Music Production: Vocal Processing

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course on vocal processing in music production. When I first started as a producer, EQing, compressing and treating vocals properly was one of the things I found to be most difficult. I was working with a lot of different types of singers, and every time I thought I narrowed down a process, it would change based on the speed of the singer or rapper in some cases, the tone of the singer, and so many other factors that I thought it was really important for me to start to narrow down a foolproof process for how to process vocals. So we're going to be covering things like EQ, compression DSing, saturation, dynamic E Q, and so much more. And we're also going to cover a few ways to set your vocals in the correct space so that they really sit within the mix convincingly. Not only are they level in terms of volume and tone, but also they just sit properly in the mix, which can have its own challenges altogether. Now, there is going to be a class project within this course, so make sure that you check out the class specifically designed to go over all of those details. But in short, you're going to be taking a raw vocal part that you've recorded and try applying these techniques so that you can see the before and after and really see how much your vocal processing has improved. Personally, this was a course that I wish was available to me when I first started as a producer, but I'm very excited to be able to share it with you so that you can see all the techniques that I've learned over the years, how I set them up in a particular process to be able to get a consistent vocal sound every time. So whether you're a beginner producer or someone that's been doing this for a while, but just not sure if you're doing it right, I would love to share my process with you so that you can have something to take from it to improve yourself as a producer. I'm looking forward to diving into this one. Can't wait to catch you in the first class. I'm going to see you there. 2. Class Project: For this class project, you're going to take a production that you've already been working on that has a vocal part. You're going to solo the vocals and export those. You're going to solo the song or a loop within the song that has the vocals and export that. From there, you are then going to apply the processing techniques that I've given you and then repeat that process. Once the vocals have been reprocessed, you will export those soloed, as well as export it as either the full song or the loop with those vocals reprocessed. So I will have four files. I'll have the dry or soloed vocals before the new processing and after the new processing, as well as that same context within the full production. I want you to take note of which production techniques improve your vocals the most. Within the course description, I want you to write about those techniques. Explain how you think they improve the vocals and which techniques you are most likely to use moving forward. In other words, which techniques you liked the most and you feel might lend them towards your style as a producer. So if after going through this process of these different techniques, you find that saturation and delay were the two effects that improved things the most, then write about that. It's really about being transparent with yourself about which techniques you like, because you're not going to use them in just a couple of projects. The techniques that you like the most, you're going to find yourself using in nearly every project. So to be able to identify early on which techniques you like and which ones will most likely find their way into your future projects is really important so that you can hit the ground running as a producer and not delay the process of you finding your own style. Once you've exported these files, preferably just as MP three, you're going to supply a public link to me so that I can access these files. This might look like four links using SoundCloud, one link using Google Drive. Whatever you feel is most appropriate, whatever medium you're comfortable using, just make sure that you're supplying to me a public link so that I can access your material. From there, I can give you feedback as to what you did best and areas of improvement. But most importantly, opening up a discussion regarding those favorite techniques that you have, and I might be able to help you take those techniques to the next level, whether it be guiding you to a specific book or newsletter or YouTube. At the end of the day, I want to make sure that if you outline what your favorite techniques are, I'm able to help you with the next steps to take that technique even further. Now remember, you're not submitting a masterpiece, but make sure that you're taking your time before you submit this project if you have any questions along the way, please feel free to reach out, and I'd be happy to give you some feedback and answers as required. I hope you have fun working on this project. I can't wait to see what you submit. I'll catch you in the next class. 3. Recording Space and Setup: No, I don't even know to play for you. Alright, first things first, let's get talking about your space and setup for recording vocals. Now, right now, we don't have to dive into Ableton. We're gonna have a little bit of a pre chat about some recommendations for how you should set up the vocals, how you should make sure that you're going about the process of getting them into your DAW, whether it be Ableton Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools Futops FL Studio, whatever we're calling it, it doesn't matter. The process is going to be the same. Now, first and foremost, I want to mention, I'm not a stickler with this stuff. I do think that it's okay to have a little bit of room characteristic. I do think it's okay if you don't have a shield behind your microphone. In fact, the vocals that we're going to be working with for this course were recorded with an SM 57. That's the way that they were given to me. The only main issue that I had was dealing with Ss, which were really intense. But for the most part, you can take a half decent vocal and make it sound professional. If it's already going into the DAW with perfect sound treatment, running in through the best pre amps and compressors and EQs, then you don't really have to touch it. Like a singer like Lev, for example, way her engineer produces things is he's barely touching any digital plug ins on her voice, maybe just a couple. I am currently in the situation where most of what I do is digital as I roll over to a more analog based studio. Having said all that, I'll give you all the recommendations that I think are important, some of which I follow, some of which I'm not as much of a stickler for. The main reason I mentioned this is because I don't want you to think that the barrier to entry has to be really high. If you have a half decent microphone, most importantly, a great singer in a decent room, then what you're able to do in your DAW should be enough to fit your mix. So let's zoom out and then slowly zoom in. So we're going to talk about the big, which is your room. Is the room that you're recording in relatively