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Here's some great info gave to my by "TruBeats":
"The first and most important step
It seems easy; you just get some lines of words into an audio track and tweak it down. But it is not. The truth is that recording and processing a vocal is one of the more challenging things for a studio to do. Basically, there are two phases to getting a good vocal. First is the recording process where the vocals are recorded. It's important to get your recording process as perfect as possible. Why? Because there are some things you just can't "fix in the mix". It is very hard, no, impossible, to fix damaged, sustained overloads which result from poor recording technique. You have to get the level right the first time. Not even the best restoration software will help. The second process of getting a good vocal sound is "post-processing". This is after your vocal tracks are recorded. Here's where you can fix things like off key notes (with pitch processors), surgically remove short clicks and pops (with a pencil tool in an audio editor), replace words or phrases if necessary to make a great sounding "composite" vocal track. This is also where you apply effects and other processors to make the vocal tracks sound more professional.
The most common mistake is recording vocals too loud or too soft. Newbie's tend to go too loud.
The main goal to recording a solid vocal is to get all of the performance. It's not easy to set levels with a good, dynamic vocalist. As soon as you think you have the level pegged, you do something like move a few inches from the mic and you find out you are louder than you thought and meters are in the red. So you lower the level and find out that the meters are barely moving at all. If the you are nervous and moving around, you might spend hours and never find an optimum level. The human voice is extremely dynamic, from soft whispers to piercing screams. If the level is too low, you will be bringing in noise and hum if you amplify it later. However, if you record too loud, there will be times when the file goes "over" which will likely result in damage that cannot be corrected later.
One solution to this madness is to use a compressor in the chain after the preamp. The compressor, essentially, automatically lowers the volume when the input exceeds a certain threshold. It's like an invisible hand on a volume control. This allows a vocalist to get louder without going into the red. One of my favorite settings is to have the input to the compressor boosted so that all the "soft" words come through with a strong level. As soon as the vocalist gets louder, the clamping down begins and if they scream, it clamps down hard. The ideal is to have more consistent loudness no matter what they are doing.
The other solution is to record at such a low level the highest peak will never break through the roof.
Getting the level right before you start is the first and most important step, because once you have a distorted recording, there is not much you can do with it."
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