Microphone for low guttural death metal vocals

P-Keisari

New Metal Member
Feb 3, 2016
25
0
1
Finland
Hi. I'm working on this brutal death metal album (the same I've been working on for ages) and now I have reached a point where I realised that the vocals just don't fit in the mix and they must be recorded again. Even a most skillfull EQ can't save this situation. See, the mic I used was a large capsuled condenser mic. Røde NT-1 to be exact. Didn't work at all. The dynamic range for this kind of vocals it's just waaay too wide. The lower section is all boomy and muddy and I had to high-pass the vocals from somewhere around 250Hz and after that there's nothing left really. The sibilance is also something that can only be described as pretty morbid. I'm not saying that it's a bad mic, I'm saying it was a bad mic choice. Aaand maybe I didn't use it properly. But anyway what kind of mic would you recommend for death metal vocals? My voice is quite deep and... slimy? Don't know how else to describe it. It's kind of a mixture of Dying Fetus singer John Callagher and Necrophagia's Killjoy. More like Callagher though. People seem to use dynamic mics quite a lot for this kind of stuff. Thank you.
 
Hard rule of thumb for me is SM7b. I've never had a situation where it doesn't work for screaming and it has an incredibly long running track record of being on most of our favorite heavy screaming albums. Keep in mind if you invest in one, you'll need a preamp with lots of gain (I don't remember the specific amount, but you can search around and find it)

Edit: I'll also add that it also adds a level of comfort when using it. Reason being is because you can hold it while doing vocals which lets you twist your body in all weird types of ways while using it (this might sound silly, but half the battle with vocals is feeling comfortable while doing them :) ). Check out the Whitechapel studio diaries with Suecof to get an idea of what that looks like
 
I've had great results with dynamic mics and LDC mics. It's all about the distance, room and vocal performance. After that some clever subtractive EQ into a nice compressor suitable for the job, such as the Distressor etc.
 
I've had great results with dynamic mics and LDC mics. It's all about the distance, room and vocal performance. After that some clever subtractive EQ into a nice compressor suitable for the job, such as the Distressor etc.
Yeah, by the way, Distressor incredibly helps tracking extreme vocals.:thumbsup: