Transcription
It's been 12 years since my journey started of trying to get a better vocal sound, and in that time, I've probably mixed thousands of hours of vocals alone. In this video, I'm going to condense those thousand-plus hours into 24 minutes of the most important things I've learned in getting a professional vocal sound. By the end of this video, you'll know more about mixing and recording vocals than 95% of artists out there, and you won't have to go through the years of frustration to get a good vocal sound like I did. Let's get started.
We'll start off with what I assume most of you struggle with most, which is actually mixing vocals and putting plugins on them. Although this is far from the most important thing that you can do to get a better vocal sound, I'll get to that at the end of the video. It's probably one of the most confusing. Let's go over the plugins in the order I normally use to process my lead vocal. Heads up, the vocals that we'll be working with today is a custom song that I made specifically for this video.
First plugin we'll start with is pitch correction. For modern song production, pitch correction is make or break, and getting it right is essential. That being said, pitch correction is very genre and singer dependent. If your singer is mostly on pitch, or you're working with a genre like folk or acoustic, you might not need it. For this track, it feels more pop, so it makes sense to use it. There are two main types of pitch correction: manual, which involves individually moving each note that was sung, and automatic, which automatically does it for you. In my opinion, manual gives better results than using the automatic counterpart, but it does take significantly more time to dial in a vocal. I normally use Melodyne for any manual pitch correction that I'm trying to do. On the other hand, automatic is way faster, but in my opinion, doesn't sound quite as good. For this performance, the vocal was already sounding mostly on pitch, and for the sake of time, I'm going to be using automatic. In my opinion, the best automatic sounding tuner is Auto-Tune Pro.
Let's go on to the next plugin in my vocal chain: EQ. EQ, in my opinion, is the most important plugin that you're going to put on your vocal chain today, and most people have no idea what they're doing with it. Out of all the plugins we'll use today, it's one of the hardest to get right. That's probably because every vocal, every microphone, every different recording needs slightly different EQ settings. Even though that's the case, there are some EQ moves I find myself regularly doing, regardless of the singer and microphone that's being used. Those moves are getting rid of the bass below 100 Hz, adding a high shelf around 8k and boosting the shine, and then dipping some of the mud around 250 to 750 Hz.
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This is a good starting point for most vocals. You can do this same type of EQ move with any type of EQ that you choose. Some of my favorites to use are the Pro-Q 4, like I'm using here, or Logic's stock EQ. I also want to point out that the majority of these are subtractive EQ, or in other words, taking away the sound. This cut and this dip here, this is the opposite of additive EQ, which would be adding or boosting frequencies. I find that subtractive EQ tends to sound more natural, whereas additive EQ can add some colors to the sound, which can be pleasant. When I want to add those colors to the sound, I often turn to analog emulations of EQ to get the job done.
The first plugin that I'll use is a simulation of a Pultec EQ. I often use this to boost the highs of a vocal above 8k. I'll go up to 10k here, turn up the bandwidth, and boost up.
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Just more present overall. I'll also use the same technique to boost the low end. I find that both of the boosts just have a nice sound to them. The other analog EQ I find myself using a lot is the emulation of an SSL EQ. I used this exact EQ setting for years on my vocals, and I stole it directly from a mixer called Leslie Braithwaite from a video I watched about 8 years ago. Taking some of the filter up to get rid of the body, taking more of that low end down, dipping some of the mids around 500 Hz, dipping again at 4,000 Hz, and then boosting at around 9k with a high shelf. These settings I'm giving you are great starting points for vocals, but you're always going to get better results when you can train your ears to identify the frequencies that need help.
Here's one concept that really helped me with EQing and just mixing in general. This tip has to do with the mid-range of any instrument. Think about 1k. It's one of the most important and most heard parts of any song or voice or instrument, and you can think of that mid-range like a rubber band. The more mid-range a voice has, the more it's going to band towards you and feel closer to you as a producer.
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The less mid-range a vocal has, the more it will start to blend in and dip back into the rest of the track. You can use this idea to help bring your vocals more forward in the mix. I think a lot of people would be really surprised to hear how much actual mid-range is on the vocals of some of their favorite tracks.
