EADGBE wrote:
I am recording a female vocalist in my home studio. She is
a
14-year-old with comparatively little professional studio
experience.

Her mother wants her to do a vocal demo so she can have
something to
market herself with.

The problem is that this girl has NO control over her
dynamics. When
she sings softly or at a moderate level, I can record her
fine, with a
nice clean signal and good presence. But the problem is
that this
girl rarely STAYS at that moderate level. She likes to get
EXTREMELY
dramatic with her singing, especially on the higher notes,
where she
just BELTS it out, easily overloading my mic and preamp!

Are you overloading the preamp? Probably.

Do you have your mic's gain turned *all the way down*? Have
you tried using the 414's internal attenuator? What preamp
are you using, anyway?

During our session, I kept having to move her further away
from the mic
(AKG 414) in order to minimize the distortion, but then her
voice lost
a lot of definition and sounded noticeably less distinct
in the mix.

Proximity effect loss and build up of room reverberation,
anybody? I'm told that a lot of the Detroit recordings by
Motown were done with mics up to 4' from the vocalists. Of
course that was in a relatively dead studio. And, the goal
was not a really tight sound in many cases.

One of the first thing that AKG says about this mic is that
it is a high-sensitivity mic.

http://www.akg.com/products//powersl...uage,E N.html

The first thing on the page:

"High sensitivity and extremely low self noise"

That literally means that with a loud source and its
internal attenuators turned off, you can probably drive a
line-level input directly with the mic.

However, this is actually a very flexible mic, given that it
has internal pads.

Are you using the mic's internal pads? On its lowest
sensitivity this mic is rated at something like 158 dB with
relatively low distortion.

Do you realize how %$#!! *LOUD* 158 dB is?

There is zero chance that a human could create a sound this
loud with their voice! 130 dB at an inch or two, yes but
not 158 dB. Therefore, I seriously doubt you're clipping out
the mic if you have it adjusted properly.

It seems to me like there is no reason to have clipping
problems with this mic and any reasonable preamp. It's all a
matter of adjustment.

What have I done when I'v had vocalists that ran away with
levels? First, I've recorded them with lots of headroom and
a good audio interface that isn't excessively noisy with
smaller signals.

Then, I've used the enveloping capabilities of
Audition/CoolEdit to simply level things out.

20-20 hindsight is pretty good! ;-)

I just drew a gain envelope that attenuated the vocal signal
as required to give a useful range of amplitudes. Using
expanded time scale editing techniques, I can simulate an
intelligent limiter with nearly instantaneous attack, and
any desired release characteristic. No human mixer working
in real time can equal the speed and dynamic range of good
software with a skilled operator.

I've had no problems getting undistorted recordings,
well-leveled with very loud and dynamic voices miced very
tight.

I have to admit that a person who is singing very loud
changes the character of their voice. When leveled out this
can result in somewhat unnatural-sounding results.

Please see other poster's comments about using monitoring
and training to tame this singer's voice by modifying her
behavior.