Today I want to show you how to prepare and mix professional sounding vocals in any DAW,
just using the stock plugins that come with your digital audio workstations.
So, this is what we're going to start with
and this is what we end up with
I'm also going to show you how to create your own backing vocals and harmonies, even if the
singer didn't record them for you. And I'm gonna go through every stage of that process. As I said, just
using stock plugins. So let's hop into the DAW and get it done. Now, this is a track I did with
Natalie Conway for EDX's label Syrup Records and I'm just going back into that project to play with
the vocals for your example today. The first thing we have to do is comp the vocals and you're gonna
get several takes from a singer, whenever you record, and comping is basically where you pick
the best parts of each take and put them together into a composite or composition.
So I've got three takes here from Natalie who's the singer. The trouble is she's such a good singer, they're all really good takes but
that's one and this is another one.
So they're all very similar but if you look closely you can see they are actually different so all comping is doing is selecting the best parts
and then creating one main lead vocal. So you might take that one from that vocal track you might take this bit,
from the second take and then you might take this bit from the third take, for instance,
and you do that shooting the vibe of the track. And it's very obvious to hear,
if there's a bad take obviously and then you'd make sure that's kind of blended together and
sounds like it's uh one take basically so here would be the result. There you go
So that would be your main take. And that's what comping is
And you would do that for every part you've recorded so the lead vocals, the backing vocals and the harmonies as well.
So, the next thing to do is get rid of any excess noise out of the background of your take.
So, you can hear there's some background noise there
An easy way to do that is to use a gate, a noise gate. So, let's just get one here from Ableton
And what the gate is doing is taking everything below the threshold that you set down to silence
and that way we can avoid the hiss that sometimes is in the background of your recordings.
Okay, the next stage is auto tune and just tweaking up any slightly dodgy or flat notes. I like to use
third party auto tunes, especially great software such as Melodyne, or Antara's auto tune, but because
I wanted to show you how to do it just with stock plugins in Ableton, this is how you would do it
So, i think this one sounds slightly flat, so what i'm going to do
is just select that part of it and then tweak it slightly with the
And if this is hard to do, what you can do is you can load up a simple piano sound
and you can use that as a reference. So, if we hit this piano sound
So, we know that note should be this... Might be an octave up though so now
let's loop that note, play the piano and then tweak her vocal with the tune
Nice! Now it's in tune and you might need to just blend the
clip edges as well and you can do this in any DAW, not just Ableton.
And it's quite painstaking to do it this way but it's so worth
it because the end result is only going to be as good as the vocal you put in. And if you want me
to do a lesson on how to record the perfect vocal take, let me know in the comments below. I'll give
you a quick example of what it would look like if I was using a third-party plug-in like Waves Auto
Tune or Antara's Auto Tune. The first thing I'm going to do is put in the key of the track
Now I know it's d minor natural.
And we don't want that really kind of t-pain sound, we want to make it a bit smoother and this is how
So once we've applied that to all of our tracks we end up with this
So, once you've spent all the time tuning it perfectly next is to make sure that the
timing is correct and the way that you do that is you can zoom in and you can
Again, you can use a warp feature or flex time in Logic and just make sure
that you are getting all of the syllables lined up in the way that you want them to.
So making sure all the takes are lining up and, sometimes you might want it to be slightly before
another just to give it a more of a real feel you might not want it to be too perfectly in time,
but you also don't want it to be too out of time because then your mix is going to sound a bit
messy and like the performance wasn't very good. Again, Complex pro if you are using Ableton is
the best to use this for this. Okay, so you've got the comping done, you've got the auto tuning done ,
and you've got the timing done. Next is make sure that the volumes are balanced out. Now, lots of
people just throw compressors on but I actually prefer to tweak the volume manually because then
it makes the compressors a lot smoother, when you do apply them, which we will be doing soon so you.
You can do this a couple of ways. You can automate you can use a third-party plug-in, like the vocal rider
by Waves, or you can automate a trim plug-in, like a volume plug-in basically, so any super quiet bits
you kind of bring them up, as as you want them like this. And then you would do that across the whole mix
Obviously that's too much and it was an exaggeration
but that's how you would even out some of these levels. The other way, in which you can do it, is
to again split the clips up like this and then you can do it more visually and just try and make it
match what's going on around it a bit. Obviously, if you're doing this with
breaths and sibilance, then you want to be careful because you don't want all the "S"s really loud
but in this example, you can see here, I'm just increasing the volume of some of these clips,
and then fading them into the clips around them so it's a smoother finish result.
Again, that's a bit of a and then you have to do that across
all of your comps. So, again leave vocals back in vocals harmonies. So now we've got the prepared
vocals, it's time to actually mix them, but before we do that I'm going to give you an example of
what you can do to create your own harmonies, if you haven't been provided with them.
now in this instance Natalie did provide me with harmonies but let's just assume that she didn't.
and all we had to work with was this lead vocal So, first you do the comping,
you do the auto tuning and you make sure that it's as good a take as you can get and then what you can
do is this. I'm just going to minimize these so we don't get distracted. I'm going to duplicate
that track, make sure that we have it warped (I'll just turn off the auto tune). Again, if you're
using Ableton make sure it is on Complex pro and then we can split this into separate syllables.
