Welcome to sage audio. Today we’re talking about How to Make Clear Vocals
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High-Pass Filter and Gating
The quickest way to add some clarity to your vocal is to combine a high-pass filter with
a gate tailored toward vocals. The high pass will will attenuate an aspects of
the vocal that are causing plosives or unwanted rumble, and the gate cleans up the performance.
Although this seems somewhat basic, these 2 steps
are often overlooked, but can have a big impact on the clarity of your vocal.
When setting up the high-pass, you may want to use a linear phase mode
to avoid phase changes, but use your ears to determine what’s best.
When it comes to the gate, it’s important to utilize a range
function - this will ensure that the attenuation isn’t too drastic.
Subtract Low Mids
Low-mids, especially in a vocal recording,
can greatly reduce the clarity and perceivability of your vocal.
Typically these frequencies are between 150Hz and 4 or 500Hz, and are masking or covering up
higher frequencies around 2 to 3kHz that would otherwise provide clarity to the recording.
By slightly to mildly attenuating these frequencies, you’ll reduce the effect
of masking, and end up with a cleaner and clearer sounding vocal recording.
Usually, a bell filter with 3dB of attenuation is a good start. Additionally,
if you can make this band dynamic, this will help to retain the low end when it isn’t too dominate.
Excite High Frequencies
Exciting high frequencies is a great way to add clarity to any instrument,
including your vocals. By exciting higher frequencies, you’re creating high order harmonics,
which both make your fundamental frequencies more easily perceived
due to some psychoacoustic effects, and amplify your vocal’s high frequency range.
To make this happen you’ll need to use a exciter that can target
just the high range of the vocal. Luckily, most excited plugins already target high frequencies.
Additionally, you can use a multi band exciter like the Ozone 9 exciter
to target the exact range that you want.
Compress to Bring the Vocal Forward
Compression with automatic gain is a great way to bring the vocal forward
and to control the perceived level of the vocal. If you compress heavily,
but in a way that reduce unwanted artifacts, you can cause relatively
transparent compression that still greatly increases the clarity of your vocal.
The FabFilter Pro C-2 has a preset that covers this idea really well. Notice that the attack is
super quick, meaning that the compressor will capture the entirety of the vocal’s signal.
Additionally, we’re using a soft-knee to cause more compression,
and a fast attack to retain detail. Lastly, the automatic gain increases the amplitude
of the quieter, more detailed aspects of the vocal.
Amplify High Frequencies
Amplifying the high frequency range of an instrument or vocal is probably the first
solution someone would use when trying to add some clarity. Equalization is probably the
most powerful tool in audio processing, and can be used in multiple ways to make a vocal sound clear.
The easiest would be to amplify 2 to 4kHz
on the vocal with a bell filter, or maybe use a shelf filter starting around this same range.
If you’re equalizing a vocal bus, you can attenuate this range on the side image as well,
this will make the more powerful aspects of the vocal stick out.
Lastly, some dynamic equalization can create a more unique sound.
Use Bright Reverb
Bright reverb effects are one of the many ways that engineers create clear
vocals - this is especially true in rap tracks in which the vocal needs to
sound crisp and upfront. Bright reverb both causes the vocal to sound bigger,
and amplifies the high frequency range, causing clarity.
To accomplish this, you can use a reverb plugin that includes some form of equalization,
like dampening, or an eq.
If your reverb plugin doesn’t have this functionality, you can create an aux send,
and amplify the signal either before or after the reverb effect.
Limiting Your Vocal
When mixing a vocal, limiters aren’t super - but they can greatly add clarity to a vocal
by controlling its dynamics while reducing the amount of artifacts found with heavy compression.
When limiting a vocal, be sure to compensate for the gain changes that will occur.
I’ll use Elephant by Voxengo to show some of the ways that limiting can
affect a vocal. First, I’ll push the vocal higher using the gain,
and then compensate for it by reducing the ceiling or output gain.
I’ll increase oversampling to reduce unwanted distortion, as well as open up the mode
editor to control aspects of the limiting that will change the timbre of my vocal.
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