>> We're going to talk here a little bit
about EQ side chaining.
Just going to go ahead and use my song,
a crazy life again from my record six tape.
There are several plugins that achieve this effect.
The one that I like to use because it's quite easy,
is called track spacer.
It's by a company called Waves factory,
not to be confused with waves.
Basically all it's doing is it's
taking an input, in this case,
from the vocal bus and it is
in real time analyzing the EQ
of that vocal bus or whatever you choose
and then it's creating a reverse EQ curve.
It's essentially cutting those frequencies out of
whatever you choose to cut those frequencies out of.
I have all the effects that I'm using
going to this FX aux.
That's the first thing that we'll look at,
checking out this second verse here and the
reverse EQ that is being triggered by the vocal bus.
[MUSIC]
The blue line that you're seeing at
the top here is the EQ
that it's getting from the vocal bus in real time.
Then the white line that you see dipping below
here is the reverse EQ curve that it's creating.
You'll notice in this particular plugin that
the reverse EQ curve is quite a bit
smoother than the input that it's getting.
That's just so that you get a more nuanced effect on it.
Basically what's happening is
when the vocal is happening,
when it's singing various vocals,
those frequencies are being dipped from the effects.
What's cool about that
is that when the vocal stop singing,
then the effects come back and bloom again.
It has the effect of you still hearing plenty of
effects without undermining the clarity of the vocal.
That's something that I love to do.
You also can just have a straight compressor too.
It doesn't even necessarily need to be
a side chain nibble EQ such as this.
You could just use a straight side chain compressor.
I'm doing that on this track as well.
Again, there's a vocal bus and that's
being sent to this compressor.
Then I have the side chain key
input set to receive that information.
Then it's just a straight compressor.
Basically when the vocal is singing at
an attack and release and ratio of my choice,
the overall effects on the song are ducking and
then when the vocal's done
singing, those effects comeback.
They bloom again. You hear the effects quite
nicely without them overpowering
or muddling up your tracks.
We can take a look at that as well.
[MUSIC]
I don't know if you're hearing that well
or not in this particular case.
Basically when the vocal's done singing,
then you hear the effects
which mentally tricks you into thinking, oh,
there's a lot of effects on that
vocal and that sounds nice,
but then when the vocal is singing,
you get the clarity.
You can not only do this with
your master effects in your track,
but you can actually do it on the entire track.
I am also doing that using the same track spacer plugin.
Basically I have all of
my instruments going to this master ox here.
I could easily call it an
instrumental ox and actually in my new template,
I do call it, I think an in stock.
Basically everything but the vocals,
is going to this master aux or instrumental aux.
What's happening in this case is I have this again,
side chain EQ track spacer plugin by Waves factory,
which is taking the input from the
vocal via this key side chain,
creating a reverse EQ curve on the entire track.
Again, that might sound drastic,
but it really works great because it's just
carving out space for the vocal to make
sure that you have a nice, clear vocal.
Let's see it in action here.
[MUSIC]
There you go.
When you're doing something like that
on your master aux or instrumental aux,
whatever you choose to call it,
you're probably going to want to have it be more subtle.
If it's not subtle,
it's going to make your song maybe sound weird.
If you're just doing a few dB of compression,
it's not really a compression,
it's creating a reverse EQ curve,
but you can think of it like compression.
Then it's just going to have this nice effect
of making sure that your vocal is nice and clear.
When you're working in certain types of media,
you really need to make sure that the vocals
clear and the lyrics can really be understood.
These are some techniques that can
help do that and I hope you have fun with them.