buzzy vocals

[mechanismo]

Hi,
we?re a band called mechanismo and we?ve just started recording our songs at the house. we use cubasis for all the mixing and do all the drums with it.
we?ve bought a nice but cheap shure mike but we can still hear buzz in the vocals. is there anybody that knows a way to keep it to the minimum??
any tips are welcome.
you can check our songs at myspace and tell us what you think and if we should change whatever.

thanks folks!

[brandondrury]

Can you describe this "buzz"?

Buzz can mean a lot of things. When I think of buzz, I think of the sound of unplugging an electric guitar from a distorted guitar amp.

Brandon

[mechanismo]

whenever we?re playing the instruments you can?t really hear any noise, but if we record the vocals there?s always a noise, the sound doesn?t come out clean.

[brandondrury]

Hmm. You are going to be need to be more specific than that. If you can't put it into words, maybe you can make an mp3 and attach it to your next post.

I assume you mean that if you record an instrument, it sounds fine, but if you record a vocal is sounds "buzzy".

What kind of preamps are you using? You generally have to crank the gain up for vocals. Is it a "hiss" or is it something else?

Brandon

[mechanismo]

We use a toneport for recording vocals and guitar. Generally we have the gain quite high on vox which inevitably leads to hiss which we later try to equalise out. most of the time this works ok but we often struggle to fight several layers of hiss when we're recording vocals over a micced up acoustic guitars etc. we sometimes also struggle with deessing. we have a few plugins on cubase to combat it but they don't work too well.

thanks for your help.

[brandondrury]

We use a toneport for recording vocals and guitar.

I've never used the Toneport, but if it's like any other Line6 product, it's complete garbage. More than likely, it's fine what what you are doing.

If there is that much hiss in your vocal, you need to do something different. A nicer mic preamp will take care of that. However, if your budget is low, just turn the gain on the mic pre down. There is a point on cheaper mic preamps where the noise skyrockets. Find a nice happy median between level and noise. You should be able to make up the gain somewhere down the chain. At worst, the mix will be quiet and you'll have to crank the headphones. Of course, these will be noisy, but it beats a noisy recording.

In my rig, I'd put a compressor plugin on the vocals and crank its output up really high. This should take care of it.

NEVER eq noise out of a vocal track. If the noise is THAT high, you screwed up. It's generally okay to eq noise out of a bass track, but that's about it. If you get you gain structure right, noise is seldom a problem.

we sometimes also struggle with deessing.

Who doesn't? Keep working at it. Sometimes you need to do each word individually. It takes time, but it's usually worth doing. The need for de-essing is generally caused by using the wrong mic or a singer is dinging in a way that is no appealing. Both are possibilities. More than likely it's the mic.

It sounded like you had used a Shure SM58, but after EQing it there is no way to tell. Since you EQ'd all the high end out, it's going to make the upper mids sound more aggressive than they were, which will lead to the need of the de-esser.

Brandon

[mechanismo]

Thanks for your advice, much appreciated.

P.S. I have no idea about other Line6 stuff but the Toneport UX2 is very good.

[brandondrury]

I figured the Toneport was similar to everything else in its price range (which explains the noise problems you are having).

Brandon