hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well
today's video i'm going to show you a vocal chain that utilizes three core plugins yes that's right
just three plugins to get a fat warm sound for your rap vocals you know i don't want you all to
overthink this because a lot of you out there are just not getting the tone you want you've
got a really thin sound and you're trying to get something that's sitting in the mix better
you don't have to try to over stretch your resources and use a ton of plugins we can
do a lot with a little but let's play back the core chain here with just these three plugins
we're going to talk about how i've dialed these in and we're actually going to set this empirical
labs mike e comp up that's giving us a lot of that warmth and fatness for this particular chain
nice clean crisp sound here but it just sounds a little thin it's not coming through the mix
the way we want so we need to add some heat to it so that's where this plug-in which is
the empirical labs mike e comp comes in this is something that came out fairly recently
and you all are probably familiar with the hardware distressor from empirical
labs you see it in all the big studios there's a reason for that it is an excellent compressor
but this ties in some of that technology with a compressor and a saturation section combined
but we also get this really nice preamp section which is based on the hardware mike e let's go
ahead and dial in the compression section this is just the default setting right now
but i'm going to go ahead and we're going to turn the output down just a little bit
and i'm going to bring the comp sat in a bit more and then we're going to adjust the ratio
the attack the release and then we'll get to the preamp here in just a second
all right so already just with that comp sat section we're getting a lot fatter warmer
sound and just adjusting the attack and the release you know i like this little toggle switch
because these are just some very optimized sort of points for where we would normally
set the attack and release and gives you some flexibility there some of you are probably going
to be uh you know kind of turning your nose up at the fact that i have it set to eight to one
doing some of this aggressive pushing in the comp sat section is not necessarily a bad thing
so experiment with it use your ears not your eyes again i'm not here to make a mix look pretty
i'm hired to make it sound good so we're gonna go with eight to one moving down to the preamp
section right now we're set on clean but i'm going to slowly just go up here and start going
through these different notches so we can hear what's happening all right so i'm gonna go back
and i'm gonna go from clean to kind of this mid 8 setting here so you can hear the difference
that is much more than a level change those of you out there who are a little bit more uh sensitive
about gain matching take a close listen there because there is definitely some tonal things
happening and it just sits that vocal much more up front a lot fatter a lot warmer gives us that
analog depth that we're looking for and then i just set the high pass just because we did get
a lot more fatness out of it and stylistically for this song and i didn't want too much of that low
end building up so playing it one more time with and without the mike e here usually i don't use
plugins in my final mixes that i'm just checking out or just trying out and i ended up using this
in this chain left it for the final mix and so i went out and bought it now this plugin is a
little more on the costly side i have covered some other plugins that do something similar in terms
of preamp emulation so i'll put a link to that there's some stock options and some things for
you all to consider i was just very impressed and it did a lot of work again just within one plug-in
having the compression the saturation combined along with that preamp emulation so that we don't
have to have an overly complicated vocal chain following the mike e we have the manny marroquin
eq from waves this has become one of my favorite eq plugins just because this top end is really
smooth for a plug-in i've just noticed that you know analog hardware eqs in the top end they tend
to be a little bit more forgiving versus in the plug-in space you can get harsh pretty quickly
this one is very very nice very smooth so i'm just adding a 15k boost and then i'm also cutting at
175 which may seem a little high uh compared to some of the other chains i've showed you guys but
just given that really warm saturated boost with the mic e i just wanted to cut some of that that
out stylistically for this vocal so here it is disabled and i'll enable it so it just gives us
that really crystal clear smooth top end and then we're just feeding that into a de-esser this is
something i've been sharing with you guys for years but it's just a method of getting a nice
smooth top end that also kind of informs the de-esser of where to pick up on some of the
harshness so we're aggressively boosting the top end with the eq feeding it directly into here and
then that detection is going to be you know even easier we're kind of doing a little bit of lifting
for the de-esser before you add the de-esser the vocal chain is going to sound overly bright and
harsh but again we're just feeding it into here and we're able to achieve that top end we want
different people will experiment with putting the de-esser in different places in the chain
i've just found that with most de-essers this is the best way to do it in terms of getting
this particular tone that's really warm but also very bright so those are the three core plug-ins
but just for the heck of it i'm going to show you another plug-in that gave us this particular warm
and fat tone which was actually the reverb so i'm gonna go up here and let's just click and take a
look i have the seventh heaven so i'm gonna turn this on let you guys hear what's going on we've
just got a small vocal chamber but this again just has more of a hardware analog sort of vibe to it
it's based off of the bricasti m7 i believe i think that's why it's called seventh heaven
all right let's do a final ab just so you can hear the difference from what we started with
all right y'all so i wanted to give you a quick look at a simpler vocal chain this is the vocal
chain that was used in the actual release so i just wanted to show you guys that sometimes less
is more and when you carefully select these plugins and then optimize the settings here
you don't necessarily need a ton of stuff thrown at it so i hope this is helpful if you have any
questions about the plugins or how i set up this chain feel free to leave a comment below if you
learn anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing we'll talk to you soon