Provided by Sweetwater.

 
Q: I’ve been recording for a while, and frankly I thought I’d seen everything.

Nope . . .

I’m recording a vocalist who simply will not wear headphones.

Now, I don’t mean they’ll wear them around their neck, or will have one on / one off.

No, the headphones cannot be anywhere in the room.

Why is this the problem? Well, they can’t very well sing along with backing tracks they can’t hear, can they?

Given that this is an issue, I promised to find a solution and then resume the sessions, but I’m at my wit’s end. What can I do?

A: While it’s rare to find an artist who’s truly that unwilling to compromise, sometimes you’ll find a vocalist who just wont use headphones. However, in their defense, some of them do have a hard time monitoring bed tracks through headphones, though it doesn’t seem like that’s the issue in your case.

Either was, here’s a trick to overcome the problem.

Set up the vocal mic and put a pair of small monitors (like Auratones) about three feet on either side of the microphone; use a tape measure to ensure that they are equidistant. Next, place the speakers 90 degrees off axis and point them directly at the microphone.

Then, feed the monitors from a mono cue mix bus, and reverse the polarity on one of them and cut a bit of top and bottom as well. The vocalist will hear the speakers, due to the distance between his or her ears, but the speaker output will be 180 degrees out of phase at the mic capsule.

Therefore, the bed track bleed, though not absolutely gone, will be down by about 30dB.

Be careful not to feed anything to the speakers that you don’t intend to use in the final mix, and don’t run them any louder than necessary for the vocalist to sing in tune and in time. A little bit of bleed won’t kill you. No one ever decided not to buy an album because there was a bit of instrumental bleed in the vocal mic!

If you degrade the hi-fi quality by 5 per cent, but improve the performance by 30 per cent, it’s a no-brainer. Always let technology serve the art, not vice-versa.

As always, we welcome input from the PSW community and would love to know your thoughts on this situation. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

 
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