Transcription
Hey, what's going on out there? I'm Sean Divine. Hope you all are doing well. It has been a minute. I want to give a big shout out to those of you who gave me some encouragement and, you know, just lifted me up in prayer. Good news, I'm doing a lot better. Glad to be back. Got a lot of new things in the works.
Anyways, we're going to jump into a video today where we're going to talk about the ultimate SM7B and SM7DB vocal chain. I know a lot of you out there are utilizing this microphone. Many of you, you know, you see and hear this mic all over the place, and you set it up and you go, "Why in the world does it sound like garbage right now? Why is it not sounding like all these other people out here that I'm hearing?" And the reason is, you need to do a little bit of work, a little bit of processing, and you need to be aware of a couple of aspects of this microphone that are going to help you to get the most out of it.
All right, so we got our session open here. We're going to take a listen to some vocals that I recorded with the SM7DB as well as the SM7B, but I'm also just talking through with my SM7B right now. And let's go ahead and talk about the elephant in the room with the SM7B, which is that noise floor or that hiss. So if you listen very closely, if you got some headphones on, you're going to notice that there is an inherent sort of white noise or a hiss there. No, there's nothing wrong with your SM7B or your SM7DB. They all have this. Actually, I thought that there was something wrong with my SM7B for years, and I thought I had a faulty mic or something. It's just the way the SM7B and the SM7DB are. People will tell you that the SM7B is a silent microphone. It's not. This noise is just there. The good news is, it doesn't make it a bad mic, and it doesn't make it unusable. We're going to take care of it very easily today.
Once you start, uh, utilizing a preamp, if you're not using it correctly, you're going to notice this much more, which is what is happening to a lot of you out there. You're cranking your preamp because you got a bad interface, and then that is, is just amplifying that noise and making it, uh, more noticeable in terms of your, uh, noise to signal ratio. So the absolute easiest way to solve this that I have found is utilizing a noise suppressor like the NS1 from Waves. This one is like the perfect companion to your SM7B because watch what happens when I turn it on. So if I'm silent, and we turn it on, the noise is gone. A silent SM7B, SM7DB, amazing, right? So it's totally gone. Now, one thing to note with these is you want to be really light. And I found that with the NS1, parking it right here around 7 to 8 on this meter, that's all you're going to need because you're going to see when you start utilizing a noise suppressor and kind of pumping it up too much, then we start muffling our signal. We don't want to knock off the brightness and the detail. So just park it right there, and boom, we got a silent SM7DB or SM7B.
The second major concern that we need to remedy with our vocal chain for the SM7B is that the SM7B has significant boosts across the frequency spectrum, specifically in the low mids and the high mids. So if I go over here to our frequency response, you're going to see that we've got some significant boosts in 2K, 3K, 4K, and then going up here into more of the five and six. And then there's a little bit of a roll-off here more in the top top end. Depending on the application, it's going to get kind of messy because you're going to have to utilize a lot of different cuts to remedy some of the resonances that might be in certain voices. You know, if you're using this for a podcast, which is where you see this mic a lot, the reason is because it cuts through. It has those boosts. But musically, you're going to find that once you start processing and compressing this and putting it into that context, you're going to want to control it more. So what I would highly recommend using is a dynamic tone shaper or a dynamic EQ. In this case, for me, that's the F6. So I'll turn this on, and we have a high-pass filter at 110 that's going to roll off those lows. I'm controlling some 200, I'm controlling some 500, uh, we're controlling a little bit at 2K, which can be a harsh, harsh frequency. So if I solo that, this is that frequency that can just kind of be very irritating, as well as 4K. So when that comes through in the context of a musical mix, as you can hear, you don't want to listen to that and have that really be poking out. So we just control all that dynamically. And if I turn it off, you'll hear the mic does have more of a fullness. But again, we're going to listen to this in the context of a mix.
Next up in our vocal chain, we're going to need some compression. And I would highly recommend not utilizing just one compressor. If you followed my channel, you see that we utilize multiple compressors in our vocal chains so that we're not putting all of the compression duties on one plugin or one device. You're just going to find that you're going to be able to combine styles and you're not going to have to kind of stretch your compressor so much and have it just overworked. When you spread it out across a couple different compressors, you just get a lot cleaner and more pleasing result. So in this case, I am going to utilize the R compressor, which you see we have a relatively low ratio at about 2 and a half and pretty quick attack just to control those peaks. And then we have a, you know, kind of a middle ground release. And then I'm feeding that directly into R Vox. If you have very little experience with compression, this is one that I would start with because it's extremely easy to get results. So let's turn both of those on on this rap verse and hear what that does for us.
