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I am learning to sing and recently learned how to use my personal computer to record myself. How can I take advantage of this in my regular training and practice?

I am currently recording myself and listening to the result right after I completed, then hear for weak tones, irregularities, recurrent problems or failures. Which points should I especially consider?

While I do not want to turn my living room into a recording studio, what should I take in consideration to improve the quality of the takes? The room is about 4m by 4m and has a low ceiling. Where should I put the microphone and where should I stand?

Obviously, I am going to discuss this with my teacher, but I would also enjoy other advices.

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    As much as it might be a tad embarrassing to showcase your skills to friends and family members at an early stage, it is a good idea to also get some outside opinions. Avoid the friends and family members that will not be honest and praise everything that you do!
    – MrTheBard
    Mar 31, 2014 at 13:14

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Recording yourself and listening to it in a loop is the best way to improve your skills. By doing so, you can find out which all area you need to improve. Don't buy a cheap mic. Buy a good mic. And while singing, be closer to the mic. And I also recommend that you use noise filter software. After recording yourself, use this software to clean out the noise from your soundtrack. Audacity, Sound Forge, Audition and many other software like them have good capability to clean noise that your surroundings generate. And always use headphones. :)

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Make sure you have a decent microphone and decent recording software. Using a 5 dollar microphone with windows recorder will not represent your voice well enough. As for the position of the microphone, you should be really close to it (don't put it 1 meter away from you). Also, a pop filter is basically a must...

As far as listening to yourself goes, that is indeed the best you can do. And keep on practicing! Keep singing and singing and singing! :)

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    I disagree that a pop filter is a must. A good singer must learn to control plosives as pop filters are very rarely used anywhere but the studio.
    – Fergus
    Mar 31, 2014 at 21:35
  • That is true, but his purpose is recording. In my opinion, for that low price, you should buy it because it improves the overall quality.
    – Valentin Grégoire
    Mar 31, 2014 at 23:33
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    Pop filters, quantisation, pitch correction, compression etc can all improve the overall quality of a vocal recording. The question is to improve singing technique via analysing recordings so using any of those recording tools would be counterproductive as they all hide poor vocal technique.
    – Fergus
    Apr 1, 2014 at 0:37

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