Need Advice on Recording with SM58 / HD500

[elias1876]

Hello Folks,

I recently recorded a cover of a song by the Smiths and I find my voice lacking clarity in the recording.

Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want

I used an SM-58 mic going to the mic in of a Pod HD500. For the HD500 patch I just used one of Line 6's standard patches for 2 inputs: vocals and acoustic guitar (I think it was named VOCALS/ACOUS 2). The mic signal chain in the patch goes through a TubeComp, Eq and Reverb (I will try to post the settings later). I used Audacity as my DAW.... Oh, and I'm singing about 1 to 2 inches away from the mic with a pop filter in between.

Please share your thoughts on how I can improve the clarity of my voice recording using my current recording set-up especially using the available effects in PodHD500. Any other input is welcome. Thanks.

 

[elias1876]

hmmm... a bass-cutting Eq applied to the vocal track on Audacity helped...

pleasepleasepleaseletmegetwhatiwant

 

[Liquidribs]

there's quite a few vids on youtube on vocal eq which I can't show you now cuz I'm at my office lol. The EQ if you try to imagine is something like this http://i56.tinypic.com/11c6rk0.jpg.

I also find it helped when I tried my best not to add any compression to the vocals and focus on my volume control

 

[elias1876]

Thanks for the reply and advice Liquidribs.

 

[blueprintstudios]

I think the "clarity" you are talking about is from the clear crisp highs you'd get from a large diaphragm condensor mic for your vocals instead of a dynamic one. unfortunately the POD HD500 does not have phantom power , you may either get a USB mic , mixer with phantom power to line into your pod hd500 , upgrade a new main audio interface with XLR inputs + Phantom power (and this usually comes with a DAW like cubase LE or something.) then it would be time to "grow" from Audacity to something more fullfledged. because at this stage you're not wanting to record/improve your songwriting, you're wanting to record/improve your recording/sound. then from there the desire grows and you get addicted to improving your mixes and you buy buy buy.....