hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all are doing well I know there's some
hard times out here in the world these days but I'm just sending my thoughts and prayers out to
those of you who may be struggling this is just a little tutorial I know in the scheme of things
this isn't that important but I just hope that there's something inspiring and empowering for
your music making process in here we're going to have some fun mixing vocals from scratch using
some presets that I'm going to provide for you for free for the waves users out there this is
a bit of a polarizing topic some Engineers will say that mixing with vocal presets is lazy that
it is makes you incompetent I'm here to tell you that neither of those is true and I will
also guarantee that your favorite engineer's favorite engineer uses presets for mixing
vocals at some point we're going to talk about the situations where this is extremely efficient it
can be very inspiring in the moment if you're writing or mixing mastering as well it's just
something that will allow ow you to have a great ideal starting point so that you're not having
to reinvent the wheel in terms of building these vocal chains so let's go and dive in
I tracked these vocals over the weekend haven't had a chance to do any vocal chains or real
effects processing you are going to notice that I tracked with waves tune real time that's just my
preference for vocals you don't have to do that and the chains were going to look at today this
is not uh necessary it's optional um I did do a little bit of blend end in some light moves on
the mix as well as some panning let's tackle our verse one lead initially I'm going to select the
lead and the stack or the backing layer and we're going to Route these to the same bus or aux track
if you follow the channel you know I utilize these auxes extensively because it's just a lot
more efficient on your CPU and your DAW and it gives you more flexibility in terms of routing
multiple tracks to the same processing or the same vocal chain so I'm going to go ahead and
just call this lead vocal and we're going to go ahead and open up Studio Rack if you click the tab
here for StudioVerse that will load up our studio verse browser now before we start browsing presets
I would recommend going ahead and just dialing in the optimal input for the tracks that you've
recorded just so that when you're going through and searching some of these presets and loading
them up things are going to be consistent in terms of Dynamics and compression so I build my chains
based on an input of minus 25 lufs integrated if you're not doing that don't worry about it right
now but uh you can just dial your input back until we're getting a nice green signal here
on our meter I'm going to just full reset this let's play this back and see where we're at so
pretty much already there I just dialed it back just a little bit and I'm going to click this
little lock icon and that just means as we're browsing that input is going to stay the same
so that's just going to give you a more consistent experience across Studio verse so now once we have
gone into the studio verse browser you can search presets based on tags for instruments
genres character you can even search down to the specific plugin that you'd like included in the
chain but uh today we're just going to type in Sean Divine and then you'll see my artist profile
here if you just click that it'll give you all all of the different presets that I have available
for you on studio verse and I have two exclusive chains that are from the recently released vocal
chains ultimate pack that I put out you can get two of those for free here in studio verse we're
just going to click on the load button here next to Holy Grail Evo this is a versatile chain that
can be used for a lot of different styles so once we do that it'll say loading and then over here in
studio rack we'll see all of our plugins all the settings I have dialed for you all in as well as
the eight macros over here on the left that we can adjust and customize which we're going to do
so we'll close out the studio verse browser for now bring this over here the output's probably
going to be a little bit too loud right now just cuz the beat is not competitive so I'm
going to bring that back but let's play this back pretty good starting point right so I'm
going to play this back again and I'm going to make some tweaks with the macros just to blend
this better make it more complimentary for our specific track you can hear that nice delay and
Reverb already has a side chain applied there the Dynamics were already dialed in had a nice tone
with the EQ and the preamp from the Scheps 73 so had I built this chain from scratch probably going
to take me about an hour to kind of get something pretty solid and then tweaking from there but you
know already having a starting point all we had to do was just turn some macros and we already
get something where the vocal is sitting nicely in the pocket very complimentary to the instrumental
track moving on to to our dubs let's just go ahead and select all of these and we're going to
Route these down to another aux and process them separately from our lead vocal and we'll just call
this verse bgv and we're going to load up another instance of Studio rack go ahead and launch the
studio verse browser once again and we're going to load that second chain that I have available on
studio verse for you all from vocal chain ultimate it's called wide dubs it's exactly what it sounds
like it is a very wide background ground chain it's useful for a lot of different background
vocals not just rap but once we got that loaded we'll close that out bring this over and I'm going
