Recording Live Audio and Vocal Processing

Vocals are the most recognizable part of a song and can single-handedly determine whether people love it or hate it. You’ll want to devote careful attention to making sure you get the best-sounding vocals possible. In this chapter, we will learn how to record live audio and process vocals.

In the pages ahead, we’ll discuss the setup and preparation you need to take care of before recording. We’ll look at how to record in FL Studio, learn how to mix your vocals, and finally, look at the best practices to apply effects.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Understanding microphones
• Setting up your recording environment
• Recording audio in FL Studio
• Using pitch correction with Newtone
• Retiming audio samples with Newtime
• Vocals effect processing best practices

Technical requirements

To follow the examples in this chapter, you will need the FL Studio Producer Edition or higher. You will also need headphones and a microphone to record into.

Understanding microphones

You need a microphone to record live audio. What are microphones? Microphones are electronic devices you use to record audio. They contain a material called a diaphragm that vibrates when struck by sound waves. They convert the sound waves into electrical currents that can be played by devices that replay sound.

If you were to Google search What microphone should I buy?, you may feel overwhelmed by the number of search results. There are many competing brands of microphones that each have their own advantages. Prices range from tens of dollars to thousands of dollars.

Personally, in my experience, if you do a good job in terms of recording, mixing, and applying effects to your audio, most listeners won’t be able to tell how expensive the microphone you used to record is. The thing you’re recording and what you do with it is much more important than the price of the mic you use. That said, there are different types of microphones you...

Setting up your recording environment

Before recording your audio, you want to be in a location free from background sounds. Ideally, you would be in a soundproof environment.

If you record audio and find there is some consistent background static or hum, it’s not the end of the world. If the unwanted sound is at a low volume level, you may be able to remove the unwanted noise using a gate plugin effect. We discussed gates in Chapter 6, Compression, Sidechaining, Limiting, and Equalization.

You’ll need to obtain headphones so that you can listen to your music playing while you record your instrument or vocals. You don’t want to hear your song playing in the background on speakers while you’re recording sounds, or else the background noise will appear in the recording.

Recording instruments

Recording instruments appears simple on paper, but it takes a surprising amount of effort to do. If you’re recording an acoustic instrument, position...

Recording audio into FL Studio

Let’s record audio into FL Studio:

1. Select the position in the playlist of your song that you want to begin recording from. Left-click to place your cursor on the playlist timeline.
2. Check that the Countdown before recording button is selected as shown in the following screenshot. This will give you a few seconds to prepare when you are recording:

Figure 8.5 – Record countdown

3. Open your mixer and left-click on a new mixer track to select it. When you record, your audio will be recorded into this audio mixer channel and then sent to the playlist. If you have effect plugins on the mixer channel, like pitch correction plugins such as Autotune, this will be applied while recording the audio file. Usually, you’ll want to apply effects later in mixing, but it is possible to do so at this point. If you’re going to record with audio effects, it’s recommended to record on two channels...

Using pitch correction with Newtone

When you record, a singer’s melody will sometimes drift out of pitch from the song scale. Usually, this is undesired and makes the vocal sound bad. Pitch correction is a tool used to bring note pitches back into the song scale. There are several pitch correction tools on the market. Some well-made pitch correction plugins include Antares’s Autotune and Celemony’s Melodyne. The most widely known and used pitch correction tool in the industry is Antares’s Autotune. It is a little pricey for beginners, though. If you’re interested in purchasing Autotune, visit www.antarestech.com.

FL Studio has a pitch correction plugin called Newtone that comes with the FL Studio Signature Edition. If you are new to processing vocals and don’t have access to Autotune or Melodyne, Newtone is a beginner-friendly option to give you an introduction. It offers the ability to adjust pitch in a timeline graphical mode as well...

Retiming audio samples with Newtime

When recording live audio or importing samples, sooner or later you’ll find audio clip timings don’t match up with the rest of your song. Audio mistimings can be corrected using the FL Studio plugin Newtime.

Newtime allows you to map out the key moments in your audio sample and adjust the timing to better fit your song. Let’s retime audio samples using Newtime:

1. You’ll first need an audio sample clip to retime. Load up an audio clip sample in the playlist. Any will do. In my example, we’ll use a drum sample that comes with FL Studio, but you can use any sample that you like. If this is your first time using Newtime I recommend finding a drum loop sample as this is the easiest way to see clear results.

Figure 8.15 – Drum sample

2. In the playlist, left-click on the top left corner of the sample to see the options and choose the Time-warp sample option:

   Figure...

Vocals effect processing best practices

Let’s discuss some best practices to process your vocals.

It’s best to record dry vocals without any effects. You can always add in and swap out effects later. If you need to hear how an effect will sound for reference while recording (such as when using an autotune or vocoder tool), record the dry vocals at the same time as the effected vocals on two separate channels so that you end up with access to the dry vocals, in addition to any effected vocals.

When applying effects on vocals, there’s an order that’s usually followed. The following order is a suggestion, not a mandatory rule. This order is here to help you get a natural sounding vocal where each effect helps to build on the previous one rather than interfere. If you find any of the following terms confusing regarding compressing or EQ, revisit Chapter 6, Compression, Sidechaining, Limiting, and Equalization.

Here’s a suggested order to...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about recording audio so that you can record your instruments and vocals. We learned about microphones and how to prepare for recording. We learned how to record into FL Studio. We learned about pitch correction and how to pitch-correct using Newtone. We learned how to retime audio samples using Newtime. Finally, we learned a series of tips and best practices to mix your vocals.

Some key points to think about:

• The order you apply effects can be important, so the plugin effects should complement and build on each other instead of undoing the previous plugin’s work.
• After adding effects, you should always test turning your plugin effects on and off to check that they actually made your sound better.
• Once you’ve finished setting up your mixer effects chain, you can save the mixer track by right-clicking on the mixer track and selecting File | Save mixer track state as. Then, you can easily load it in the future...