hey what's going on out there I'm
Sean Divine hope you all are doing well today I have a new tutorial where we're
gonna talk about how to get full thick lush hook and chorus vocals this is by
request and so let me just play back this hook for you and you're gonna
notice that there are a lot of layers and harmonies playing off of each other
and also just the way I've mixed it, it gives it a very wide full sort of sound
so we'll take a listen and then I'm gonna break down the vocal chain for you
and just talk about some of the thought processes for how you can get this sound
similar in your vocals
alright so you get the idea
there let's first talk about the layering which this is more about the
recording process than it is the mixing but once we have the layers obviously
the mixing plays a big role in it but we've got to have the layers to work
with in order to give it that wide full sound so the first thing about the way
I've layered this is I've recorded which I do this a lot in pairs so we'll have a
take and then I'll have two versions of it now they're recorded separately but
then I can pan them individually so for instance with these first two layers
it's gonna be something like this
it's the same delivery same sort of approach but they were recorded in two
takes and that way I can pan them and it's gonna give us a little bit wider
sort of sound than just having one you know take down the center and then we
have another set of pairs here that are panned more extremely left and right so
those are like falsettos and I've just kind of brought those down back in the
background a little bit and then let's see what else we've got another set of
so this is the harmony now some of you may be a little bit confused about
how to do this and a lot of you hear this and you think that it's something
that the auto-tune is doing but in fact I am using autotune but the auto-tune is
just kind of keeping my pitch in check it's not actually we're not using it to
create a harmony which you've heard some artists do with vocoders as well as some
of these other pitch correction software's they actually create a
harmony out of some of their layers and that may
be something that I do a tutorial on in the future but I actually sang these
harmonies and then again I'm using the auto-tune just to make sure
that my pitches is in but if you listen to those the way I'm singing them
explaining harmonies you know obviously this is that could be a whole other
video just talking about how to kind of create those and figuring out what
harmonies are gonna work vocally but it's really just it's like you've got
one you know pitch that is being referenced and these two takes and then
to create a harmony I'm just selecting another pitch that's going to harmonize
or kind of create almost like a two note chord I guess you would say and vocally
with that main layer so just having those harmonies themselves and having
ones that work really well with the main vocal that's going to give you a
lot fuller sound so in the context of the music when I play the harmony back
with it let me mute those you can hear the difference
so without my high octave sort of falsetto and the
harmonies there it's just not really the same sort of feel I wanted to have that
really full wide sound so again just going back to the importance of layering
properly and giving yourself some things to work with it's very very crucial so
now let's get into the actual vocal chain beyond just the balancing and the
panning you can see here that I have wide panned the falsettos and the
harmonies are panned a little bit but let's go over here and break down the
vocal chain first thing the usual just EQ nothing too crazy I'm rolling off a
little bit more of the lows than I normally would and this is just really
because I was recording with this mic and it tends to pick up a little bit
more of the low mids on my voice so with a lot of different layers going to it I
just felt like I needed to take a little bit more of that off got a noise gate
just to take out some of the noise in my room my lights make some noise and so I
had that on there and then we also used the waves NS1 which is another
noise suppressor again just taken out that little kind of white noise you can
hear that is created by the mic as well as the room compression let's just take
a listen and you can hear what that's doing
so pretty heavy ratio on the compression now that I look at it
7:1 that wasn't a conscious thing but it is very heavily compressed
and you know it you really just got to use your ears there's no rules to you
know kind of how you compress vocals but my dynamic range you know it looks like
it was pretty in check but again I wanted to create this very kind of
blended meshed sound with all those layers so that's why the heavy
compression works for this because it gives us the sort of perception that
there's one vocal but there's all these layers kind of happening and it doesn't
sound like they're so separate they're cohesive and that is done in large part
by the compression so what else do we have here we've got SSL EQ
removing even more lows there and I think that's all that one's doing and
then for the additive EQ and the top-end I have cranked the SIE-Q is as far as
it'll go so again no rules to mixing this would be technically incorrect but
it worked great for what I was doing I fed a bunch of De-essers after that which
we'll talk about in a second but let me just bypass the the SIE-Q and then turn
it on so you can hear what it's doing
so major, major high end sizzle which
in a hook like this that's what I'm going for to get that full lush sound we need that
top-end so that was accomplished with this EQ but obviously when you do that
when you crank the high end so much you're gonna add some sibilance so I have
three de-essers and I know I've gotten questions about this because this is
something that I've been showing you all lately a lot of people were really
confused by this they're like why in the world would you use 3 de-essers and the
reason is or the the philosophy is that I'm going to use all of these not so
heavily I'm not going to overwork any particular de-esser but I'm gonna have
the different de-essers work on different ranges or different problematic areas so
the Pro DS here is kind of taming things just overall and then we have
this de-esser which is dealing with a different frequency 4500 and then we
have this other one that is dealing more with like the "sh" sounds and this one's
actually automated so you can see that the threshold it's gonna be the
threshold is it's at 0 right now it's because I've automated it so then I'm
feeding the the Manny Marroquin Triple D this is just kind of smooth things out
really great utility plugin and then I have a C4 for which this is based
on or it may even be using this Pensado vocal which is in the factory bank
it's just a really nice preset for c4 and it just gives me some control over
this rather full kind of complex vocal chain with all these layers it just
gives us a more controlled sound
that thing does a lot really just keeps things in
check and then we're of course just feeding a little bit of reverb I've got
a two and a half second reverb space here on the Valhalla and then we have a
little bit of an echo let's hear what that sounds like so just giving us
giving us a little bit of stereo width there and then I also have another tape
delay that is automated just to do some throws like this something yeah so it's
just something subtle in the context of the mix with the music
one's bringing out that that was really the main purpose for that throws to get
that Ghost last phrase so alright y'all so just a couple of overall thoughts and
looking into the layering, the harmonies that I did for this particular hook and
also the vocal chain itself and I hope that this just gives you an overall idea
of what you can do to get your choruses and your hook vocals more full more lush
more exciting have more space and depth it really is about first of all getting
the right layers and then through the mixing process making sure that we're
maximizing everything that we've recorded to give us that massive sound
that we're after if you have any questions about mixing your chorus
vocals feel free to leave a comment below if you learned anything in the
video please like and subscribe and we'll talk to you soon