to go ahead and just mute the the lead so that we can get this in here and we'll blend them together
that feels pretty good to me you can mix those to taste once we widen things quite
a bit I'll bring those back just so that they're not sticking out too
much all right let's check out this pre chorus section let's just listen to it
dry okay so I just routed it down to another aux we're going to load up StudioRack as we did before
slide this over here and let's go ahead and just try something a little bit different I'm going
to show you another preset that you can pick up on Studio verse this was not designed for this
vocal but I'll just show you how easy it is once we have you know the general tone and the Dynamics
set we can really customize these things pretty quickly so let's click load on trippy tune trap
vocal and if we play it back now it's probably not going to be specific to this vocal at
[Music] yeah so we're we're not really going for a Chopped and Screwed thing
on this so we're going to close that out let's bring this over and I'm going to turn
screwed off we're also going to turn the tune off cuz I already have waves
tune on here here and we're just going to make some edits and see what we can
do okay so there's also vocal bender on that delay don't really like that
so I'm just going to turn that instance off here and the parallel split and let's see
okay I like that delay there's a little bit too much feedback there so I'm going to turn
that down and let's also just filter the high pass a little bit more just so it's a bit more
subtle so transitioning from verse one let's check that
all right sounds like we got a chorus to mix right we're going to Route all of our chorus
layers to a new aux and these are just the same take I just stacked them a bunch pan them
to give us some uh a little bit more exciting width but uh if your takes are all pretty much
the same you can process them through the same vocal chain I do like to process harmonies with
different chains just to give us a separation there and you know depending if you have kind
of different deliveries in different pitches or maybe you have different Dynamics for some
takes you're going to want to process those on separate auxes or separate chains so we're going
to get super efficient with the chorus here using a vocal preset we're just going to copy the chain
that we built for our lead verse I'm going to just copy that studio rack instance in that whole chain
down here we're going to customize it and tailor it for the chorus but keeping the foundation of
that chain that we had for the verse we're not going to have to do a bunch of initial sort of
building I'm not crazy about the Reverb and the delay I want to do something different so
on this preset I'm just going to take that macro and turn this uh parallel
split with the Reverb and the Delay we'll just turn that off so now it should be dry
yeah okay so we got a dry signal there and we're going to send this to an aux and then we're going
to load up Studio rack again and on this one we're just going to go up to the regular preset menu
these are the presets that are on my computer and we're going to go down to user presets and
you'll see my vocal chain ultimate pack and we're just going to go to sends and let's try
maybe the echo delay toolbox so I'll load that up this is just a nice preset with some side chain
delay and Reverb options and then let's send some down there and see what that sounds like
not really crazy about it yet but let's go in here I want to
go ahead and just set this to maybe a whole note instead of a quarter note
and let's turn on that flanger and maybe turn off the doubler
[Music] [Music] that works
out pretty well now we could also I know we got a lot of feedback there too so maybe we want to
turn that back just a touch on the Manny Marroquin delay but let's say that we also just wanted to
automate that delay when we're coming out into this verse section that I haven't recorded yet
we can just go ahead and do that let's just go to latch and that'll move that [Music]
[Music]
so yeah we won't have that clouding up our verse once we get into that once again going from the
bridge to that hook let's see how those blend all right so a little bonus for y'all something
fun I'll just show you how this can translate into mastering if we go back into Studio rack
and let's go back to the presets and I have a mastering preset called Divine Next Level
mastering let's just click load on that and let's try to dial that in bring this up to a competitive
level
okay let's play it from the beginning
all right y'all so there you have it utilizing a a few different instances of Waves Studio Rack and
loading some of my presets from StudioVerse we're able to get professional results very quickly and
without a lot of fuss not to say that you can't get your hands dirty you can still get creative
you have a lot of flexibility here but might as well give yourself an ideal starting point
you know why waste time if you can already get a nice base something that you've probably already
done before I know that a lot of these I've dialed these Dynamics and EQs in very similarly over over
and over so why do it again if I can go ahead and just give myself that starting point so I
hope this is helpful again these presets are available on StudioVerse I'll put a link for
them in the description if you want to go ahead and load them up in your studio rack setup hope
you have fun with it thanks for watching if you learn anything in the video please
like subscribe and consider sharing hit that notification Bell for more we'll talk to you soon