Now let's move on to the next plugin I'll put on the chain: the compressor. Compression can either glue your vocal perfectly, or it can completely destroy it, and the difference is in understanding these tips I'm about to share. The first one is that different compressor types color the sound differently. My favorite type of compressor to use for vocals would be the FET type compressor, which most famously is the 1176. It adds a distinct flavor that I've come to love and expect when I hear my vocal tracks. I almost always use as fast of release as it can go, a pretty fast attack, and then a 4:1 ratio.
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I also tend to chain multiple compressors together to get the best sound possible. Having multiple compressors in a row will reduce the workload of any one compressor and often leads to more natural sounding results. After adding compression, you might notice that you'll have some more lows and low mids that you might want to get rid of. You can always go back to the EQ from before and adjust accordingly. In this case, I think it sounds pretty good. The vocal is sounding way better in the mix, but there are still a couple peaks in the vocal that need to be tamed that are being overcompressed, which brings me into my next point. Get out my iPad for this. With more compression, oftentimes the voice will be more upfront and easily able to be heard, but it also comes at a cost of less energy. On the other hand, a vocal that's less compressed will be farther back, and it will have more of that original energy of the recording. This is often an important trade-off to keep in mind. The more you compress something, the less of that original performance energy that will have. But the less you compress something, the less it will be able to be understood. For most modern mixes, you'll probably want to lean more towards more compression than anything, but there are ways to have the best of both worlds where you can get both energy and compression at the same time, and that has to do with gain staging, which let me show you now.
Notice these peaks in my vocal here. These parts are going to get compressed way more than the smaller parts of my vocal. To help fix that, all you have to do is highlight the selected vocal and then take it down in terms of gain. You can either do this in the region editor in Logic, like this, or you can automate everything. I personally like to use the first method and create different parts for the regions because I can visually see how loud those vocal waves are getting, but actually automating gain will probably give you more fine-tuned results.
Let's move on to another specific type of compression that can really help save a badly recorded vocal, that would be the de-esser. A de-esser is basically a compressor that only targets a narrow range of high frequencies, specifically where S's and sibilance live. Mics tend to exaggerate these sibilant sounds while recording. They can make your vocals sound very sharp or painful, and if you're boosting the top end like I recommended with my EQ, this can become even more of a problem. De-essers are super easy to set up, and they're very easy to hear the difference between A and B. Notice when it says "show" that this de-esser starts working. Let's turn it off.
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It's really subtle, but that small taming can actually help a lot. This particular vocal recording doesn't have a lot of sibilant sounds, but others definitely might. Just like with normal compressors, you can chain de-essers for a more natural effect. You can also affect where they are in the vocal chain, which will give you slightly different results. My favorite thing to do for an especially sibilant vocal is to have one go before my EQ, and then one sandwich my EQ and compression. That means before I boost anything, I'm de-essing a little bit, and then I'm also de-essing after my compression to make sure that that S isn't so harsh.
Let's go over the next types of plugins I'll put in my voice: reverb and delay. Let's start with reverb. Most people use reverb to add space, but if you want your voice to sound expensive, you'll need to understand its nuances. There are two main ways of putting reverb on a track: either directly on the track or using a bus track. Both have pros and cons. Putting it on the track itself uses more processing power, but it can be faster and it can be easier to dial in and automate. Busing reverb oftentimes requires less processing power. You have more control over the reverb bus itself, but it does take a little bit longer to set up. I tend to use a combination of both techniques on my vocal. If I'm working with a lead vocal or an instrument track, I have no problem just throwing on a reverb track by itself on there. Oftentimes, I'm trying to work as creatively and as fast as possible so that my ideas don't slip down the drain. However, for background vocals or something with 50-plus tracks, I'm absolutely going to use bus reverb so I can save on processing power.
Let me add one of my favorite reverbs here directly to the lead vocal, the Valhalla VintageVerb. The more reverb a vocal has, the farther back it feels in the mix. Let me go back to my iPad to demonstrate this. If you are right here and you're in a hallway and you hear a sound really close to you, somebody's whispering into your ear, you probably won't hear any reverb. There's not going to be any extra room reflections that bounce around and then go back to your ear. However, on the opposite side of the spectrum, if somebody's yelling at you from across the room, that sound is going to travel forever until it hits your ears, which is also going to introduce a lot of extra noise reflections and a lot of reverb. That being said, this would be more reverb, farther away, less reverb, right up close. Hopefully that makes sense.
