PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Recording, Mixing, Performance and Production What is your vocal signal chain?

Mine will probably be the oddest process/path offered. It's simple, no muss, no fuss.

We first set up Audacity to record vocal input

1. AT 2035 condenser mic to phantom power "in".
2. Phantom power "out" to guitar amp (Peavey Nashville 112) 1/4 inch input.
3. Set tone & reverb on amp as appropriate for the song, genre, and vocalist.
4. Guitar amp "Headphone Out" to Computer "Mic In"

That's it for the vocal path. We don't use a true DAW - Audacity is as close as we get to a DAW, and we use it sparingly.

As we're singing, Audacity is recording the vocal. We listen to the backing tracks from a WAV file on our computer desktop. Once we've saved the vocal recording in Audacity, we slightly contour/shape the vocal with mild EQ and light compression. In Audacity, we mix the vocal with the backing tracks. We're done with the vocal recording.

Our vocal tracks are almost always one cut, start to finish. We never cut & paste. We just sing it and record it in one continuous take. Sometimes we'll do three or four vocal cuts and select the one we like the most. Any vocal "shaping" is done via the amp controls and a final touch with Audacity. If it can't be done that way, it doesn't get done.

We don't use an audio interface, equalizer, compressor, etc. It's all raw vocal into the guitar amp and then lightly touched up in Audacity. We love the depth of tone we get through the guitar amplifier. We also sing with the reverb already set. We prefer spring reverb to digital reverb.

If interested, here are links to four original songs we wrote and recorded with that process, as we do with all our vocal recordings. These songs are in four totally different genres with the amp settings adjusted (usually very minor adjustments are necessary) for the genre and "feel" for the voice at that particular time. Recently we've started using Soundcloud's mastering process. We get three free master per month.


1. "Burning" - Di, my wife, singing. A classic RnB song of the 1970s and 1980s:

https://soundcloud.com/alananddi/burning


2. "You" - Di singing again on this one. Brazilian Bossa Nova. Backing tracks redone in early 2021 but using the the original recording.

https://soundcloud.com/alananddi/you-remix


3. "That Wasn't In Our Plans" - Me singing. A contemporary Pop-Country Ballad.

https://soundcloud.com/alananddi/that-wasnt-in-our-plans


4. "Spending Time With You" - Di singing. Big Band music typical of the 1940s and 1950s.

https://soundcloud.com/alananddi/spending-time-with-you


We're pretty happy with the sound we get from our process. We don't see a need to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars, or more, when we can get what we think is excellent sound recordings from our method.

I normally wouldn't put links to any of our songs in this type of post as it might come across as "self-promotion" - that's not the intention. But, because our process is almost "Neanderthal" in terms of music recording methods, we just wanted to show that it really works quite nicely for us.

Good luck to everyone with their music efforts.

Alan & Di