hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well
in this tutorial we are going to be breaking down the holy grail rap vocal chain now what
i'm talking about what i'm referring to here is a hardware analog chain that has been being used in
the major studios for the past couple decades it's really the de facto rap vocal chain artists like
dr dre drake has used this chain big sean future a lot of your favorite artists are utilizing this to
get their rap tone to sound the way it does now i do want to preface that they are using some
very expensive microphones like the elam 251 the neumann u87 i don't expect you all out there to
be utilizing those i actually used a rode nt1 for these vocals but i'm going to show you some things
to consider in terms of optimizing the frequency response of whatever mic you're using and then
utilizing these stock plugins to replicate this analog hardware chain it's gonna get you really
close and you're gonna save a lot of money uh trying to achieve this sound here with this method
so let's go and dive in all right so we got our session open here and this is just a
quick little verse that i laid down i've got some different layers you all follow the channel you
have seen that i do backing layers and i'll just stack those very softly underneath just to give
us a little bit more of a thickness and a presence to the vocal that's going to cut through the mix
and sometimes i'll wide pan things but let's just take a listen to it dry and then we'll
start building out our holy grail rap vocal chain all right so we got a nice clean signal there and
again i used the rode nt1 going into the aphex channel with maybe three or four db of compression
if you're curious about that i'll put a link below but you don't need to worry about tracking with
compression right now it's not going to affect the processing that we're doing here with this chain
so first thing we're going to do is just select all of our verse vocals and i'm just routing
them to the same bus down here which is bus one we're going to be processing them all on this
ox so before we start talking about what exactly makes up the holy grail wrap vocal chain i want to
show you some things to consider in terms of your microphone and the frequency response of your mic
when compared to some of these very expensive mics that a lot of these rappers are using
you don't need to worry about that and you don't necessarily need one of these mics to still get a
great result but you do need to know a couple of things and the main one is just understanding the
frequency response of your mic for example this particular mic the road broadcaster sometimes i
just leave this set up and i will record my own vocals with this mic but it took me a while to
understand the frequency response of this mic is designed specifically for this type of thing which
is narration and broadcast so they have uh boosted certain frequencies that when i start layering
vocals and especially for hip hop and wrap stuff it can get harsh pretty quickly and the reason is
because you see in the frequency response here there's a pretty significant bump at 2k and 3k
which i already have quite a bit of information in the upper you know 1k 2k range in my voice so
i was just finding that the vocals were a little bit harsh as i stacked and as i recorded very
simple fix we can just go in here and just kind of pre-optimize the vocal with an eq so if you go and
you look at that frequency response of the various mics and even if you want to compare them to
something like the elam 251 or the u87 you can do that here this is a site called recordinghacks.com
i'll put a link to it but if you click on the cardioid for for instance the 251 and let's just
say we wanted to compare that to the nt1 which is what i used it will show you those curves
and then you can then just kind of optimize it and sort of match with an eq to kind of get it closer
you can see the nt1 is actually pretty close it's a quite nice curve for the price that the nt1 is
if you look up your mic's uh frequency response and it does have some of these unpleasant bumps
as far as something that's just not really working for your voice it's a good thing just to be aware
of that and we can pre-process it with eq as needed alright so what are the hardware pieces of
this holy grail rap vocal chain number one we need a 1073 preamp or eq combo something in that style
lucky for us in logic there is a stock eq plugin that replicates that exact piece of hardware
it is in the vintage eq collection and it's called the vintage console eq
so if we open this up this actually even looks like a 1073 for those of you who might be
familiar uh it has an output drive section which is going to replicate some of the things that the
the neve pre will do some of the saturation and a little bit of the grit and character that you're
hearing in a lot of those voices we're going to adjust that in a minute but first let's just do
the eq let's adjust the high pass frequency first i'm probably going to go towards 80 but you can
do this to taste and you'll notice if we do too much the vocal will get thin but let's just see
so just getting rid of some of that low rumble here moving over to the low gain we can take
some of that low murk and just that mud out of our vocal that's going to have it sitting
nice and clean so already just a nice clean less muddy sound going over to mid game this
is probably one of my favorite things about the the 1073 style eq is these notches are very much
optimized in my opinion for vocals they work really well for cutting out harsh frequencies
particularly the 1.6 and the 3.2 notch my voice tends to have quite a bit of build up there and
when i layer it can start to get harsh in a hurry i'm sure that's probably the case for a lot of you
out there with your rap vocals so we're going to take out probably about two or three db up here
at one of these notches let's just adjust so it just takes out some of that nasally kind of harsh
sound there and then we're going up to the high gain very important we're going to boost this up
just to give us that nice top end sparkle the 1073 has a great high shelf for vocals here sounds nice
the s's do get a little bit sharper we're going to deal with that we're going to add a de-esser
to this chain because that is another piece that's not talked about these rappers are definitely
utilizing deessers or rather their engineers are using deessers and that's how they're getting
this brightness but without the harshness we'll go ahead and add the deesser to the chain while we're
processing just so it's not getting in our way and taking our ears off here so i'll open up deesser 2
and let's just dial in something very quickly for that i'm going to leave this at relative
switch the range to wide and let's adjust this a little bit all right so that'll control that
a little bit a lot of you who are not using a lot of analog gear you're getting a very clean
pristine digital sound and we need to grid it up a little bit so that 1073 is going to work well
we're going to go ahead and select the the console eq drive model or the output model and we're just
going to add a little bit you'll notice if i bump this up too much we start to get some unpleasant
distortion so we want to be careful about that pretty drastic difference right and this is just
a stock plug in here in logic uh so we got the the 1073 style pre eq dialed in now we need to
move on to the all important opto compressor the hardware compressors that are being used
in this style are ones like the la2a you've heard about that but also the tubetech cl1b
that's one that's used by big sean and others but we're gonna use just the stock compressor in logic
and there is a matter of fact a vintage opto modeled compressor so that is going to react in a
similar way to those hardware pieces i'm going to set the ratio to about four to one all right so we
got our attack and you saw that i slowed down the release time a little bit you will notice that i
have auto enabled that does not mean that release does nothing it does it's just auto responding
according to where i set this so i want to slow that release time down so we get a little bit more
glue and then i'm going to turn on the limiter this is really useful just to set it at zero
just so that we don't get out of control with the signal coming out of the compressor so we
just get that nice warm creamy sort of sound and it tucks it into the mix glues it a little bit all
right so let's go ahead and play it back dry and then with the plug in so we can hear what we did
all right so there you have it with essentially three stock plugins we rebuilt the holy grail
rap vocal chain in the analog hardware realm 1073 pre and eq fed into an opto style compressor which
logic pro has some great models these plugins have just gotten a lot better over time hope this was
helpful and i will be including this vocal chain in vocal chains le those of you out there who
have that but if you don't i'm sure this will be easy to rebuild and it's pretty simple also very
easy on your cpu so i think you're gonna have a lot of fun with it if you have any questions
about what we did here in terms of building this chain or maybe you have a specific question with
your rap vocals in terms of getting them to sit right in the mix or you're struggling to get the
tone you want leave us a comment below happy to help if you learn anything in the video please
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