Now let me show you how I might add reverb with a bus track. What's cool about the bus track is it lets me add any number of effects after the reverb to further change the sound. For example, a common one is to use an EQ to really hone in what frequencies the reverb is happening on.
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But this also works for other effects like distortion, an amp, chorus, flanger, to make a reverb feel more like reverb without muddying up the vocal. I like to automate the parts in between when the vocal isn't singing. You can either do that by automating the amount of send you have on the bus track, like up or down, or you can automate the individual plugin itself, which is why I think the individual plugin shines. You can see I'm just automating it so that every time there is an empty space, the reverb comes in.
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You're just filling in that space to give it that much more polish. The best vocals in the world are doing this all manually, and manually is the best way, just like with pitch correction. But if you're feeling lazy, you can do an automatic version of this by adding a sidechain compressor to your reverb bus. Make sure "lead" is selected in sidechain on the compressor. This compressor is set up in a way that when the voice stops, that reverb will come in. It's turning it down minus 10, and then when it stops singing, it won't, and you'll hear it better. In my opinion, it doesn't sound quite as good as the manual way, but it can really save you some time if you just throw this on.
Let's move on to the next plugin: delay. Even though delay is a really popular effect, most people don't take advantage of some of the best ways of using it. Delay and reverb are very much cousins. You can do all of the same techniques that I just mentioned with reverb with delay. Anytime I'm using a delay, I almost always like to put it before a reverb so that my delay isn't dry. In this case, if I put delay directly on the track, I'll use H-Delay, which is one of my favorites. I'll put it before the VintageVerb on a bus track. Oftentimes, that means me making a completely new bus specifically for delay and then adding its own reverb plugin after the fact to make sure that it's not dry. The majority of time I use delays, I bandpass the incoming signal. Really easy to do on an H-Delay like this. You just take the high-pass, pull it up, and the low-pass, pull it down. This helps get it out of the way of the main lead vocal so that you can have both living in the same space but still be able to understand. Teach you how to make better vocals, just like reverb, probably to get the best results and fill in some of these spaces is to automate the delay to fill them in. And just like reverb, you can use that sidechain compression method to do the same thing. If delay is a big part of the track sound, I'll often make its own track just for the delay itself. Sometimes what you hear as a delay is actually just multiple tracks stacked on top of each other with each vocal pasted exactly where I want it. This just gives me more control. For example, I might do that with this lead here, take the last part here and move it over.
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And sometimes I'll record a completely different part with background vocals that I'll sing on over that. I'll get more into background vocals in a little bit, but I thought I'd point that out. And here comes one of my most favorite tips when it comes to using delay. Delays are a fantastic replacement for reverbs when it comes to a busy mix. If you have a lot of elements going on already and your mids and your low mids are already very muddy and convoluted, then it's really a good idea to use delay instead of reverb. It will still push back the sound like you want it, but it won't muddy up the mix nearly as much. You can do that with an H-Delay right here. Instead of using the host and syncing up with your BPM, go into milliseconds, drop it down a little bit, turn up the feedback, and then use the dry/wet knob to taste.
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That's got absolutely no reverb on it at all. The only thing that's driving it backwards in the mix is the delay itself. This is a really good idea if you have super busy mixes. It also goes right in hand with the next point of my delay. If you want to hear the delay of your vocal, take it off of syncing with your BPM. If you want your vocal delay to blend in with the rest of the track, then sync it to your BPM. 90% of the time I'm syncing it to the BPM, but that can be a really helpful hint. If you want to actually hear your delay better, then take it off and just use milliseconds and put it to some random value.
Now, if all of these plugins and things I'm talking about still seem overwhelming, I've created a free vocal preset that you can download in the link below. If you download them all, all you have to do is click on them, and they will automatically load in. It will automatically change the sound for you, which is really cool. Using some of these same concepts I mentioned, you don't have to worry about buying any of these plugins I have here because it only uses stock plugins. Go check them out in the description below.
Now let me do a quick-fire round of some of the other cool vocal effects I like to use. First up, the flanger. Flanger is great for adding width, and it's also a good replacement if you didn't actually record doubles or triples.
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The next up would be formant shifters, which I always put before any of my other plugins. Formant shifters are great for changing the sound of a voice without actually changing the pitch.
