People have become pretty good at recording vocals at home. And if they’re not recorded to the level that I would record them, which is likely it’s gonna happen, right? I’ve been engineering for 30 years and if people have just started, of course there’s gonna be a difference in level. But that said, I am yet to, to receive a vocal that someone’s recorded at home on their own and not be able to use it.
And that’s, that’s the truth. and this is an example. Let’s have a listen. I feel the beating of the city’s heart again, You can hear the room that, that Willow is sitting in there. I When she goes, ah, you can hear, you can hear it where I am. Ah, I feel the bit, I’m all right with that, that ambience that’s added there.
You know, if I was sitting in, in a tiled room, maybe that’s gonna be too much. But I think just the ambience of a normal room is perfectly usable. I feel the beating of the city’s heart again, I got drawn in, I did a little fade there. That was a bit too much, wasn’t it? Let’s put the vocal first vocal chain on.
So I have this eq, let’s just switch it on and then I’ll show you what’s in it without My, Can you hear the difference there? Oh, I’ll put it on and I’ll put it off. Oh, sorry.
I feel the of the city’s heart. It’s off. Gets onto my skin and it’s, Let’s have a look at what I did. This utility plugin is there just to adjust the volume. ’cause if I wanted to do some automation moves, it would then take the something out of my hands.
I wouldn’t be able to move the volume of the track up and down. I’ve also got my own particular way of mixing that. But we will come to over the next few weeks or month. I’m gonna do a little mix with you guys ’cause you know this already. I’m a mix engineer and I mix in a particular way. so that’s why that utility’s there. That’s not really affecting the sound of Willow’s vocal.
But this EQ is, here we go. This could be, if you don’t have the fab filter Pro Q3, don’t worry. I’ll show you how I would do that with the standard stop Ableton one. It’s this one EQ eight, excuse me, EQ eight. And all I’ve done is I’ve rolled off all of this low end stuff, this kind of sub harmonic frequencies.
So all of the low stuff, things that could be happening in the room, like this room is making my voice more boomy. If I was to put a high pass filter, lets the high, high frequencies through, if I was to take away the low ones, it would take away all of the low frequencies from my voice. And that’s what I did with this on Willow’s vocal.
I just took away the low stuff. I feel the beating of the city’s heart. Again, That’s just gonna get in the way. Every time you record a vocal in the same room like this, like willows, it’s gonna record that low stuff and you don’t need that. So that’s why I’m getting rid of that. So that’s move number one in your vocal chain. Okay, now I spoke the other day about stacking vocals.
So you’ve got your lead vocal, then you’ve got your backing vocals and you have your harmonies. And in an ideal situation, all of those things would’ve happened at the same time. So I, I know that all these were done at the same time. And I know that Willow is consistent. There aren’t multiple vocalists in here. So it’s a safe bet to say once I’ve removed that low end from each one of the channels, from each one of those takes, it’s a safe bet to say I could make a group for the entire vocal production, if you like.
And I could use instead of using, in this case, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 eq, six compressors, six reverbs, six saturated, six choruses.
I can just use one by putting it on the group. And here is my one right here. Let’s put it on and see what’s going on. I feel The beating of the city’s hearts again. I get drawn in, it gets onto my skin. This sounds very different. Tell that I feel the beating of the city’s hearts again.
I get drawn in, it gets onto my skin and it’s hard, hard to let it go. So let’s break it down. What do I have in there? It’s quite, quite a chain, isn’t it, crew? So sounds really different. Yeah. And just went, whoa indeed.
It it, it makes it shiny and it makes it sound like a record, doesn’t it? I feel the beating of the city heart again. So what have we got in this chain? Another, high pass shelter. I think that’s slightly over the top. I feel the of the city’s heart again, But it’s fine. All the same.
And then I’ve got this chorus on the vocal. This a chorus. This was free, this chorus effect. It’s it’s made by Arturia, these guys, Arturia, they make the controllers and plugins and things like that. And at Christmas time they give away a plugin. Every year they give away a plugin. And one year it was this, I was waiting for it.
I got a tip off. So there I was around Christmas time, just every day I would check. And sure enough, there it was. Stewart said, best free fee ever. It’s a pretty good one, isn’t it? And what a chorus will do essentially is it will thicken the sound, it will double up a sound. this one is modeled on, on a chorus that came with a synthesizer in the eighties called the Juno 60.
And ’cause they were mono simps, they didn’t really have stereo polyphony. So they put that on there. Let’s put it on and off. I feel the of the city’s heart. It almost makes the vocal phase a bit. Let’s take the reverb away, the saturate away the echo away, Hear it, turn it up, Kind of thickens the vocal and starts to make it phase.
It makes it move. And if there’s something that I like, and if there’s anyone here and I know there is who’s had an appraisal from me, be it a song appraisal or a production appraisal, one of my things that I love to bring up is dynamics. Dynamics could mean a lot of things.
It could mean dynamically, you know, performance. It could be dynamically in a, an arrangement in this case it adds a dynamic to that vocal, which from what I’m looking at here, ’cause I’ve removed all the compression, there is no compression. So it’s, if you have a vocal that’s compressed heavily, I will put some compression on here. if you add compression and you really push it, then the dynamic disappears.
Everything sounds the same volume. Adding a chorus effect to to, to something like a vocal or a live performance of some kind or add that dynamic back.
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