hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well
today's video we're going to talk about five plug-ins that can take your vocal tone to the
next level doesn't matter what microphone you're using even if you have a budget mic you're setting
it up and you're not getting even close to the sound that you want out of the gates that's okay
this is before we get to you know a lot of the ear candy we got to get the core tone down first
so let me go ahead and play this back for you this is just a little verse i put together
and then we're gonna go through each of these plugins right now they're all bypassed so this
is just dry the way it was recorded look too far ahead and now i miss the view time passes love
changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close cause
when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave now
i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live for one thing
the first plugin you need to take your vocal tone to the next level is going to be some kind
of preamp emulation or even better a a sort of channel strip with some eq settings so that one
we can get that warmth and we can get that subtle saturation that a hardware preamp would give you
a lot of you out there using usb mics cheaper interfaces with the onboard pres we want to add a
little bit of that sort of analog heat to it so we got a preamp section and then we also want to just
doctor the eq curve of your mic just a little bit you know pre-compression pre-processing to
get it closer out of the gates to the tone that we want so let's go ahead and activate this one from
arturia this is called the pre-trident a uh you can experiment with different preamp emulations
out there we're just going to bring the gain up now if we did this you know pretty heavy we're
going to get distortion but we just want some subtle saturation some of that bit of sizzle
here look too far ahead and now i miss the view time passes love changes six months later we
could be strangers all right so you can hear the distortion there we're gonna bring it back we want
to keep this very very subtle look too far ahead and now i miss the view time passes love changes
six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close cause when it
goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do so just getting a little flavor a
little character and let's go over here to the eq section i like this one because you can combine a
couple of different notches in the highs as well as the lows give you some custom curves here
i'm gonna go ahead and boost just a little bit at 9k look too far ahead and now i miss the view
time passes love changes and then let's add a little bit of air here at 15. look too far ahead
and now i miss the view time passes love changes six months later we could be strangers i did
everything not to get too close adding a little bit of that air and then let's go down to the the
high pass here i'm gonna set this to 50 just push that notch in look too far ahead and now i miss
the view time passes love changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get
too close and i'm gonna leave the rest as is right now we're to use another plug-in to dynamically
control some of the mid-frequency uh information here that's a little bit
harsh but for right now i mean if we just bypass that look too far ahead and now i miss the view
time passes love changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close
cause when it goes sour already almost sounds like a different mic right so a good good starting
point there we'll leave that and next up we're going to move to a compressor but this one is
quite different this is a newer plug-in i just got my hands on from mathew lane
this one is a combination of a tightness control or you know the the compression the the subtle
analog compression here models some different hardware and then you've got a contour control
which this is going to be more of a tonal effect add subtle saturation some of the things that we
were talking about with the preamp you know we get some tonal things that a hardware unit would
give us some top end i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling
it the most i gotta so that's a pretty aggressive compressor let's go try this oxygen one i've been
really liking this yes i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be
feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of hands to
hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live for one thing other than ourselves all
the hate could go to hell so even just with a few db there we get a nice tightness nice compression
there glue to the sound and let's move over to the contour control and we've got some different uh
settings here i've been really liking this air control because it adds just a nice top-end sizzle
and let's see what this does yes i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll
be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave now let's say be that real quick
yes i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most
i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most
i got a list of things to do before i leave now wow so it just really takes the blanket off of
that top end there opens up the mic sound a lot very easy and quick to dial in some tone there
and uh next up let's go to the dpr-402 which uh this one i had not really been familiar with
waves had a sale a couple weeks ago and so i just picked this up thought it was interesting
because it combines a compressor a peak limiter and a de-esser it's kind of a different combo of
effects there but it works surprisingly well for you know taming a vocal and keeping the s's in
check it's got a great de-esser section i did everything not to get too close cause when it
goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of
hands to hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live for one thing other than
ourselves all the hate could go to hell so just a few db let's uh maybe that i got a lot of hands to
hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live for one thing other than ourselves
and with i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live
