Vocal Mixing

Looking for that elusive, major label vocal sound? 

Check out this article based on just a 10 minute section of the 17 hour Multi-Platinum University series.

Mixing Lead Vocals

Mixing Lead Vocals

Now that we’ve got the drums, bass, guitars and folk instrument tracks cleaned, balanced and panned, let’s take a deeper look at mixing a lead vocal. First, some theory.

MPM001

MPM001. Our mix up to now. Let’s move on to mixing the vocals. 


Resolution: The power of a dB.

I know what you’re thinking, a “resolution” is something you break every January after New Years. Well I’m with you…

Mixing Lead Vocals 2

The Lead Vocal Chain


We looked previously at how the plugins on our instrument tracks have been set to Pre-fader. As an example then, a Pre-Fader compressor on our vocal track would disregard the level of our fader, and just smash any loud vocal parts that came from the track. This is not ideal in the case of a vocal, as it won’t produce as musical a result as we would like. The way we’ve worked…

Mixing Lead Vocals 3

For those not familiar, a DeEsser is also a downward compressor, but essentially a band-limited one. It’s basically only listening to a specific set of (usually) high frequencies where the “Sssss” sounds usually reside. (I’ll bet you know where this is going.) As you lower the threshold, the DeEsser will start to attenuate the selected frequency resulting in...wait for it… a De-ESSed sound. I’m…

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That obviously helped a lot from the get go. We’ll tweak it more in a minute, but lets see what we can do about the excess low mids. Leaving the filter in place, disable any low shelving EQ you may have and find your Low Mid bell shaped EQ. We’re going to use the same method we used before to find the frequencies we want to cut. Grab the gain knob on your LM EQ and crank it up a ridiculous…

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Vocal Compression & EQ

Let’s switch over now to take a look at her vocal compressor. Select the plugin and let’s get our initial compression settings going before we start to tweak. 


MPM011 - Untouched compressor.

The compressor settings I like to start with are pretty simple, and it works as a great starting point for many things. I set a 4:1 Ratio, with a slower 31 ms attack time and a medium 51…

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MPM014

MPM014 - The threshold determining the amount that the target Freq gets Attenuated.


Now, because I want to save you the shock and embarrassment of doing this in a session, pull the threshold down waayy too far, say -50 dB. Now, pick yourself up off the floor and try to stop laughing. If you go too nutso with a DeEsser, you’ll find your artist suddenly develops a pretty extreme lisp. Next time…

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Vocal Verb Setup

Before we jump to the fader ride though, let’s set up the ambience and time based effects for our current lead vocal. This will help us keep our vocal ride in it’s proper audio context with the rest of the mix. Let’s create a couple of Aux Input tracks for our Vox Verb and Vox Delay tracks. Name them accordingly. Next, go into your IO setup and name the next two free stereo buses…

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Finally we need to create two sends from our Lead Vocal Mix track to the two new Effects buses (Vox Verb & Vox Delay for the slow among us), and set the Aux Input tracks to their appropriate buses. This will allow us to adjust the Lead Vocal Fader and the Vox Verb & Vox Delay faders to create the right blend of dry, unprocessed lead vocal, with reverberated and delayed wet vocal. 

MPM024MPM025

MPM024 - MPM025…

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MPM028

MPM028 - Obese & ungainly

MPM029

MPM029 - Slim & sexy

Impressed? No? Really? Because it’s often very handy to fit more faders on the screen at once, as it reduces a lot of your precious time spent side scrolling. OK, put it back. Whichever way you’re comfortable with is really fine. For the sake of the screenshots I’ll put it back wide again.


Vocal Delay

Solo the LV track, and your LV Mix, Vx Vrb & Vx…

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MPM032

MPM032 - Flipping the phase on one channel of the delay. 

Just flipping the phase on this one side will cause our stereo delays to go insanely wide when you listen back to them...we’re talking IMAX ™ sized delays. Of course, if someone is listening to your tracks over the supermarket 70volt, mono sound system, the width of your stunning vocal delays will be utterly crushed...but then, we have to…

Mixing Lead Vocals 11

MPM037

MPM037 - Bump up the verb send on her vocals just a bit, and bring the Delay compressor threshold up to increase the size of the effects on her vocal. 


Now put it all back in and listen to your vocal in the track. Pretty cool huh? While these sorts of tricks obviously won’t work every time, for every song, they are some great starting points to building some interest in your vocal over the…

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