— GUIDE

HOW TO RECORD A PRODUCER TAG (ANY MIC, ANY ROOM)

You don't need a studio to record a tag that sounds professional — half the famous ones were captured on whatever was nearby. You need a quiet room, any microphone, and a performance with actual energy. Here's the whole chain.

Gear: use what you have

• A phone voice-memo app is genuinely fine. Tags are two seconds of heavily processed speech; the performance matters 10× more than the mic. Record WAV/lossless if the app allows.
• A USB mic is the comfortable middle. Anything decent at arm's length in a closet full of clothes beats an expensive mic in an echoey room.
• The room is the real gear. Duvet fort, closet, car interior — kill the reflections and any mic sounds twice as expensive.

The session

1. Warm up the line. Say the phrase twenty times before recording. The first takes are always stiff.
2. Record 15–20 takes, varied. Same words, different energy: shouted, spoken, whispered, half-laughing, doubled. The keeper is usually a take you didn't expect.
3. Get close, but off-axis. 10–15 cm from the mic, slightly to the side, so plosives (“P”, “B”) don't pop the capsule.
4. Leave silence. A second of room tone before and after each take makes editing painless.
5. Peak around −12 dB. Loud comes later, in processing. Clipped source audio is unfixable.

Picking the take

Play candidates over three different beats at preview volume — not soloed. A take that sounds great alone but disappears in a mix loses to a rougher take that cuts through. You're choosing a logo, not a vocal performance; character beats cleanliness.

Processing, minimum viable chain

In any DAW (or right in your browser — see below):

1. Trim + fade. Tight in, short fade out.
2. High-pass at 80–100 Hz. Removes rumble that eats headroom under an 808.
3. Compress hard. Fast attack, 4:1 or more. Tags want to be dense.
4. One character move. Pitch shift down 2–3 semitones for menace, telephone EQ for lo-fi, stutter the first syllable for trap. One, not all. Genre chains are covered in the making-of guide.
5. Limit to around −1 dB and export WAV — dry version and FX version both.

Need to repitch a take without a DAW? Our pitch changer runs in the browser, nothing uploads.

Keep the ritual repeatable

Save the session, the presets and the dry takes in one folder you back up. In two years, when you want a variant (“…on the beat” for collabs, a clean radio-safe read), you'll match the original exactly — same voice, same room, same chain. Consistency is the entire asset.

Next in the manual: Producer tag placement — the four positions.

FAQ