interface.
- Record the guitar using two channels, one with a mic in level with your ears, and close to you, pointing to the fretboard, another with the line out (if the guitar has some sort of pickup, if not, another mic pointing to the bridge).
- On the first mic (fretboard), apply some compression, not more than 3:1, with a very short attack, perhaps even 0 attack. This will be the "center" channel, and will carry body and warmth.
- On the line out/bridge mic, apply a high pass filter, cutting everything bellow 100Hz, or even higher if you can get away with it, experiment. Also apply compression, but now, leave a decent attack time, something between 5 and 15ms should work nicely. This will be your "side" channel.
Now for the trick, duplicate the second channel (line out/bridge), pan the original hard left, and the copy hard right. Then on either of them, this is up to you, unlock the "snap to grid" feature of your DAW and DRAG manually the whole track so that it gets out of sync by a few miliseconds. The offset should be visible with a good amount of zoom but it should be quite gentle, don't overdo.
And that's it, a simple technique that can be done with almost any DAW default tools. It will sound rather good, provided that you play it properly (something I can't do )

Couldn't have suggested it if I didn't ask