So you finally recorded your vocals, congrats! But for some reason you can’t get them to sound right. That’s exactly what we’re diving into today. We’ll address the two most common problems with recording your own vocals and how you can fix them.

The whole point with these tips is to process your vocals and get them ready to be made louder. If you skip this, then you will struggle to make your vocals sound decent.

I discovered these tips after working on an album with an artist in Miami. This was in my earlier years and for some reason the vocals had an amateurishness that we couldn’t fix.


I later found the solution after searching through hundreds of dollars of books and tutorials. Then I re-tested my findings on myself and recorded using these methods and the mix was way faster and cleaner. This solution is from my book DIY Recording Secrets, which you can get in the Soulful Raps Packs.

Problem 1 is your vocals are too distorted/hot

Most amateurs record loud, and get bad quality because of this. You can always turn the volume up after you record. But if you record it too loud…you can’t take the distortion away afterwards. It’s similar to pouring concrete, once you lay it down it’s stuck. If it comes out like crap, you have to demolish it and do it again.

The solution is to always record at quiet levels.

Unfortunately this means, if you record it badly, there’s not much you can do to fix it. There is one fix if you don’t mind going for a warmer distorted sound. You can place a distortion or guitar amp effect (such as Guitar Rig or Sausage Fattener) on your vocals. This is just accepting the distortion and it would hide if you had accidentally distortion on your vocals.

But If that’s not the sound you’re going for then
you will have to re-record

Here are some tips for recording at quiet levels.

• Step 1 : The best volume to record it at is for the loudest part of your recording to top out at -12db.
• Step 2 : The easiest way to make sure these recordings stay at this level is to turn the microphone volume down on your audio interface.
• Step 3 : Once you find the volume you like, just always leave it at that level or use some type of marker so you know where the sweet spot is.
• Step 4 : Another way to make sure the volume is on the quieter side, is to put five fingers from your mouth to the microphone.
• Step 5 : Also turning down the master volume helps, sometimes playback is so loud it makes you have to be louder to hear yourself.

Problem 2: is your vocals are too quiet

We’ll explore the solution to Problem 2 in the next post. I’m sure that if you try this it will help your vocals, just try this out with one of your songs first and let me know how it works for you!

Stay Tuned,