"Put it all in motion, I'm buried in emotions, feeling what the Lord is doing, heart is open. See, I've been blinded by my own ambition, heard my mama say to me, son, don't worry about a thing, see, you already won." Let's go. Z. "Put it all in motion, I'm buried in emotions, feeling what the Lord is doing, heart is open. See, I've been blinded by my own ambition, chasing dollars to heal the pain, but I failed that mission." Obviously, we're getting a lot of level increase. But now it's going to be easier for you to tell what's happening with that dynamic control. And also that noise, if we hadn't suppressed that, this is going to bring all this up. The same thing when we get to additive EQ here in a minute. We don't want to, you know, accentuate the muddiness and the murkiness and honky and the noise of the mic. So if I turn those off, let's just hear the difference.
"Put it all in motion, I'm buried in emotions, feeling what the Lord is doing, heart is open. See, I've been blinded by my own ambition, chasing dollars." Much more tight and controlled sound, and something that's going to work best in the context of our mix here.
Next up, we got to have some additive EQ with this mic. I'm doing a little bit of external EQ right now. So if I turn that off, uh, you're going to hear that the mic gets pretty dark. Um, it's got like this wooly-ness to it, this kind of quality. Uh, so we definitely want to do some additive EQ to give it more top end and help it cut through the mix, especially if you're doing rap. You know, you're going to want that top end sheen. So that's what we're doing here. We've got a boost at 12 and a half K. So let's just turn that on and off here.
"Put it all in motion, I'm buried in emotions, feeling what the Lord is doing, heart is open. See, I've been blinded by my own ambition, chasing dollars to heal the pain, but I failed that mission. I woke up one of these days, heard my mama say to me, son, don't worry about a thing, see, you already won. The Lord has been looking over you." These cuts here at 110, 250, and 800 are more specific for a lower voice like mine. I just find again with this mic, it has an excessive amount of low mids when you're rapping. So I cut that. I do have a control here that you can scale that stuff back. You can hear as I'm boosting some of the high frequencies in the SM7DB, we get some sibilance or some harshness. And so all we got to do is just back that up with a de-esser. This is a technique I utilize with most mics. If I do aggressive boosting, I just follow it with that de-esser to keep that controlled. And I've got that at about 5100 here on the Waves de-esser. So let's activate that.
"Never feel the void, I smoke it, I drink it, I lust it, I overthink it, the ship is sinking. Never feel the void, I smoke it, I drink it, I lust it, I overthink it, the ship is sinking. I just need a reason, no more people pleasing, flirting with my demons, Christ step in." All right, so we got a nice smooth top end there now.
Just for fun, I decided to do a little parallel split to give you all a delay, slap delay kind of thing going through a reverb. And then also we have a, uh, just a typical delay with a side chain compressor that's going to control that as the signal is coming in and duck. So we've got a ducking delay. Let's turn that on and hear what we got.
"The Lord has been looking over you since day one. God knows I don't deserve it. I stay nourished. I've been self-serving, but I can never feel the void. I smoke it, I drink it, I lust it, I overthink it, the ship is sinking. I just need a reason, no more people pleasing, flirting with my demons, Christ step in. No saving face, it's all grace, it's all love."
Finally, we want to bring the vocal up in our chain here and maximize it without crossing zero or clipping in terms of true peak. So you see I have that true peak domain set here in the L1 Ultra Maximizer ceiling just below zero. If you want to put this more towards minus one just to be safe, you can. And then we can safely bump up that threshold here. I have a control here on the limiter to push that and just get as much level as we can or as much as we need and do it in a safe manner. It's just standard practice for me to use a limiter as the last plugin in a lot of my vocal chains.
"The Lord has been looking over you since day one. God knows I don't deserve it. I stay nourished. I've been self-serving, but I can never feel the void. God knows I don't deserve it. I stay nourished. I've been self-serving, but I can never feel the void. I smoke it, I drink it, I lust it, I overthink it, the ship is sinking. I just need a reason, no more people pleasing, flirting with my demons, Christ step in. No saving face, it's all grace, it's all love." "God knows I don't deserve it. I stay nourished. I've been self-serving, but I can never feel the void. I smoke it, I drink it, I lust it, I overthink it, the ship is sinking. Christ step in. No saving face, it's all grace, it's all love." "But what you got to show when your time's up? Rolly stop ticking, the Benz stop glistening, the party's all over when the fans don't listen. The rhythm, the kicking to make you feel the vibe alive."
All right, y'all, so I hope we have shed some light on how to get the most out of your SM7DB or your SM7B utilizing the processing here. If you are a Vocal Chains Ultimate user, I will include this vocal chain for free. You can get that from your account. But if you don't, no worries. You can of course just follow along in the video, build this however you see fit. You can even use whatever plugins in place of these here, whichever are your preference. But these are the ones that I've used to get the best results for the SM7B and the SM7DB. If you learned anything in the video, please like, subscribe, consider sharing with a friend. That's very helpful for the channel. Much love to you all. Take care. We'll talk to you soon. [Music]