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Next up would be sampled vocals. Take a portion of your lead vocal and drag it to an empty track and put it into a quick sampler. Turn on slice, take the sensitivity down of the transients, and all of a sudden you can play these chops on the piano. Can be a super cool and creative way of finding some cool ideas for vocal chops. Next up would be LFOs. LFOs are really great for emulating side chains or rhythmic stutter effects like this.
Next plugin I talk about is creative busing. Just like with our bus reverbs, we can add some different effects to them to get some interesting sounds. For example, we might be able to add a clip distortion, or after that, we could even add a guitar amp. Now, any of the reverb that's going through this bus is going to go through Valhalla Room, it's going to be side-chained, then it's going to be distorted, and then gone through an amp. This allows for a lot of really creative effects and can give some cool results.
Next up would be reversing vocals. Take the first part of your lead vocal, drag it to a new track, turn on reverb and crank that thing up on the individual track itself. Bounce it in place, extend the tail, double-click on it, go to functions, reverse, and now you have a vocal swell that you can put right before your drop that's going to sound cool. And if you put it right before your actual drop, it's going to just hit even harder.
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This next tip has to do with distortion. Distortion is a heavier version of saturation and can add grittiness and energy to a vocal. Cranking it up is great for genres like rock, punk, or metal, but I do want to point out that it won't emulate the actual distortion that a singer needs to sing to get the best results. This is without saturation, but me singing with a slightly distorted tone. You can hear that there. But sometimes what I'll do is I'll only distort the high end if I want some extra presence. So I'm just going to distort this part here, take this part and turn it completely down. It's leaving that low and mid-range nice and untouched, but it's really distorting that high end.
The lead vocal is maybe the most important thing to worry about when it comes to your vocal tracks, but there are some other things that really make a difference as well. Let's move on to the next important topic that can really transform your vocal sound: doubles. Doubles and triples are when you have the singer record the same part multiple times. You can take these separate recordings and pan them one hard left and one hard right, and they will create a new width to your vocal. It sounds so much better with doubles and triples if you're trying to have more energy. To get started with these doubles, I'll often copy and paste the same exact settings I have from my lead vocal onto my doubles, then I'll tweak the processing slightly depending on what I want. The two most common things I'll do is tune the doubles and triples to be slightly more tuned than the actual vocal itself, and then to take away some of the high-end information with a high-shelf EQ. That just helps the lead vocal shine out even more when you do what you're supposed to.
If for some reason that you didn't record those doubles, you can fake them by duplicating the lead vocal track twice, duplicating it again twice, going to the track, going to fine-tune, and going up plus 15 on one track and minus 5 on the other. Panning one right and one left, and this is going to simulate that same effect. Notice it still sounds weird, and that the actual double and triple recorded takes are always going to sound better.
If you need even more energy, I'd recommend recording other vocal parts either an octave up or an octave down. Check out what this sounds like. If you want a more detailed high-end, you can do the same exact technique, but instead of singing normally, you can whisper into the microphone. Check out what this sounds like. It adds a nice presence to the mix without being overbearing. I don't do whisper vocals for every track, but for certain genres, I find it works really well, like pop.
If you want your vocals to be less noticeable and overall tighter sounding with the actual lead vocal itself, I recommend syncing them up in time with the lead vocal. This can be a time-intensive process because you're going to take every single transient and move it to where it needs to be, but once you do, it's going to give you a good result. Let me show you what it sounds like with these timed up.
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And without. Those small differences in timing make the background doubles feel a lot beefier. So if you're going for a tighter, more polished sound, you'll probably want to sync them all up. I also want to point out that I almost never touch my lead vocal in terms of rhythm. I just am looking for a good solid performance and recording to start. There's a decent chance that I'm not exactly on the grid, but I find that getting too close to the grid just can sound a little bit robotic and unnatural, and it can sound especially unnatural if I have to do that in post-production and move every single transient.
Now that we have our lead vocals done and our doubles done, let's go over some background vocals. Background vocals often go unnoticed, but without them, they completely change the feel of a mix. While recording background vocals, I often recommend using a different mic completely. In this case, I used an Sh SM7B. Most of the time when you're recording lead vocals, you'll use a large diaphragm condenser, which has a nice sparkle to it. To make sure your background vocals stay in the background, it's important to use something that is a warmer sounding quality, like this dynamic microphone.
