Whether you’re recording vocals in a home studio or capturing professional takes for release, this section helps you get better sound with less stress. Learn about microphone choice, vocal takes, room treatment, and how to deliver your best performance in front of the mic.
These articles are written from the perspective of a working voice coach—grounded in real-world studio experience and practical vocal insight.
Last week’s article on building a Recording Studio on a Budget was overwhelmingly popular, so I thought for those of you who have taken the plunge into recording yourself (either now or recently), we’d dive into some basic baby steps you can use to get better vocal takes. Having been a vocal coach and singer
Autotune vs No Autotune: Is Autotune Cheating? When musicians talk about autotune, they often do so with great disdain. For guitarists, bassists, drummers, pianists, especially those of a more traditional or even classical persuasion, it can come across as an ENORMOUS cheat to use it. Personally, I have no issue with autotune as a tool.
When I take holidays in the summer, I generally take 2 weeks off. The first week I’m properly away with my family. The second week I am not seeing clients, but I’m not away on holiday. Instead, I use that week to get the studio ready for a new academic year with clients. Last summer,
As a singer and vocal coach of many years, I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to sing live, and record singing well in the studio. There are stark differences between the two, both in terms of challenges and also assessing the result. In this article I want to go over these differences, and
I received an email this week asking about how to sing when recording. I’ve re-parsed the sentences in the email so that the questions flow for the purposes of this article. “Hi Mark, Do you have any articles [or advice] on how to sing when recording? I feel like my recorded voice sounds both harsh
As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the recording realm and inherently comparing live vs recorded vocals. I have pretty good pitch, but even I notice how unforgiving it is to hear your own recorded vocal back. We might only be talking about just one or two notes in a
I’ve been doing a lot of recording the last few weeks, getting back into that world of getting good takes, mixing the voice with tracks… and vocal comping, which is the subject of this weeks article. I’m by no means a fully fledged expert, but it’s something that is good to have some competency at
As a full-time vocal coach, I take singing pretty seriously. At my Nottingham vocal coaching studio I have a huge range of microphones for myself and clients. But I need to have a reliable workhorse microphone to hand whenever I need one – enter the Rode M1. If you’re looking to pick one up, here’s
