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 make tradeoffs in life.
Next, we’re going to make a couple quick tweaks to the delay settings to fit it more in context with our song. Start by setting the Feedback for both channels to 13%. This will send just a little bit of each delay back into itself, resulting in a repeating delay sound. Next, lets get rid of a touch of the high end using the Low Pass Filter (LPF) to simulate the sound of her voice actually traveling through the air, bouncing of one of our giant cavern walls, and coming back, resulting in high frequency loss. This makes our delays a bit darker, but actually also makes them feel bigger, with a more realistic sense of space. Set them both to somewhere around 9-10 khz.
Now for a tip that is worth the price of admission. Drop a compressor plugin (I’ll use the Focusrite again) on the Vox Delay track right after the Delay plugin.
MPM033- Putting a compressor plugin after our delay.
Now, set it’s Key Input to one of the original Vox Delay Buses!
MPM034 - Setting the key input to one of the Vox Delay buses.
MPM035- Finally turn on the key input to your compressor.
So what did we just accomplish by doing this? Simply put, when she sings now, her voice going over the Vox Delay bus will cause the compressor to compress, keeping the delays effectively turned down while she’s singing. Otherwise, we’d have a big old delayed mess of vocals on our hands. But, at the ends of her words and phrases, the compressor will no longer sense anything on the delay bus, and stop compressing, allowing the delays to turn back up to their normal level and be heard only when we want them, at the ends of lines! Like I said, magic.
Real quick, let’s set our compressor settings properly for this purpose. You should listen to the vocal while doing this and particularly to the ends of phrases. Start with your threshold low enough to make it really squash the level of the Delays when she’s singing so they’re very low in the mix. - 45 dB sounds right to me. Next speed up your attack to make sure the compressor is compressing the delay volume quickly when her vocal starts. Finally adjust your release up and down until you feel the delays coming up at a speed that feels good at the ends of phrases. I ended up with an attack of 14 ms and a release setting of 277 ms. Here’s what my delay compressor ended up looking like.
MPM036 - The Delay compressor settings.
Now let’s unsolo our vocal and listen to it in the track. The first things I hear are that the EQ could use another dB or so at the 5.3 khz mark, so adjust it to +3.5 dB. Also, my reverb send could stand to come up just a bit to add a touch more wetness to her vocal, so I’ll bring it up to -8.6. Finally, after listening to it in the track, we may be compressing those delays a bit too much, so go back and raise the threshold on their compressor up to about -38 dB to give them a bit more size.