Singing to backing tracks is not all karaoke. Our vocal clients have recorded to backing tracks for many reasons. We've had:

1. Professional singers using Space to record vocals for a new album (backing recorded elsewhere).

2. A singer on the club circuit making an album to sell at gigs.

3. A girl singing to tracks she's written and recorded at home using e-Jay software.

4. A chap singing to 'I Need You Tonight' by the Backstreet Boys, having been bought the time as a gift through a 'gift day' agent.

5. Five 11-year-old girls for a birthday party singing to Kelis' 'Lil' Star'.

6. An ice-cream man singing to Elvis numbers (complete with shades).

7. A singer making a demo to get more work singing Rat Pack swing songs on cruise ships.

8. A Jamaican dub singer singing to backing tracks made for him in Jamaica.

9. A rapper rapping his own raps to backing tracks made for him.

10. 14 hen ladies who were plied with sparkling wine and who sang like angels.

11. A team building day where a work team wrote a song to a backing track we made in-house.

As you can see, we've had people just having a laugh, like the Elvis ice-cream man who wanted to surprise his mates with a recording of his own vocals, or the little girls who gave me colour-coded lyrics (and then proceeded to swap lines every take!). And we've had people who are using these recordings to launch a career in the music business.

Let's start with the pleasure seekers and the newbies. The first hurdle in recording for the first time is hearing your voice back. This often scares people, but with a little coaching we can have you sounding great.

The other thing that takes some explaining is why recording one song takes so long. If you were to book an hour to record one song (and that's not long) the session would go like this.

00:00 Arrive at Space, tell us a bit about what you're doing, and have a cup of tea.

00:10 We load up the song you've brought, on CD preferably, into the ProTools session we've created.

00:12 You go into the vocal booth and we show you where to stand, how to handle the cans (headphones), and we make sure you can hear the track and yourself in the cans.

00:14 You try the first take of the song, and we're checking for levels while you get comfortable with the headphone balance.

00:18 Come in and listen to your first take. Discuss what needs to be done differently.

00.25 Go back and do another take.

00.30 Do some drop-ins, replacing any dodgy notes.

00:35 Listen again and make sure you're entirely happy with your performance.

00:40 We mix the vocals, applying any effects and compression to iron out some of the variance in vocal level.

00:53 Bounce to whatever format is most sensible for what you're doing.

00:56 We burn a CD or put it on your MP3 player.

1:00 You take the CD home and listen to it on as many different systems as possible - car, hi-fi, MP3 player, etc, to make sure you're happy with it.

That's as short as it can possibly be. And that's if you're a top-notch singer. No matter how great you think your performance is when you practice it, you need time to warm up, get used to everything, and we also need time to mix and make the balance correct. Very rarely do singers get it in one take, and to base the timing of a session on the possibility that you might puts pressure on you. You then say in the studio that it sounds fine, then when you get it home, you say "darn it, that note is a bit duff, I wish I'd taken more time".

The other thing to consider is little old us! We might know the song you're singing, but we probably won't, especially if you've written it! We also don't know how you're going to sing it and what kind of voice you have. Take the chap who's making an album. He's trained, he's got an amazing voice, but a lot of the songs start quietly and build up to a rousing crescendo. So when I set the levels for the beginning of the track, by the time we've reached the end he's belting it out and my level meters have gone red. So we have to go back and redo some of the louder bits, setting new levels or asking him to take a small step back from the mic.

Which I guess brings me on to the professionals, or those aiming to be. Step one is to source the best backing track you can possibly get. If you've downloaded them from file-sharing networks (naughty you!) apart from being illegal, the quality is usually not the best. These are usually MP3 files recorded at 128mbps, and when we put them on our top-notch ProTools HD3 system and play them through our studio monitors, you can hear what we call "artefacting" which sounds like birds twittering in the background. If you're going to be making an album or a demo to send to agents (and agents expect album quality), this just won't do. Another problem comes if you bring the backing track on a minidisc player. One client had recorded them onto minidisc and had clipped the recording, so they sounded distorted. Often, what sounds good on smaller speakers at home will sound different on studio monitors. Likewise, what sounded good through a PA in a club for this chap didn't stand up in the studio.

Ideally we'd use unmastered WAV files of backing tracks, but you're unlikely to get hold of these unless the backing tracks have been created for you. So we'd suggest a CD of backing tracks that you've bought as the sample rate on a CD is higher than on a minidisc or an MP3, both of which are compressed and therefore of a lower quality. This kind of thing really matters in a professional recording where your demo will be listened to under close scrutiny and in comparison with some stiff competition. No matter how good your vocal is, a distorted backing track will let it down.

The time it takes will depend on whether you're one take wonders, your experience in the studio, or how long your voice lasts! You could book a day and burn through the lot, or two half days, and see how it goes. You can spread out the bookings too. We'd need a couple of hours to mix the vocals with the tracks, but again, this depends on how many vocal lines you record.

Backing tracks - officially you'll need permission from the people who recorded the backing tracks to use them. And then we need to arrange an MCPS license as I outlined in my last email, for us to record your voices over the top. If you get backing tracks from a company who sell them online at around £5 each, they come with the licenses and permission in place, but you still need to arrange the MCPS license as no (legitimate) company will manufacture your CD without it. It all sounds a bit scary but in practice probably few people follow all this, but we've decided (rather boringly) to take the completely above-board route as we deal with record releases here.

So if all this hasn't put you off, give it a go. We can help you with all of the above - a bit of vocal coaching if you need it, advice about where to get backing tracks, presentation, manufacturing, even graphic design and photography. Whether you just want to sing for yourself or sell your own CDs on the Internet or at gigs, Space Studios can help you at every step.

back to music recording