hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well in this tutorial we
are going to be setting up the perfect vocal Reverb and delay but not just any Reverb And
Delay one that will automatically duck based on your incoming signal this is an effect that you
hear in a lot of your favorite mixes those of you out there who want to create these really
interesting big washy spaces maybe some textural Echoes but you don't want those to cloud up your
vocal it's also going to give you some workflow enhancements that not only apply to reverb and
delay but really any effect that you want in your toolbox to use for your vocals in your
session so let's go ahead and dive in alright so we got our session open here and we're going to
be focused on the pre-hook section of the vocal the lead specifically but what I've done is gone
ahead and just removed any of the Reverb And Delay from that particular part and then I've
left everything on the kind of made hook just so you can hear the difference in what we're
aiming for with our ducking Reverb and And Delay so let's go ahead and play this back
[Music]
all right so you can hear that big space that I have on the Reverb for the second part of our hook
you can also hear those interesting Echoes And Delay textures created there but our pre-hook has
none of that on it right now and that's what we're going to work on here so I'm going to go ahead and
hit our aux for our pre-hook vocals and we're just going to create a bus to send down here for
our ducking Reverb and DeLay So I've already got that name down here and what we're going to do is
just go ahead and load Studio rack there are some serious advantages in terms of setting up internal
side chaining very easy for setting up these ducking effects we're not going to have to set up
multiple buses and auxes for things like different reverbs delays with our studio rack instance I
want to just go ahead and click parallel split what this is going to do is it's just going to
split the incoming signal of whatever we send to Studio rack so when we send this down here through
this bus we're going to be able to multiply this and we can do up to eight different splits so that
could potentially be eight different effect chains don't get lost here it's not that complicated but
we're going to go back here and we're just going to activate two of these because we're
going to have one for our Reverb chain and the other for our delay chain I'm going to
go ahead and just send a little bit down here so that we can start working with it and we're
going to start with the Reverb so we're going to use a classic r verb today and we're going to
go ahead and dial in a church space this is one of my favorite algorithms in Renaissance Reverb
go ahead and get rid of the EQ and the damping that's being done internally with our verb I'm
going to show you we have a lot more flexibility if we use a separate EQ I'm going to go ahead and
increase our pre-delay to about 20 and we'll probably create a little bit bigger space here
so obviously right now I mean we get that big washy tail and it's just gonna be way
too much in the context of our mix but that's why we're going to make a ducking Reverb get
to that in just a sec so I'm a huge fan of eq'ing reverbs it's really helpful to do
this to create space in your mix but I've been using a particular EQ here of recent
it's called the geq classic graphic EQ but you have a ton of different frequency notches here
which means for things like reverbs and delays that were eq'ing you have a lot of control and
flexibility so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click this button over here right
now it just says drag and that just means you know I just drag these faders individually to
set those now if I click that and it now says draw I can just go like this and set them pretty
much wherever I want so I'm just going to full reset that and we're going to roll off quite a
bit of lows as well as the highs and I'm just going to tweak this while we're listening to it
so just with those EQ moves here on geq we get a nice vibey space but not something
that has a really harsh top end or a lot of low end build up I'm going to remove a
little bit more here at about 1K just so that again we're not creating extra harshness with
that Reverb space for the lead vocal we want to keep everything up front there keep it pretty
clean but that should work quite nicely as far as the EQ now to the ducking aspect and this is
why we're using Studio rack because there's no faster way to do this that I know of all
we need to do is pull out the r comp and then we're gonna go up here to the side chain menu
here in studio rack we're going to set this to the studio rack input which means the signal
coming into Studio rack is going to trigger this compressor and given that it's the last
plugging in the chain our vocal signal is going to suppress or duck this as it's coming through
so not that complicated just listen here to what it does I'm going to lower the ratio I
want to go with a pretty high ratio and then we're going to bring down the threshold here
now to take this a step further you can get really precise with the ducking and
adjust the attack and the release so I like to speed up the attack because we
want that ducking to happen quite quickly but I want the release to be a little bit
slower we don't necessarily want that reaction to be really sudden because you can cause some
artifacts and some words can get kind of cut off if we do that too quickly
[Music] so with that side chain compressor engaged we're able to get that vocal to come
through nice and clean but we still get that big space the perspective that there's a big
Reverb there but it's not again clouding up the vocal and the lead sitting up front
so let me just unmute the beat so you can hear that now so I think we got the Reverb
dialed in pretty well there now let's move on to our delay and this is going to be set
up very similarly we're gonna be using kind of a secret weapon delay uh for me I don't hear a
lot of people talking about it these are really good especially the EQ and the delay these are
two that I use in pretty much every session but this delay has some cool unique effects
that we can dial in really quickly so let's go ahead and hear what that sounds like [Music]
obviously it's very very overbearing right now I'm going to turn the feedback down that ducking
is just happening on the Reverb we can control these independently so we're going to go ahead
and just dial in the tone of this same thing with the Reverb and then we'll create some ducking
free myself [Music]
[Music]
I'm alone
combining a little bit of Reverb a little bit of distortion and some width as well
as a phaser and then also filtering the delay we get a really nice tone a nice Echo texture
there but now we're going to go ahead and add another R comp and if you want to you can just
copy this one by holding option command and just drag that since we already set that up
for the same incoming signal now obviously we can adjust the attack and the release if
we want to make sure and uh precisely set this delay and what's kind of coming through there
[Music]
it's really helpful to mix and blend these in the context of the entire mix with the beat so you can
hear you know where those delays are gonna sit and you know making them noticeable enough but
not intrusive and also adjusting that Reverb just to make sure that that space feels right [Music]
I'm hoping this is gonna get your wheels turning with setting up parallel splits and
then utilizing effects in this way it's really powerful to be able to independently control
mixing control ducking not to mention you can add other effects for example if I wanted to
add you know say a doubler a lot of times I'll use a doubler on the lead I can just add that
into here to the split and then control that independently of my Reverb and my delay I can
also automate you know levels here on each of these parallel splits so just infinite
possibilities setting this up with Studio rack and you can do kind of some Mega effect
racks for your vocals to be able to choose from different splits and different chains
there if you have any questions or comments about setting up ducking reverbs and delays
for your vocals feel free to leave a comment below if you learn anything in the video please
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