Tracking Vocals with in-ear wired earphones

[Jay Menon]

I use an old set of Shure E4c which I've had for 20 years...

Pros:
- comfortable
- no spill into the vocal microphone
- sound nice while tracking

Con:
I seem to sing a little flat (consistently) with them

When listening back afterwards with the same earphones, my recorded vocal sounds in tune.

But it sounds flat through studio monitors played at low-moderate volume.

Could this be related to increased bone conduction when the outer ear canal is occluded?

Is there a set of closed back headphones (largely for vocal tracking) that you would recommend? And would they alleviate the problem?

[The Elf]

I don't know the real cause, but this is common. I often get vocalists to take one ear-cup from their head when I can hear it happening - as if by magic, almost every time, they sing in tune.

There's obviously something going on, and I'd like to know what it is, but it's always been enough for me to be aware of it.

FWIW, to my knowledge, I've never worked with a vocalist who tracks with buds or IEMs.

[James Perrett]

Quieter sounds sounding flat is a fairly well known psycho-acoustic phenomenon. Try listening to some fairly loud music on headphones and then take them off while the music is still playing. You will probably notice the pitch of the music get lower.

The first thing to check is whether your backing track is loud enough compared to your vocal level in the headphones?

[Dave Rowles]

I agree on the psycho-acoustic side of things.

On the monitoring side, especially with IEM, you've got to get the level correct when tracking, which is hard to get without listening in the same way. I encounter this all the time in live work.

If the monitor level is too high you'll sing flat as you under sing to cope with the high volume.

If the monitor level is too low you'll sing sharp as you over sing to try and hear yourself.

I'd try playing with the level you monitor your vocal with when tracking to see if it sorts it out.

Also, if you've got any pitch correction software, try putting that on the vocal and see if it's tries to correct it. That'll give you an indication if it's the room/monitoring that's making you think it's out of tune, or if there is a serious tuning error.

[alexis]

I use an old set of Shure E4c which I've had for 20 years...

...

When listening back afterwards with the same earphones, my recorded vocal sounds in tune

...

Could this be related to increased bone conduction when the outer ear canal is occluded?

Because of the bolded part above, I think there may be more than a psychoacoustic phenomenon going on here - if the monitor volume were making the singing actually flat or sharp as described above, I don't know why you wouldn't hear that on playback through the IEMs. Is that reproducible?

Maybe indeed it is something to do with your ear canal, position of IEMs in said ear canals, bone conduction etc. ... I don't know, that's very interesting!
.

...
Is there a set of closed back headphones (largely for vocal tracking) that you would recommend? And would they alleviate the problem?

I use a set of Beyerdynamics DT 770 Pro for tracking, it's one of a million options available, they work nicely for me.

As to whether they will fix the problem ... that's a great question! They're not super expensive compared to some, if you could get a hold of some headphones before buying you might find out!

[amanise]

It's definitely a common thing with in ear monitoring. I was watching an interview with the fella from The Stereophonics who was kicking himself about a series of shows that he felt weren't very good (shall we say) because he reckoned it was the first gigs he had done since they converted to IEM. He reckoned it threw his singing off something rotten. He must have got used to it in the end though because when I watched the video of the big one they did at Cardiff Arms Park, his singing was bang on. Not really a fan of theirs - but I appreciate good large scale production.

I use some Senny's, but my pitching is not anything like as good as yours anyway. Those Bayers that Alexis mentions are very popular with a number of people on here for tracking - and not too expensive.