for one thing other than ourselves nice nice nice smooth sibilant control there it also has
a peak limiter so sometimes with vocals if you're pushing it especially with a 2-track it's nice to
just dial that in and you also have a compressor that is very nice as well but since we're already
utilizing the the tico for this i'm going to leave that as is fourth plug-in to give you next level
mic tone with any microphone is going to be a dynamic eq or a multi-band compressor i prefer
a dynamic eq in this sense because we can dial in the problematic areas of your specific mic
and your voice and we can dynamically control them so just versus an eq where you know we're going to
be cutting out the the frequencies no matter what this is very much determined by the performance
because obviously dynamically your frequency is going to change there so i'll show you what we
mean we've got some problematic areas in this mic again like i said it's got a lot of mid
frequencies so that it cuts through on radio and things of that nature but for this type of vocal
not really the best thing because once i start stacking vocals it does get harsh so we've got
a couple of problems here one of them is going to be at around 1k let's just take a look here yes i
did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got
a list of things to do before i leave now so let's go ahead and just dial one right there around 1k
and then we've also got quite a bit of build up over here at uh you know between 2k 3 and a half k
so i'll just put that right there and then we're going to go down to the dynamic range section
and i'm just going to bring this down let's narrow the queue as well so this is only controlling
about somewhere in there and we'll do maybe you know a couple of db reduction on both of these
yes i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i
got a list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of and you've got a handy control
down here to control the gain scale so once you've dialed those plots in you know we can
increase the intensity of that or decrease it and just leave everything we've done there intact yes
i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a
list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out so
tell me this one thing can we live for one thing other than ourselves all the hate could
go to hell Christ burns on our heart all right and then we've got another little bit of a mud
here at like 300 to 400 so let's just dial that one in i'm going to leave the gain at
zero but we'll just pull down that dynamic range once again a db or so would be plenty
i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i gotta
solve that real quick
i got a list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out
so tell me this one thing much better much better the fifth plugin to get next level mic tone with
any vocal microphone is going to be a little bit of reverb now this is not like an ear candy type
of reverb what we want to do here is just dial in a small subtle space that's going to cover up
any problematic acoustic issues in your room so a lot of you that are recording in your bedrooms or
you know just a spare room with no treatment you know you're going to have some flutter some echo
i have a little bit of flutter in this room just because there's this air duct that kind
of goes back on the ceiling and i don't have that treated so things just kind of reflect off of it
and you can hear that in some of the recordings so if we put a very subtle reverb on top of that
we can kind of cover that uh problematic acoustic issue up so let's go ahead i've got 100 sent down
here to studio rack and this is one of my presets from divine mixing vocal chains sr you can dial in
pretty much any reverb you could imagine change the decay time the pre-delay you know add side
chaining all that but we're going to do something pretty simple we're just going to use maybe a
plate or a room let's try a room we'll dial in a small decay time and a pretty quick pre-delay
as well time passes love changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get
too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i
leave now i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live
for one thing other than ourselves so just a very small tight rich sort of sound there
just to cover up the tail of the the room let's hear that in the context of the mix time passes
love changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close
cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave
now i got a lot of hands to hold before i bleed out the last thing i'm going to do is i'm going
to add a little bit of a boost here just to give us a bit more top end just to add to what we did
with the contour control on tycho and the cool thing about boosting it here with a dynamic eq
it will boost but at the same time attenuate if we have you know an excess
of those high frequencies at a certain part of the performance so rather than just you know adding
a a boost across the whole thing we can do it in a very controlled manner and it just gives you a
smoother brightness in top end so i'm going to add something around 12k let's just see what we can do
time passes love changes six months later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close
cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling so let's go ahead and just play the whole thing back
with all of this bypassed and we'll a be it time passes love changes six months later we could be
strangers i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be feeling it the
most i got a list of things to do before i leave now and with time passes love changes six months
later we could be strangers i did everything not to get too close cause when it goes sour i'll be
feeling it the most i got a list of things to do before i leave now i got a lot of hands to hold
before i bleed out so tell me this one thing can we live for one thing other than ourselves all the
hate could go to hell christ burns on our hearts had our backs from the start even when we pushed
away it all led us to this day fix my broken spirit we stay prayed up can you hear us now