Adjust your expectations:
- We're all just doing what we can with what have in the time we have, it's all good
- Character and tone and emoting can render all this recording stuff mostly or totally irrelevant
- The less of the below things that are practical for you to do, the less you should expect your vocals to sound like what you hear on
Singing:
- TODO add concise info about singing tips
Micing/Recording:
- Put your mic on a stand, you will get a more consistent sound than if you hold it in your hand and you won't get any noise from your hand touching the mic or the mic moving in the air
- Don't touch the stand, and, consider getting a shock absorber to put your mic in on the stand
- Keep about a 6" distance between your mouth and the mic, generally speaking, to avoid the "proximity effect", which is an effect where close mic'ed vocals have dramatically pronounced low/bass frequencies
- Use a windscreen/pop filter to help tame your "plosives" (consonants like "p" and "b" which when you sing them produce fast bursts of air that can cause issues in recordings)
- You can try pointing your mouth a bit off to the side of the mic to try to tame "sibilants" ("s"/"sh" sounds)
- Try to record with as little background noise as possible so you get clean vocal tracks
- Consider getting a piece of gear that attaches to a mic stand that provides acoustic shielding behind your mic to reduce background noise (e.g. an sE Electronics Reflexion Filter etc.)
- Use a condenser microphone (e.g. Audio Technica AT2020), or, if you're style calls for loud/aggressive singing or you want a more "live" feel use a dynamic mic (e.g. a Shure SM-57)
- If you're using a condenser microphone, you're audio interface will likely need to support "phantom power" and you will likely need to enable that for the channel you plug the mic into
Mixing:
- Apply a "high-pass" filter to your vocals to cut very low bass frequencies
- Use a compressor to reduce the dynamic range of your vocals
-- Light compression preserves natural dynamic range, heavy compression gets more of a pop music/top 40 feel
- Generally speaking you should apply some reverb to your vocals, to taste, anywhere from enough to just be felt to as much as you want for whatever effect you're going for
Tuning:
- Some folks use autotune to various degrees, it's built in to most DAWs in some for or another these days
- For more subtle correction, some folks use tools that let you make specific adjustments to individual notes in a vocal track (e.g. Flex Pitch in Logic), rather than forcing every not to be tuned the same way
I can add/edit/update the above as folks share info.