A good vocal recording requires a few things at home: a good vocal microphone, a sound card, a computer with the necessary recording software, suitable room acoustics and headphones.
Voice recording and its frequency characteristics are strongly influenced by the choice of microphone, so it is better to put different microphones for recording female and male voices. Thus, to have two or three microphones available. Perhaps cheaper than the price category Shure sm 58 and SENNHEISER E-845 should not be dropped. But this applies to dynamic microphones. They are not good enough for studio recording. Therefore, it is preferable to choose condenser vocal microphones: AKG 414, MXL, Neumann 87, Audio-technica, Oktava. The choice of a company already depends on your financial capabilities. You can find inexpensive tube microphones from Octava. The MXL microphone is more expensive. And Neumann and AKG - professional studio microphones - will already be a serious investment of your money.
It is worth working with the acoustics of the room. There are several ways to go here. A cheap way to drown out reflections in a room is to buy glass wool or carpet. It is better to search the Internet and buy sound-absorbing boards or a screen and hang them on some walls in the part of the room where vocals will be recorded. The main rule: do not overwhelm the room, but also remove its boomy and unnecessary echo. Each room has its own acoustics, so you need to hang shields based on your specific situation. Recording criteria: good flat frequency component of the recorded sound, no hum at low frequencies. There are rooms with natural pleasant echoes. But keep in mind that this echo cannot be removed from the recording.
An external sound card is required to record vocals at home. The most popular models are from m-audio, Apogee. In general, in choosing a card, a lot depends on the preamps that are in it. The rest is again up to your taste and price preferences. Sound recording software must also be installed on the sound card. You can use any of the professional studio programs - Logic, Pro Tools, Cubase. Learning to work in these programs will also raise the level of professional work at home.
A lot of vocal recording depends on compressors, sound amplifiers, and reverb choices. Again, you have two options - cheap and expensive. At the same time, half the world and even many studios use the "cheap" option in this case. You can install compressor plugins, reverb plugins on your computer. An expensive option would be to buy hardware software. Thus, it is possible both to put a Breverb impulse reverb on your computer, and to purchase a box for a certain amount of money. Although the advantages of the piece of iron in this case cannot be taken away.
