Chapter 11 Further Reading — Recording Vocals

A short, honest shelf, in two halves like the chapter: capture and performance. Everything named here is real; nothing is required before you track your lead vocal. Per this book's habit, resources are named rather than linked — sites reorganize, search functions don't — and where a domain is given, it's domain-level only.

Beginner

  • This book's own appendices, in session order. Appendix C (Microphone Selection Guide) when the mic-by-voice table turns into an actual purchase decision; Appendix G (Producer's Checklists) for a printable version of this chapter's pre-take protocol; Appendix E when you need your DAW's name for take lanes, loop recording, and low-latency monitoring.
  • Mike Senior, Recording Secrets for the Small Studio (Focal Press). Written for exactly this book's reader — small rooms, two mics, no budget — and its vocal chapters reinforce everything here: room prep, placement pragmatism, headphone-mix care, and session psychology, with the same placement-over-purchase spine.
  • Shure's educational articles (shure.com — the educational/publications section). Manufacturer content, but unusually honest about mechanisms: vocal mic technique, proximity effect, plosive control, working distance. Read for physics, not model numbers.
  • Sound On Sound magazine (soundonsound.com). Decades of freely searchable technique features; their vocal-recording guides and "Session Notes" columns show real sessions with real compromises — including the headphone-mix and performance-coaching problems this chapter says fill most of every vocal day.

Intermediate

  • Bobby Owsinski, The Recording Engineer's Handbook (multiple editions). The natural next book after this chapter: source-by-source recording surveys built from working engineers' interviews, with a substantial vocal section. Valuable precisely because the engineers disagree — it inoculates you against one-true-method thinking.
  • Bobby Owsinski, The Music Producer's Handbook (Hal Leonard). The other half of this chapter's job: producing the human. Session pacing, working with singers, psychology at the talkback button, and what a producer actually owes a performance.
  • Howard Massey, Behind the Glass (Vols. I and II, Backbeat Books). Long-form interviews with major producers, heavy on exactly what this chapter cares about: getting performances, knowing when to push and when to stop, and what was really assembled behind beloved records. Case study 1's themes, told first-person by the people who were in the room.
  • Sylvia Massy, Recording Unhinged (Hal Leonard). A riotous, illustrated argument for performance-first recording and creative risk — the perfect antidote if this chapter's take-14 syndrome sounds uncomfortably familiar. Unorthodox capture ideas throughout, all of them subordinate to the take.

Advanced

  • John Eargle, The Microphone Book (Focal Press). The serious reference behind every position decision you made today: pattern derivation, proximity effect, and off-axis behavior with the math attached. Any edition deepens this chapter's setup half.
  • Johan Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice. The classic scientific account of the instrument you're recording: formants, the singer's formant, registers, and vibrato. Explains why presence peaks flatter some voices and weaponize others — the physics under the mic-by-voice table.
  • Ingo Titze, Principles of Voice Production. The standard voice-science text: how vocal folds actually work, what fatigue physically is, and why the voice's session budget is real physiology rather than studio folklore.
  • David M. Howard and Damian T. Murphy, Voice Science, Acoustics and Recording (Plural Publishing). The bridge volume — voice science meets capture engineering directly, with experiments. For the reader who wants the bone-conduction sidebar at textbook depth.

For Educators

  • Run exercises C2 and C3 as the graded lab. The deliverables are artifacts, not audio: the filled setup checklist, the position photo, the take log, and the next-day verdict paragraph. Artifacts grade fairly across wildly different voices and gear, and they assess the discipline rather than the singing.
  • Stage a blind take-selection panel. One volunteer singer, four full takes captured in class, level-matched playback, written votes before discussion — then make students defend verdicts in terms of the song, not the singing. It reliably reproduces the take-3-versus-take-14 debate live, and pairs well with case study 1 as a discussion text on what session lore deletes.
  • Mike Senior's free multitrack library (maintained alongside his books). Raw professional multitracks, many with complete unedited vocal takes — students can hear what real keeper takes sound like before polish, and the same sessions feed Chapter 15's comping labs later in the course.
  • The companion volume, The Physics of Music. Its Chapter 5 (psychoacoustics) underwrites this chapter's "the vocal is the song" claim, and its Chapter 7 (timbre) explains the spectral vocabulary of the mic-by-voice logic — useful for courses pairing production practice with science credit.