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Answers: Recording beginner here. I'm trying to record solo vocals with my Shure PG81 condenser mic. I have it hooked up directly to the preamp on my M-Audio Delta 1010LT soundcard. No external mixer. Vocals (recorded through Cubase) are totally muffled and muddy. Would getting a mixer help this? Or is this just not a good enough mic for vocals?

Specs for my mic:
http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/W...

Thanks a lot.

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A Shure mic is perfectly good quality (although I've only ever used their SM-57 for vocals). PG81 is best for acoustic guitars, etc, but it should be fine for vocals.

It may be that you're placing the mic slightly wrong. Have an assistant move the mic around slowly inside your recording space while your vocalist sings. When the sound gets clearer, wave frantically through the window for them to hold still, and then set the stand up there. Usually, a vocal mic is set up slightly above the singer, sloping downwards towards their mouth. This eliminates some of the force of the air that's coming out of their mouth, and makes for a cleaner sound. It sounds like this mic can be placed very close to the mouth, since it can handle high volumes.

You might also have background noise in your recording space. Use anything you can find to muffle the walls and windows (soundproofing is ideal, but you can also stuff the windows with cloth).

The louder you are able to get your initial recording, the clearer the sound will be. The easiest way to do this is to have the singer keep singing, turn the pre-amp up until it just starts to distort (the tips of the sound levels turn red), and then just a tiny bit down from that level. You can also use a little bit of compression in the initial recording, if the singer is using quite a wide dynamic range - but leave most of this for later.

Once you have your recording down, you can make it clearer using EQ. For now, don't fiddle too much with the settings, but as you get more used to it you can get a book out of the library to learn new tricks. Set the EQ to a very narrow frequency range, and boost it by a lot (5 to 10 dB). It should look like a little needle sticking up. Now play back the recording on repeat, and at the same time slowly move this needle across the frequency range. Every time you hit a frequency that sounds ugly when you boost it, damp that part slightly (by anything from 1 to 5 dB, but not more). Try to do this using a good pair of studio-quality headphones (Sennheisers are good), because sometimes the shape of the room will make the recording sound a bit different, and you don't want your recording tailored for one specific room only.

Once you have a nice clean sound, compress it slightly. Then add a bit of reverb AFTER you compress it (if you add it before, then all those nice little echoes will become big muddy echoes interfering with the main signal). Be careful not to add too much reverb - it's a bit of a drug, and it's tempting to give everything the same booming sound, just because you can.

Let me know how it goes!

EDIT: oops, I meant compress before you EQ it, too.

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