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If you're recording harmonies and you're ever in doubt of what to sing, just find the actual chords that are being played in the instrumental and then sing each triad or note of the chord itself on the lyrics. That's what I did for these harmonies. Check it out. Also, keep in mind the more background vocals that you actually record, the more options you'll have for things like panning and the beefier your sound will be for the same exact reasons as I mentioned before when syncing up the vocals to the lead vocal. When dealing with a lot of background voices or harmonies like this, I'll often group them into one group and then process them together. In this case, the only thing that I put on them was an OTT, which stands for Over-The-Top compressor, which is a great free multiband compressor, and a channel EQ. Already sounds pretty good, and I didn't have to throw a thing on any of these except Auto-Tune.
My last tip for background vocals is that they can also just be there to help with the instrumental itself. You can use them to sing along with leads or other synths or even guitars to help give them extra texture or flavor, or they can be the actual synth line themselves, just like I did in this song. Check it out. Pitch correction.
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You can feel free to get really creative with it, but the amount of times that I use my voice as an instrument itself is way higher than you might think.
Okay, so we've got all of our vocal tracks done. Now it's time to mix them. Let's talk about mixing your vocal track and balancing it volume-wise with the rest of the instruments going on. I used to think that vocals should just be on top of the mix, but then I learned some of these techniques, and it really helped me out. First, I recommend mixing into a limiter. The limiter will affect the overall volume relationship between the vocal and the rest of the instruments, and if you're going to have it on the master in the end, you might as well throw it on here so you can hear what it's going to sound like. Dial in the right volume for your voice compared to the rest of the instruments. You should mix in mono. It really helps you understand how the rest of the track is helping to sit together. If you're mixing on headphones only, you can always add a gain plugin to the end of the stereo output and then turn it on, and you'll mix in mono.
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Once you're in mono, you can turn down the volume of your monitors so that it's really, really quiet. You want to barely be able to hear anything. The only things that you should be able to hear poking its head through are the snare drum, the vocals, and the words themselves, and then maybe the kick drum. If that's the case, then you know that you're on to something good with your mix. This is just a good mixing tip in general is to listen to your mix at really low volumes. You can also use this same trick with reference tracks to see how theirs sounds at really low volumes. I find that to be one of the easiest ways to dial in my vocal volume. Another trick I can give is to stop soloing your vocals. Nobody cares if your vocal sounds really good by itself because they aren't listening to it by themselves. They're listening to it with the rest of the track.
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And the last tip that I'll do has to do with creating a submix of your instruments and then sidechaining your vocals to that bus. Let me explain what I mean. You can route every single instrument bus of your track into something called a submix, except for your vocals. Then on that submix, you can add a sidechain so that any time that the instruments hit and the vocal is singing, it's going to dip out some range right here in the mid-range here.
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This can just help that vocal sit in the mix rather than on top of the mix even more.
Now let's move on to maybe the least sexy part about getting a good vocal sound: editing. A good vocal take still needs editing to sound great, otherwise it's just going to sound like a demo. When I'm talking about vocal editing, it means going through, getting rid of any extra noises, any pops, clicks, taming any plosives. I know I heard one here, and that's what the process is about. If I have a plosive right here, I can just quickly get rid of it by adding a nice little fade. There, already sounding way better. Those small, subtle changes like that are going to add up to a big end result. One of the biggest parts of editing I already mentioned before comes from gain staging the track itself before it hits a compressor. I know I talked about this, but it really is that important. If you're struggling with some noise in between your vocal takes, you can get rid of it pretty easily with something called a noise gate, but just like most things in production, the best results will come from manually going through and getting rid of any of those parts that might be problems.
Another part of the editing process involves comping. Comping is short for compiling, and it means you're going to take your best vocal recorded takes and stitch them together to make one crazy good mega take. You can determine what part sounds best and then select it, and this will give you the best results. You can get really crazy with this, but I recommend trying to keep it simple. Comping, say, six different vocal takes is a lot easier than comping, say, 60 vocal takes. And while choosing the best vocal takes, the emotion and the energy of the takes themselves is way more important than the pitch. The pitch is oftentimes one of the easiest things that you can affect later, whereas energy, there's not a plugin for that.
