Hi:
First, I am not attempting to be a PRO mixer! In my case I am recording myself singing to my favorite songs to simply share with family, friends, on FACEBOOK, as well as SoundCloud etc.... I am on FULL-TIME disability and am doing this to occupy my time. I have always been involved in the choir in school and have even performed on stage and sung a few solos as a kid!
Nowadays, I like to sing karaoke style music and belong to a website with some very high quality background music.
At the moment I am not interested in learning how to create my own mixes of the actual music. I am wanting to only maximize the sound I can get out of this existing background music tracks that I have downloaded. I am making an educated guess that this music has already be processed and mastered before I got it!
One thing I CAN do is use reaPitch so I can adjust the song to where it is best for me octave wise!
So, in my case the ONLY thing I have control over is my vocals. I have a studio quality condenser MIC, a U-Phoria UMC22 interface and running 64-bit Reaper.
I hired a guy to come over to configure Reaper to have ZERO latency! (Thank God!)
What I would like to know is how and where to spend the most time and effort with my recordings?
I just do not want to spend too much time doing things that will not truly benefit me!
The following questions refer to the background music only!
I am just now starting to grasp a lot of the terminology so, some of what I am saying might not be the right words etc.
1. How should I use the gain and volume? (Which one vs. which?) Should I even need to use gain? Just for the MIC?
2. How much EQing do I do? I do know from messing around that some EQing can enhance the sound of the music! I am like a newborn baby when it comes to knowing how to properly EQ, but, I want to believe that I am slowly learning. I learn best by watching videos, so if anyone knows of a good video that teaches in-depth of EQing from scratch I would appreciate knowing about it!
What I am doing is using the volume envelope to control the volume of the music so that for example, at the very beginning of the song the volume is louder and then as I approach the parts where I am going to actually start singing, I bring the volume down a bit. If there are parts of the song that have just the music playing but no vocal for an extended period, I bring the volume of the background music back up for a bit and then bring it back down when I start singing again.
One plugin that I use a lot is MTurboReverb. One of the things I want to be able to be sure to accomplish is to avoid letting my vocals sound 'hollow' but more rich and full! (I hope I am using the right words to describe what I mean!) I just don't want to sound like I am in a tunnel!
Here is a link to one of my songs called 'Somewhere' made famous by Barbra Streisand. As I am writing this message I am listening to it and I can tell that there is so much I would like to do with the background music so that it can also stand out some more! BUT, I have already explained my limitations with the actual music.
https://soundcloud.com/bayside_studios/somewhere
Now, before anyone says how crappy my singing is (I know for sure that several notes I hit are NOT right!) it is "Just For Fun", I am also studying some online courses for that, so I should get better at singing over time!
Anyways, I would be grateful for any advice that others can offer!
Steven
Berkeley, CA USA