The Geek Sensations: Recording and Mixing good vocals with headphone attached microphone

If You are like me, then You do not have a good or any Microphone, or an Audio Interface, or a Beastly PC, or Mixers, Pre-Amps, Midi Keyboards, Studio Monitors at all, and not even the money to buy it, But made a little track to sing on, But moaning about not having a microphone, I am here to give You good eager musicians little hope. Its possible to beef up the quality and production of the vocals recorded in a headphone attached microphone, pretty better than it should.

Let me assume You have a headphone with a microphone attached to it, I assume that atleast thats a good one, say a Sennheiser or something like that. Now I accept that they are little bit better than the others to listen to a bullet or footsteps in a computer game. Nothing more than that.
Please remember, It will not nearly become the mix to be submitting somewhere serious. Its not a neumann of course, But a lot better than Your expectations.

Now lets cut to the chase.

Recording : In a proper studio, You are getting engineered Room Acoustics and Sound Proofing, Glass partitions to barely allow air to crash within themselves, a costly Plop Filter, Mixers, Pre-Amps, costly Audio Interfaces, High Quality Audio Cables, Mic Stand, and here all you get is a headphone attached microphone with a poor cables and a poor copper plug.

You have to get around all this. So lets talk about it. When you start to record, make sure that Your ceiling fans, computer fans, water pumps are off and all the doors and windows closed. Make sure that the jack is plugged in the PC pretty tight and optimal, so a little movement wont spark within. To make sure of that, introduce a weight or a clip to hold the wire firm to something. Next, These mics are super high sensitive to air plops and hisses, So, now where the hell would You get that, I have an idea, Use any filters, Best be a tea filter coz it has a handle to hold like this.

Now, It works very good with handling air blasts when singing avoiding plops. This is my tool of trade, my trick. You can thank me later. You have to hold both the mic and this filter with both the hands, and keep it very steady. Remember this filter also cuts the gain and depth of the voice, so hold them very close.

Now, These mics are also very sound sensitive. So when You are recording, It tends to capture all the sounds from your reference headphones, like the metronome, backing track sounds, which disturbs the tracks and make it near to impossible to insert effects and cure the vocal track later. To decrease the anomaly, just reduce all these metronome, and backing tracks volumes to minimum, only for the reference to sing. Start recording.....

So the recording phase is completed.

Now it comes to post recording.

Post Recording, Editing and Mixing : Make sure, No effects were on the inserts, when recording, because it effects performance, its like an illusion to the singer himself that he is doing good when actually not. Plus, I use ASIO4ALL as an emulated virtual audio interfaces, so pre recording effects effects performance of audio engine, CPU, and increases latency.
So I recorded this empty. Now comes post recording effects. I used all of Steinberg Cubase 5's plugins. No external apps used.

1) First comes Auto Tuning. For starters Its a good misconception that auto tune is used solely to correct notes and nothing. Its also used for pitch straightening. In a pop or a balled, modulated voice doesn't go great. Its not possible for humans to sing de-modulated. So pitch straightening gives a smooth and appealing sound. I will give an example...

This one is un- straightened.

This one is straightened

This straightening really makes a lot of difference. Now after the straightening done, we will concentrate into hiss sounds. due to a poor recording gear, and not being an acoustics room, The recording will contain a fair amount of hiss sounds and specially the portions where there is a gap within words. When amplified, compressed, this hiss sounds also amplifies and becomes too much annoying. I will be mentioning the left over Hisses within the words later, But we have to first cut off the within words hisses. But cutting them off completely will give a glitchy start and stop in the mix. So we just have to decrease the gain of the hisses to the minimum. Lets see an example...

First lets mark the points of the spaces and hisses, then we will zoom in and lower the gains.

Example :

Look, I have minimized the volumes already. Now comes the inserts part.
2) Compression : I used cubase's default compressor. I used low threshold with very tight compression ratio, Automatic release, with an increased make up to fill up the compressed section and increased to attack for the punch in the face word throw.

3) Maximizer : I used a maximizer insert to make up the compressed part of the vocals.

4) EQ : As I said, recording with a filter and cheap gear takes away a lot of depth. So we have to manually compensate the loss. I completely minimize the lowest frequency, and Increase the lower mid frequencies, and also increase the higher ends a little for the crispy vocals.

5) DE-ESSER : An awesome plugin to reduce the excessive throws of the "S" sound in a vocal track. Really an awesome plugin to use.

6) De-Noiser : It helps reducing all the additional blips, and pops even after using de-plop filter. Now for the special purpose, Select white noise, and reduce it, White noise is the poor quality HISS sound lying in the words. The white noise denoiser decreases it. Now all this denoiser also affects the high ends a little bit, so remember to compensate the high end frequencies with the EQ.

7) Digital Harmonics with auto tune : We all love harmony, but it doesn't goes exactly the same way. But doing it the same way is sexier. To do this, duplicate the vocal track, and shift upto 5 notes in the auto tune. Now the voice becomes glitchy, female y, and bad, but is hardly noticable when the volume is decreased with the original track playing. It sounds just great.

8) Analog synchronize : Notice all the keywords of the song. They generally are the ending words of a line, Re record them in a separate vocal track and apply a different EQ if possible, according to your taste. I use "Telephonic Voice" for example.

9) Delay and Reverb: Apply delay and Reverb as per needs and feel of the song. Try not to give much reverb to the main vocal track. It looses its punch.

All these analog and digital synchronizing gives the track a good amount of depth.
Hear for your self. I made a partial cover of DRAKE's HOT LINE BLING cover, Just with my headphone attached MIC, and all the parameters I explained above.....

Here is the video :