Am Thinking NO Vocal in Headphones is better!

No!
Not ime.

Monitoring is crucial.

Well, great monitoring is crucial.

The fold back vocal should be at a volume to do no more and now less that exactly compensate for the loss of air conduction by the headphones.

As you take the phones on and off there should be no change in volume.

Some plate reverb and a touch of delay can very much help zone in pitching as it slightly elongates a note.

If it works for you …. great.

For me it would be awful and not good for my vocals and vocal technique.

Hey everyone is entitled to my opinion!

I still encourage some experimentation.
Chris

So far as you guys guessed...
No self Vocal is usually best on me.
One off/One on when needing Cans.

Self listening tends to cause most Singers to tighten the Larynx somewhat.
Just ask Giovanni Lamperti-Well if you had a Time Machine!
Chris
P.S. Hoping Bob Ohlsson chimes in.

Including the Hardware kind?

I’m of 2 minds on this the monitor mixer is very surprised, the studio engineer is not.

Of course there are those less talented and experienced vocalist, myself included, who need a guide vocal.

To each his own, and whatever works best for the singer. The student results Bob highlights are really interesting, but I would think a key factor there is that "None of the students had ever done a recording previously." It takes some time to get comfortable with hearing your own voice.

I've been tracking myself for 20 years. At this point I would never sing without my vocal in the headphones while recording (nor sing live without hearing my own vox). For me it's all about the feel, emotion, nuance, volume, inflection, and timing that hearing yourself clearly and intimately enables. When I can hear myself against the tracking I have complete control over how my vocal is sounding in relation to the music. I believe with experience you won't overthink, rather you are freed up to hone in on what you're hearing, gaining the ability to experiment and be artistic "real time". I can hear immediately how any vocal variation sounds, helping me make decisions when practicing and solidifying what I want to do/what sounds best when recording (and for performing as well). And as thehightenor states, some effects on the vocal in the phones just enhances this experience for me. Gives me a good understanding of what the finished product will sound like.

But I understand that may not be the preferred approach for everyone.

I personally think that singers do better when they aren't trying to do too much. Trying to listen to their own vocals seems to trip up a lot of them and they end up turning up the vocals in the headphones to almost ear splitting volumes without much change in their delivery.

On the other hand, I find that if they can't keep a tune, I'll autotune a take and have them harmonize to themselves and it helps a LOT, mostly by taking away their need to try to think about staying in tune while also trying to deliver the performance.

Listening to your own vocal is what beginners do!

Or in fact listening yourself doing anything musical is what beginners do.

Experienced musicians perform and that means getting in the “zone” and when your in the “zone” you can do nothing wrong and you certainly aren’t listening to yourself on any conscious level.

That’s what great monitoring allows you to achieve …. an “in the zone performance”

Not having your vocal in the mix might work for a half petrified beginner (not you Chris of course

I’ve changed to IEM’s live.

I find they are fantastic for delivering well pitched vocals in a live environment.

Mine are vented once’s and when the level and FX are set up perfectly the net effect is like I’m not wearing them.

I’m now a huge fan of using them live.

Thinking of this thread today as I was with a younger band where the singer had a couple of sessions on this tune that was kicking his ass. I told him I wanted to try giving him the mix without his vocal. I mention Chirs' and Bob's comments including the stuff about one ear on and one off. He had good success with both ears on, and when he went to one on, one off in the middle of a take, it kinda went south.

It was quite a breakthrough for a song that was kicking his ass until today.

You’ve got to try everything when a vocalist has trouble, I’ve seen about every combination work differently with different artist, sometime you have to change it up for the same artist on different songs. I had a guy in here last week doing 5 songs. It was his first time in a “real” studio, but he had done demos of a few of them at home in garage band. He definitely suffered from “demo-itis” on one of the songs as he had been tweaking away on that song demo for over a year. All the other songs he completely knocked the vocals out of the park, I just had him do 4 takes through the songs and comp’ed a master from them (one song he got it on the second take and I used most of that one).

For whatever reason, he was struggling on the one song. I started having him try different things, flipped the phase on his vocal mic with both ears one, tried one earphone off… He really liked one earphone off and settled on that. I could tell he felt a lot better about it, but the takes were much worse (even he immediately admitted it hearing the playback). We took a break and came back to it later. I had him sit down with his guitar and just play through the song, it must have unscrewed his brain or something because it sounded damn near perfect with him playing it at the same time. I ended up giving him an electric guitar and feeding the line out to his ears so he could play and sing the choruses at the same time. He did great… Hardly any bleed in the vocal mic since it was a quiet tele. No one will hear it in the final version.

I wouldn’t obsess about what the best way to do things is. I guess if you record only yourself, figure out what works best for you in different situations. It’s more important to have a bunch of options under your belt for when you hit walls with clients. Everyone is different, even song to song and day to day sometimes. We all get too far in our own heads for whatever reason sometimes, it can be tough to figure out ways to fix that.

I’m not some amazing singer, but I really relate to this.

The other thing that is working for me is singing to my monitors off axis in the figure 8 null of my BU67. It has a similar “blending” effect compared to singing and playing guitar.