Greetings, my name is Ian Vargo, and I'm with theproaudiofiles.com.
And today I'm gonna be showing you how to approach mixing stacks upon stacks of vocals.
The song I'll be using is Little Bugs by the band Ugly Ugly Words.
Make sure to check it out on iTunes.
The idea for this song was that it was supposed to sound like the band Talking Heads.
Not sure if you've listened to them.
You definitely should, they're a great band from the 70's and 80's.
David Byrne is still doing really great stuff.
And so the song was supposed to sound sort of like an african tribal infused pop song
with a melody that was driving the song.
So we've got a lead vocal track right here and six more backing tracks, all happening
at the same time throughout most of the song.
So that can present a challenge.
Let's take a listen to it.
This is close to the final mix.
[song]
Let's just solo all the vocals.
It's a very nice harmony.
The lead singer, Andy, is doing literally every part.
So it ranges from a pretty deep lead vocal to a falsetto high vocal part.
Especially in the choruses and he's doing all of it.
It was recorded with an AKG C-414 I really like that mic, especially the way that it
works on Andy's voice.
So before I put any plugins on anything what I like to do is I take all of the breaths
in the lead vocal and I drag them to their own track.
The reason I do that is because I don't want my breaths to be triggering compression and
EQ.
And then after that, you can see I bring down all sibilant noises.
So all S's C-H sounds I bring down with volume automation.
Ok.
So my signal chain here, while we're talking about plugins, is pretty intense and same
thing with my reverb and delays.
I've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 different instances of processing here.
And we'll go through that.
So the first thing I did on the lead vocals — let's take a listen to it raw, ok.
[lead vocals raw]
So a really great performance by Andy.
Very expressive but was a little bit uncompressed and definitely was not cutting through the
mix.
So what I started by doing — I don't always do this — but I boosted a good amount of
high end with the API 560 equalizer.
So we've got some 16k, 8k, 4, 2k, I cut some mids and cut some lows too.
After that I used the Waves Puigchild.
And this is sort of handling the peaks.
This compressor is not operating the entire duration of the song, it just sorta takes
over when Andy sings really loudly.
Take a listen.
[lead vocal + Puigchild compressor]
So as you can see, only when he gets a little bit loud does the PuigChild engage.
After that I've got the Decapitator.
I was going through a big SoundToys Decapitator phase at this point.
And was pretty liberal with the amount of distortion that I added.
Take a listen.
[vocal + SoundToys Decapitator]
So what this did was it brightened up the vocal, added a little bit of harmonic distortion
to help the vocal cut through and sit in it's own space.
After that, I applied the API 2500 compressor.
Which I think is a really great compressor.
Let's go forward to the chorus.
Show you what it's doing.
[vocals + Waves API 2500 Compressor]
So pretty much all of the peaks and most of the content is being compressed by this with
a slow release time and a moderate ratio — 4 to 1 — pretty slow attack time.
Mess around with this compressor.
The threshold and knee and detector all of these things add different sonic characteristics.
After that, because I have so much processing going on, definitely need some de-essing.
Only used a range of less than 1 dB.
After that I've got a little more compression.
CL-3A.
CLA-3A is really great.
Let's go forward to the second verse.
[vocal + Waves CLA-3A Compressor]
Really boosted the vocals and sort of smoothed it and rounded it out.
I had a lot of distortion and high end going into it so it really helped with that.
And then lastly, got this PuigTec on which I'm boosting about 3 dB at 60 Hz and boosting
4 dB at 16.
Also attenuating a little bit.
So this is a unique EQ here, make sure to check it out.
So after that, let's go through some of my sends.
We've got lead verb, lead verb b, lead delay, slap lead, lead 4th, throw delay, and then
lead slap.
Some of my naming seems a little bit suspicious, you would probably get confused if you open
up one of my sessions but I sort of know what's going on.
Ok so the first thing I have is the IR1 efficient.
Looks like it's using some sort of plate sound, ok.
Let's check this out here.
[vocals + IR1 reverb]
And that was mixed pretty low.
Next we've got spring reverb, which I think is a really fun trick I like using on a lot
of vocals.
Kind of has a guitar amp sound.
[vocals + spring reverb]
Really helps the vocal sit in it's own space.
And generally I'm not soloing when I am adding these effects.
I'm sort of listening to the entire mix, so let's go ahead and add all of these effects
that I've got happening.
We've got three more instances of EchoBoy.
One with an 8th note value, 16th note, and a quarter note triplet.
So let's take a listen here.
[lead vocal + SoundToys EchoBoy]
It definitely helped the vocal after all the sculpting I did with EQ and compression and
distortion.
Sort of sit back in it's own place.
After that, got these sort of backing vocal tracks, let's take a listen one by one.
[background vocals]
That one sort of mimics the lead vocal.
Sounds like I have a good amount of decapitation going on there.
There's that high vocal.
Ok so where as the lead vocal was coming out the main output, most of my backup vocal tracks
were going through what is called BU buss.
And on the BU bus I have the PuigChild 670, which is just a stereo version of what we
saw before.
API equalizer boosting some high end.
And a de-esser doing a good amount of de-essing.
So let's take a listen to the lead vocal with the backup vocal track.
Let's go to another part of the song here.
[background vocals]
Ok, so in addition to these going to their own auxiliary track right here, the auxiliary
track was being bussed to it's own auxiliary tracks with spring reverb, more EchoBoy, and
in addition these tracks right here were certain combinations of these aux tracks that we saw
here.
So it got a pretty complex when it came to signal processing as you can see my computer
is operating a little bit slow.
It's a pretty taxing session.
So let's take a listen to it all together.
[lead vocals + background vocals + music]
And even though you see that we have some guitar tracks, more guitar, more guitar, organs,
more organs, bass, drums, everything — the lead vocal and the backup vocals working with
the lead really dominated the song and were the driving force of the song.
And that is why, as you can see, I have a lot of processing, a lot of spacialization
happening.
Definitely more so than, you know, some of the drums and other things.
Alright, so I hope you enjoyed the tune.
Once again, it's Little Bugs by the band Ugly, Ugly Words and my name is Ian Vargo with The
Pro Audio Files.
Let me know if you have any questions and I will see you soon.