Like that, and then we can actually tweak the transpose control to make our own harmonies
But it's easier if you listen to it with the lead vocal and, maybe,
the instrumental of the tune, that you're mixing anyway.
It's not as good as having your own real harmonies recorded,
but it's certainly a good workaround. A bit painstaking
And, again, you do that throughout the whole track to create the harmonies but
if you want to make it a bit easier yourself you can draw in the harmonies with midi or play them in,
and then you can just use that as a template to tweak each syllable of the vocals until you've
got your own lush vocals. And you can do that for two or three layers to create some really nice
harmonies. The other thing you can do is thicken up the sound by creating a double track. So I've just
duplicated the main lead here. I'm going to double click on it, I'm gonna make sure it's warped again
to Complex pro if i'm using Ableton and i'm just gonna drop it down one octave or twelve semitones.
I'm gonna take the formants right down and then this is the effect that it has and let's bring
it in quietly so you can hear the difference.
So, it sounds funny on its own but it just adds
a thickness to the vocals that you might not have had before
Now let's get to the mixing part of it. So the first thing i like to do
And again I always start with the lead vocal because that's the main part of the track
The first thing I like to do is add a little bit of saturation. Now, I would do this using the Oxford
Inflator usually, which is a great little plug-in get and it just adds
some kind of higher harmonics to that. But we're just using stock plug-ins so I'm just going to use
the basic saturator. I'm going to choose one of the presets and let's see how it sounds
So, it's just adding some volume, it's
just adding a little bit of warmth and that's the first stage to processing your dry vocals.
So, we've got the gates taking out the noise, we've got the auto tune or, if you're just using stock
plugins you could do that manually within the clip, and then we've got some saturation. Next is the EQ.
So, we're going to take out the frequencies we don't want and usually that would be
the sub frequencies, especially for a female vocal.
And you can see where there might be some resonant peaks, so we'll take those down a bit as the well
Just a bit, cause you don't want it to sound tinny. And if you are using premium
plugins, the Soothe 2 is really good for this, it's a dynamic EQ.
After that we add some compression and this is where we're going to start gelling the sounds together
So, if we use the compressor and just make it sound a bit more even. I should really do more work on
the automation of the volume here. And what you could do is actually use two vocal compressors in
a row, and use the first one just to take off the really hard transients
and make it kind of act quite quickly but only a little bit
Again, and then the second one will just smooth the whole thing out a little bit more
So, if we apply the saturation, EQ and the compression to each of the separate vocal
channels, this is what we end up with
Now, this is what I like to do next. I like to group all of the backing vocals together,
whoops let's put the low down one as well in there,
and this is so I can put them in their own space, using EQ.
So, we might want them slightly less bright than the lead vocal so they don't clash
And then the lead vocal, we can add an additive EQ and I would usually use an analog modeled
additive eq to give it more character and they just sound better, but, again, I'm just using the
stock plugins, so let's just add an EQ8 and boost it slightly to bring out more of that airiness.
And now we are going to actually group the lead vocals and the backing vocals together, and put
a very slight amount of compression on them with a glue compressor. Just to gel them all together
into one place. Again we're just wanting to have a decibel or two of gain reduction so we're not
crushing the dynamics from the vocals. Next thing we're going to do is work on the stereo field.
So, all of these are in mono, even though they're stereo waves, each side is identical so each one
is in mono. Now there are two ways that you can do this. I'd leave the deep vocal in the middle
and then I'd use a free plug-in. So,, it's not a stock plug-in but it is free the Ozone imager 2
by isotope and you can just add stereo width like this, so it sounds like it's wider.
So, this is with the lead vocal Now let's just pan these
other hooks, these other ones harmonies left and right. I've left this one off, because
I just wanted two harmonies in the end we can pan them left and right
One thing i'm gonna do on the backing vocals is I'm actually gonna slightly compress those
together and I'm actually going to add a little bit of chorus to give it some width.
And now let's add some reverb and delay to give this real character
This is what i do on the auxiliary channel. So, I've got two here
I've got a room reverb, which is tight and close, and then a whole reverb, which is a bit longer.
But because it's a vocal, let's add some of that whole reverb. So, first I'll do it to just the lead vocal
I'll just take away some of the brightness on that auxiliary channel
You can see I've got an eq on there after the reverb
and I'm also going to add a compressor after that and then I'm just going to add a little bit of
side chain signal from the dry lead. And that's how it ducks slightly when the the dry lead is singing.
And then the reverb comes back up, when she stops singing
It's a subtle effect but a pro tip there. So, now let's add some of that
exact same reverb to the backing vocal group.
And then this is going to gel those vocals together.
And now the last thing I'm gonna do is add some echo. And, again, this is just a delay unit on
an auxiliary channel, that I'm gonna feed some of the lead vocals into. Just the lead vocals.
And because it's on an auxiliary channel, I put it to 100 wet, so we don't double up the dry signal,
and then I've just created a quarter note delay that pans back and forth, by using ping pong,
and added some reverb to it to wash it out a bit, make it sound big and airy.
And I'm also going to add a little bit of that same echo to our piano,
just to have it sounding like it's coming from the same place.
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