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Old 02-17-2019, 10:16 PM   #2
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,019
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I do it pretty often. Like, maybe one out of every ten projects or so. Both in the control room and/or in the live room with the PA speakers.

Some singers are not good with headphones, particularly untrained singers who are maybe not so strong with landing specific notes, but who instead sort of intuit a melody by feel--something about headphones changes the way you hear yourself, especially with the relationships between fundamental pitch and harmonics, I think. Singers sometimes start trying to glom onto the harmonics of their voice and the bed recording, rather than the fundamental. In any case, sometimes people sing better without headphones...

There are a bunch of techniques for limiting or reducing bleed, including out-of-phase speakers or recording a "dummy" track of just the bleed and flipping the polarity or whatever... I have not found that stuff to be helpful. For one thing, bleed is not necessarily that bad. I mean, it's the same song and the same parts.

For another, those kind of polarity-reversal approaches always seem to leave weird phasey artifacts very low in the mix, that get ugly as soon as they hit the vocal compressor. I'd rather have "good" bleed at -50dB, then weird phasey space monkeys at -60 or whatever.

What I will sometimes do, is use only one speaker and position the mic to get it right in the null, which is generally slightly off-axis with a cardioid mic. Figure-8 mics such as ribbons are like, supernaturally good at rejecting the null, but the null is directly to the side, so it's a slightly weird position for a singer, sometimes.

To me, the performance trumps sonics, 100 times out of 100. So whatever it takes to get a great performance comes first, and then I figure out how to get the best sonic capture second. If I were working with clients who had the budget to do hundreds of takes and get vocal coaching and spend a month making a record, I might do things differently.
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