One thing you don’t want is to choke the vocals with a lot of compression. You’ll need some hard compression to achieve this sound, a slow attack to let the transients go through unaffected, a fast release, gain reduction of about -8dB and a ratio of 4:1. If you understand this phrase, let me know in the comments section □Īnyway, as I’ve already stated above, the compressor in this case will take care of all the harshness, loud peaks, sibilance and change the frequency spectrum of the vocals. I remember saying this phrase “ compress to impress” at a workshop where I was teaching mixing and only the ladies laughed because they understood it and they’re naughty. I learned this technique from Chris Lord-Alge so all credits go to him, neat trick.Īll I did for the EQ settings was to remove low-end rumble below 60Hz, cut out muddiness at 313Hz, removed some nasal quality (honkiness) at 3.5kHz, added presents and air at 8kHz with a shelf boost. The vocals already sound harsh so if I EQ after compression I’ll make the vocals too harsh. This mix is not dense so I’m just going for a particular sound that the compressor will give me. This works well if you want your vocals to cut through a dense mix. It will change the overall frequency spectrum of the signal, control the peaks and reduce harsh frequencies. This way, the compressor will be sensitive to the frequencies that I boost. The reason is simply because I want to EQ into compression. Just enough to get the old tape effect.Īfter adding some analog sonic characters to the vocal, the next thing I did was equalization. The goal is to add a small amount of saturation just to generate some overtones, you don’t want the effect to be too obvious or distort the signal. This also gives the vocals some analog warmth so that it doesn’t sound too digital.īasically, this effect simulates the saturation and compression of recording on analog tape machines. The first thing that I did was to add the Magneto II tape emulation plugin to add some sonic character to the vocals. Mixing Vocals In Cubase Using Stock Plugins Saturating The Vocals With that said, I want to give you a case study, instead of giving you a general tutorial I’m going to show you how I mixed the vocals for one of the projects I’m currently working on. So, always remember that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. That is why I always stress that you should spend a lot of time in recording and sound design, the rest of the process will be a whole lot easier. One more thing, the one thing that could be preventing you from getting a professional sounding vocal is if you didn’t get the right sound straight from the source. Some people think that they’ll understand the process better if someone explains it using stock plugins, that’s not true at all. What matters is whether the end results sound awesome and if the mix can compete on a commercial level. One thing that everyone needs to understand is that the listener or music consumer is not going to be able to tell if the music was mixed with analog gear, stock or expensive UAD plugins. Or am I missing something here? Let me know in the comments below.Īnyway, I finally decided to just do the tutorial to show everyone who sends me a message how to professionally mix vocals in Cubase, using stock plugins only. The last time I checked, 500Hz on a stock plugin is still the same as the 500Hz you get on a third-party plugin. So, this means that there’s a lot of people who still believe that mixing vocals with stock plugins is different from using third-party plugins. One of the questions I frequently get these days is “can you please do a tutorial about mixing vocals in Cubase …”
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