And finally, let's go over the most important part about getting a good vocal sound: the recording itself. Now, I know a lot of you out there are expecting to fix your vocals with plugins and tricks and tips, which is why I started this video with them, but honestly, if you don't get the recording part right, none of what I've told you in this video so far is even going to matter at all. While you're recording, the closer you get to a microphone, the boomier the sound is. The farther you get from the microphone, the thinner the voice becomes. I like to stick somewhere between 4 to 6 inches to keep artists from actually eating the microphone while they record. You can set that up at four to six inches away as a shield and as a blocker. This will also have the added benefit of helping with sibilant sounds and plosives.
I've already mentioned this, but I'll say it again: my favorite type of mic to record vocals is a large diaphragm condenser mic. It has the most modern high-end sparkle out of any type of microphone, and especially for vocals, that is extremely important. I'd recommend buying the best one you can comfortably afford.
This next tip might sound a bit strange, but if you record a lot of vocals and produce a lot of your own music, I highly recommend getting a desk arm like this. When I'm not using it, I can move my mic away, and when I am using it, it's plugged in, it's ready to go, and it's right at my mouth, ready to record. I'd also like to add that this desk arm, or just having a microphone ready to go, allows me to easily record any ideas I have that come out of my head with my voice. If I don't record those ideas, chances are very high that they will just be lost forever in the ether.
I'd also recommend that if you're doing a lot of recording, that you get a sit-stand desk, like what I'm adjusting with right now. Ideally, all of the vocals that you record will be recorded while standing. Standing opens up your lungs more, your diaphragm more, and gives you a more supported sound.
That brings me into my last tip that I'll mention while recording. While recording, I recommend actually singing to a drum track rather than a metronome. A metronome or a click track is okay, but actually recording to a live drum beat gets me way more in the pocket or way more on rhythm. This doesn't have to be a complicated drum pattern either. You can drag in a loop from Splice, or you can just use Logic's Session Drummer to automatically generate you one immediately.
Now, I know I've covered a ton of information in this video. If it seems overwhelming, that is completely normal. Don't worry. To make things more manageable, I'm going to hop back into my iPad and draw out a hierarchy of things you should be focusing on as an artist to get a better vocal sound, because to be honest, most people focus on the wrong things. This is the exact order I think about things to get a good vocal sound in the mix. We're going to start, actually, first with the master. I think in terms of what affects the sound the least in terms of vocals, master is probably the least. It does compress things a little bit, it makes things louder, but everything else I'm going to talk about is going to affect things more. Second thing that I would put would be mixing. Yes, changing the volume and the relationship between all of the instruments can definitely help your vocals shine, but if you don't have the next three, then things aren't going to matter. Next one I would put would be plugins and effects. Your plugins are more important than the mix. If you have plugins that make your vocals sound bad or muddy, then mixing isn't going to matter at all, and then your master isn't going to change that either. Next up, I would say your mic. Your microphone does make that big of a difference. You can fix a lot of things that you might otherwise not in EQ with just the microphone and the actual recording of it yourself. I'll actually put slash recording, 'cause I think that kind of goes along with it, like the whole recording process. But the most important thing that you need to get right if you want good vocals is the performance. The performance itself, the singer. But if you don't have a good recording and you don't have a good singer, as much magic as I can pull from my ass, I'm not going to be able to fix it. I really am not. You really need to get this first. I've said this before on the channel, but if Adele were to sing through an iPhone, she would probably still sound great. I can do everything else and it would be fine because she's amazing at singing, and that's really what you need to hear sometimes. The truth hurts, but yes, if your vocal tracks aren't sounding like you want them to, maybe your rhythmic timing isn't there, maybe your falsetto sounds bad, maybe your chest voice sounds weak, maybe your timbre, your vocal tone isn't there. These are all things that you can learn about and get better at. The more you sing, the more you do, the better you get. Probably talked about plugins and all this jazz, jazz, and the other for so long, but I'm, I'm telling you, if, if you get the singer right, everything's going to change for you.
There it is. Everything I've learned about mixing vocals since I've started 12 years ago. Remember, you can grab that free vocal chain I mentioned in the video earlier in the description below. If you liked this comprehensive video on mixing vocals, I think you're really going to like this one I made on music production, which you can find right up.