I've bitched and whined long enough. Let's get to the point of this brief article on the vocal mic test. The #1 biggest mistake a recording engineer can make is recording vocals that hurt! If a listener feels physical pain from listening to music, they will not listen long. Engineering in a way thats does not physically harm a person is probably even more important than choosing the song to record!!

So how do you know if you have chosen the right microphone for a given voice? Easy! See how bad it hurts. Let's start the pain test!.

Here's how you do it:

#1 Setup several microphones. Pick microphones that range in tone. Who cares how much they cost!! Try whatever you have. Put them all on mic stands.

#2 Have your singer start singing through each mic. Record this to a track. Make sure to label your tracks correctly.

#3 After you have vocals for every track, put just a little compression on the two buss. You are not trying to actually compress here. You are just avoiding excessive transients in the vocals. It's more like a limiter really.

#4 Make sure your levels are pretty close to the same for each mic.

#5 Solo the first microphone's track.

#6 Now turn your monitors almost all the way up. Seriously, make it STUPID LOUD. (Be smart about this. Don't blow your monitors up, here. Just make the vocal loud as you and / or your studio monitors can stand. )

#7 Now listen to each microphone one at a time. .

I noticed that I blink every time an incredibly bright “ess” shoots out of the monitors. It has to do with the way my body reacts to audible pain, I guess. To me, I quickly develop a deep hatred for any mic that puts me in pain to the extent that I have to blink. While it does hurt to do this. (Duh!! It's called the pain test) it's worth it. Why? Because I've done my share of mixers where I didn't know the vocals hurt until I took a cd-r out to the car stereo. It's much more painful and more frustrating to think you are finished with a mix just to find out that you totally missed the boat on the vocal.

You will quickly learn which microphones do not work with a given vocalist on a given song. It's easy to get sucked into the trap of recording vocals with a very bright microphone, but this test will demonstrate a better system. Also, you'll have a lot less need for de-essers and other unideal fixes when you pick a microphone that doesn't tear your face off.

While this little test will show you which microphones hurt at very loud volumes on a specific voice, it won't help you select the midrange qualities in a microphone. In other words, you can make that decision with your studio monitors at realistic levels.

What If I Want A Bright Vocal Sound?

Good question. (I'm talking to myself right now). There is nothing wrong with a bright vocal sound as long as it fits the music. The real issue isn't so much the frequency response of the microphone, but it's speed. In other words, some microphones are slow enough where they don't notice high frequencies quick enough to catapult them into your ears and out of the back of your head. The fastest microphones will pick up every detail and quite possibly they may pick up a lot more “ess”.

Using the vocal microphone pain test, you'll be able to very quickly weed out the microphones that are way too bright (and probably way too fast). Since the relatively slower vocal microphones aren't even picking up this super fast “ess” stuff, that part of the vocal performance may be totally ignored and not passed to your digital recording rig.

More importantly, with the right vocal microphone you should be able to add high end shelf with a parametric EQ to create a bright vocal sound without fearing “ess” rockets bombarding your ears.

Conclusion

Cranking up your studio monitors will expose the most painfully bright and sibilant microphones very quickly. You'll learn that the right midrange character is preferred over brightness by most professional recording engineers anyway. Best of all, this trick will help your mixes translate to other systems, which is the hardest part of home recording.