[yep]

Just to chime in on some of the stuff RE: perfection and classic albums having a lot of bleed, etc...

I feel like I should clarify that control-room bleed does have downsides, and I would almost always rather have the singer perform with headphones, from a sonic perspective. It's just that, given the choice between perfect sonics and perfect performance, I will go for the better performance every time.

If you have a great-sounding control room, and if you want to sound like a classic album, and if your singer has a red-faced, roaring, throaty delivery like James Hetfield, and if your mixes are super-dense rock, then the downsides to this method are minimal.

The biggest places you will run into trouble are if you have bad control room acoustics, and if you want to sound like modern commercial radio, and if you have a super-dynamic singer who is going to need a lot of level-riding or corrective compression (before we even get to crushing the vocal), and especially if you have a very sparse or airy mix, ala Ed Sheeran or most top-40 type stuff. That specific recipe will give you trouble, with this method.

Bleed is all over tons of classic albums. There is no need to dwell on how much it didn't hurt Motown, or the Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or whatever. If that's the kind of sound you're going for, then some bleed in a good room might even help kind of glue the sound together in that warm soupy murk that gives some of those old records such a human, inviting, and authentic quality.

But the sound of modern pop radio is largely the sound of super-compressed vocals. Ever since Max Martin & co started pushing Britney Spears's girlish vocal fry right out to the front of the speakers some 20 years ago, it's been off to the races. Even "authentic" or "retro" influenced artists like Adele or John Legend still have that absolutely crushed vocal sound, super close-in on the listener, where you can hear every detail of the vocal cords.

That's the kind of sound where bleed into the vocal mic is a problem, because once you start Brauerizing the vocal, you bring up every little microscopic detail, including the control room bleed. And especially if you have the kind of sparse, open instrumentation popular in a lot of top 40 stuff today, that warm, soupy, murk might start to sound less like a comforting blend, and more like a weird pumpy echo, especially if your control room is at all ringy.

This is all especially super-true if the singer is very dynamic, with levels that are all over the place. James Hetfield sings like a distorted guitar, and his dynamics are a steady-state brick. That makes it much easier to control the background noise, than if your levels are set to accomodate someone who soars between whisper and scream.

I say all this mostly just because I feel like my first post was a little blase, and also because I feel like some of the subsequent discussion could lead some people to think that sweating over every little detail is not important. I think if you want to produce professional-sounding, release-ready, radio-friendly modern pop records, then you really do need to obsess over every little detail, and you really do need to get everything as perfect as you can.

As I said above, I will take a perfect performance over a perfect recording 100 times out of 100. And there are some styles of music, especially stuff like indie rock, jazz, alt-country, and so on, where certain kinds of recording artifacts can sometimes be a feature and not a bug. But before recording this way, it is worthwhile to be aware that it does start to limit some of your options in terms of what kind of record this is going to sound like.

Have fun.