Music Banter - View Single Post - Recording Singing Vocals on a PC - Looking for some straight answers
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Old 12-23-2010, 06:42 PM   #3 (permalink)
Freebase Dali
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If you're going for a good vocal recording microphone, your best bet is going to be a large-diaphragm condenser mic. Do a little research regarding condenser microphones to get the full picture. Although an SM58 is a vocal mic, it's a dynamic and since you'll likely be tracking vocals by themselves, there isn't a need to sacrifice the response of a condenser. If you're primarily going to be recording vocals while simultaneously recording [mic'd] instruments into separate tracks, you're probably better off with a dynamic... but unless you're trying to achieve some kind of "performance realism" or something, you're better served recording individual elements separately, in which case you can use one microphone for most of your elements, a condenser being the recording choice for vocals and most acoustic instruments anyway.

Condensers need phantom power, and usually you get this from mixers or audio interfaces with preamps+phantom power. It's your choice about whether you get a mixer or an audio interface with the necessary input options, but if you want my opinion on the matter, you're better off getting a good audio interface with multiple channels (foregoing the need for an external mixer) featuring XLR+TRS (combo) inputs with good preamps (foregoing the need for a separate preamp box) and phantom power. However many elements you plan to record simultaneously into separate tracks (or also how many mics you plan to use on a source) in your recording software will dictate how many inputs you'll need on the audio interface. At least 2 XLR inputs/preamps should cover any immediate needs you may have.

The additional benefit you'll have from using an audio interface is that your audio won't sound like garbage. Onboard sound cards in consumer PCs (and Macs) are not meant for audio recording and feature crap AD/DA converters, don't support high sample rates and don't feature essential input/output options. A lot of people [surprisingly] don't realize it but the most important purchase anyone who's interested in computer recording can make is not the software but the audio interface. It doesn't matter how bad ass your software is, if the audio coming into it sounds like crap, there's no covering it up.

As far as suggestions of which specific brands of this stuff you'd need, just do some research on the stuff I talked about and when you decide what kind of gear you need, then you can move on to the next step of deciding what gear you need.
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