Making the best vocal records

[Violeta]

I am a student from Lithuania and I am studing at the University of Technologies - Sound Engineering in the last bachelor semester.
I am writing the bachelor project. The name of it is "Recording Technologies of Vocals in the Studios, Recording, Mastering and preparing Songs to Compact Disc"
Is there some literature for mixing and mastering vocals?
How to make good vocal records in the studio?
Any hints and tips?

[Juppy]

... ich verstehe diese Art von Fragen nicht:
Da studiert jemand im letzten Semester Tontechnik (oder so etwas) und weiß nicht, wie man Stimme aufnimmt und bearbeiten kann?
Was wurde in den Semestern zuvor gemacht?

[Nikita]

Hallo.
Na na...
Man wird wohl eher davon ausgehen, dass unser Litauischer Freund nicht so super Englisch kann...
Seine lokalen Bibs wird er wohl abgeklappert haben und er stieß dabei wohl auf die Ernüchternde Tatsache, dass es keine verwertbare Literatur zu diesem Thema gibt..
Das ich so auch nicht gewählt hätte.

Nun zur Frage..
We need a little more information on your project and your approach. Your title could mean almost everything.
As long as you certainly have limited your research to a particular domain in vocals production (e. g. a genre or a special part of the production process), you could maybe tell us your actual assumptions. What is the "research"?
I'm afraid there is not much of utilisable literature to bank on, nothing specail I know about. Well, you'll have a look at a couple of standart books (e. g. Glen Ballou, Handbook of Sound Engineers) for shure. Perhaps you could look up the indexes of some "Acustika" magazines? Check this out then:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/dav/aaua
Still there is little stuff.
The topic you chose seems to be quite a pain in the ass of a bachelor project
Maybe you do better by doing mulitple comparative case studys. Or a kind of an action research. You could try to optimize the workflow of in a single field (such as "voice overs for commercials") by introducing some new approaches. That would rather be a reasonable topic for a research project.
I hope I could help you a little.
My best whishes for your research, i'll keep my fingers crossed.
Good Night
Nikita

[Tomte]

There is not much literature out there, but you can try:
Bob Katz - Mastering Audio
Bobby Owsinksi - The Mixing Engineer's Handbook
(more interesting interviews in this book than facts, but you asked for tips and hints)
Acta Acustica is not exactly the right journal for this. The "Audio Engineering Society" fits better. See
http://www.aes.org/journal/
But as far as I know you have to pay for the full articles if you don't have access in a library or somebody is a member.
Good luck,
Thomas

[Tomte]

... another link:
http://www.neumann.com/?id=downloads_contest&lang=en
-> contest 2003
(windows software)
There are also some examples of vocal-recording techniques, perhaps some good suggestion.
Best regards,
Thomas

[TobiH]

My former drum teacher made some comparisons of microphone angels in a vocal recording in his thesis. Maybe this is of interest for you: http://www.myelvis.de/ You can download his results from the webpage, and you can even hear some examples. I think, there is even a bibliography at the end of his papers.