For My Aspiring Artists: Home Studio Recording w/ Nuendo. Lesson One- How to Record Clear Vocals.

Now I'm no Berklee or Full Sail professor or anything like that but I'm an experienced producer and engineer and I have noticed that a lot of DMV artists are talented but run studios out of their houses and don't always know how to properly mix songs to put out so here is my recipe for a good mix on a song. I record with Steinberg Nuendo but you can apply many of my principles to most quality programs including Pro Tools and ReCord. For my Reason producers I will do a separate tutorial later. Now I'm sure you know the complete basics on how to record a song, and if not please check your instruction manual. Here is my first set of simple tips:

1. When you record, don't let the vocals over-peak during recording. You will ruin the vocals. Over-peaking (audio clipping) is a distortion in your recording. If the track is recorded with distortion there's no way to eliminate the distortion without hurting sound quality.

2. For light waves (a thinner line from lighter voices) you should apply compression to the wave file and then raise the volume of the track with the gain (volume) command right above your project. Your audio again should not clip. If it begins to clip, lower the gain on the clip and if necessary undo the compression on the clip. The volume should be audible and clear without the mixer volume being excessively high or turned all the way up and in no way should sound muffled. Leave your mixer value at 0.0 for now.

3. I suggest if your microphone is of low quality or allows a lot of low pass from your voice to enter the effects panel (a small e in the mixer controls) and select "low cut" from the dropbox at the top. This will eliminate that added bass from your voice and make your vocals sound cleaner

4. Right click the clip and go to: PROCESS>> NOISE GATE and apply the default noise gating to your vocals to eliminate nuisances from your audio such as, breathing noises, throat clearing, background noise, pops etc.

This is the first installment of my lesson to get you acquainted with the most basic part of recording with Nuendo if you are unfamiliar. In the next lesson, we will discuss how to make your vocals blend in clearly with your beat and how to finish mixing your song,