treated, first reflections, second reflections, bass traps, cloud, all that kind of stuff? If so, then you might be able to record the vocals within the studio room itself. However, it's recommended that you have a dedicated vocal booth. You will end up getting a lot more control for noise and reflections by doing it that way. Zooming in a little bit, we now have the person. Is singing? Are they a trained singer? Are they able to control the amplitude, the volume of their voice? Do they know when they need to pull back from a mic? These sort of things really play into what you're going to end up having to do. If someone is belting and they lean into the mic, you're going to have a lot of distortion. But if they know, just like a live singer will sing with the mic way off to the side that they have to either angle their voice away from the microphone and pull back a bit, or they can keep focused where their voice is pointed at the microphone, but they may have to lean back quite a bit. Next up, you want to make sure that you have a decent microphone. What I'm using is pretty entry level AKG C 214. The C 314 is another great option. These are, and I'm talking Canadian to s, but these are about 250, $300 microphones. They're great for getting started with a decent versatile condenser microphone. Of course, you can work your way up to roads and then eventually Neuman microphones, but you don't need those to get started. And even still a Neuman microphone might not sound great with particular voices. I got the AKG C 214 because it's very versatile. I've recorded male rappers, I've recorded female balllad singer fast or slow, male or female, this mic does the trick for me, but I've also understood over years how it's colored, and I do play around with other microphone options depending on the person that I'm recording. Now, the vocals that we're going to be treating within this course were sent to me as stems. So I got all the band parts that were recorded professionally in a studio, but the vocals were recorded at home, where she felt comfortable, where she was able to experiment as much as she wanted. And there's something to be said about the fact that the microphone was a compromise, but recording at home allowed her to really feel out the moment, take as many takes as she wanted, and not feel like there's a whole studio watching her while she's performing. Now having said that, this particular singer, Chloe Watkinson is fantastic. She performs live all the time. I'm sure like stage anxiety, studio anxiety is barely a thing she loves to get in there and get recording vocals. But having said that, again, I think there's something about having no pressure to take as many takes, as many re recordings as you need so that it's an advantage to be able to record at home. The disadvantage is she used an SM 58, which is a microphone that looks like this. This is, like, a really, really old PV microphone. Like, I never use this. But the style would be this sort of dynamic microphone. I can't remember if she used a 57 or 58. This is an SM 57, good for recording amps and snares. I think she said she recorded with a 58. The main issue I had was that there was this lack of natural compression. Sometimes on a condenser mic, there's, like, a little bit of light compression, not literally compression, but this is a dynamic mic for a reason. It's very dynamic in the volume fluctuation that we can have based on our proximity to this mic. But more than anything, the Ss were just really harsh. I think I used, like, three DSs at three different stages to deal with the Ss. So we're going to go through all the stages. I've taken all the effects off the vocals. We're going to re some new version of the effects. It's not going to be exactly the same because there was a lot of plug ins at the end, based on groupings and everything else. But I'm going to try my best to get as close as I can. In the very end of all this, we're also going to go into the original session and see exactly what was happening with the vocal processing. If anything, by using this dynamic microphone, I'll be able to show you that even if you're not using the best mic, you can still get great results. The important thing is that you have a singer that's trained and singing with passion in a comfortable environment. They're singing in a half decent room, and they have some half decent microphone technique. In other words, pulling away as they're singing high notes or being sensitive to how Ss work with that microphone. Like, when you think, way back in the day, like the 1950s, shingers would shing like this. They would soften the Ss. This sort of S would sound terrible. So they would kind of shing like this, S? So that's part of the reason why they would have that approach with their microphones. I digress. What I'm saying is, have a good singer, have a decent room. The mic should be good, but if it's not, you can still make up your differences. In the end, these vocals will sound good. You're gonna have to go through all the steps with me to get it there. But that's kind of where we're starting is in a semi professional environment, but spending a lot of time getting granular and working through all the layers of production to get those vocals to sound as good as possible. Another thing to consider is gain staging. So first of all, on your microphone, do you have a roll off or a pad? If so, for vocals, I generally recommend using it. Even if you have a relatively properly treated studio, if a big semi truck is going down the street near your house or your furnace has this low hum to it, you want to make sure that those frequencies below 40 hertz, 60 hertz are just rolled off. They're not part of the human voice range anyway, so start with that pad turned on so that you're rolling off those low frequencies. Make sure that as you're going into your preamp that you're not overloading things, that you still have headroom. In other words, get your singer to sing as loud as they are going to sing and make sure that you're not clipping or going into the red. From there, if you're going into an audio card, same deal, set the gain stage so that you're not clipping at their loudest volume. From there, you're going to be going into your DAW with a pretty healthy signal. It's also recommended that you leave a bit of extra headroom. If you're trying to at their very loudest volume, get right close to that zero. But what if in the moment they do sing a bit louder? Well, now you're over zero. You're clipping, you're distorting, and that's not a good thing. So it might be a good idea to leave about 6 decibels of headroom. That's just a general recommendation. Also make sure that the power that you're working with is as clean as possible. You don't want any buzzes going in due to electrical disturbances. So you can buy things like power conditioners or something like Hum x, which is a little thing you put into your outlet before plugging in to that unit, and it's supposed to get rid of any hums or buzzes that might be caused from electrical interference. So some of the stuff in this class is relatively obvious. Like, a better mic is going to give better results, work with a good singer. But I wanted to make sure I covered all the main bases before I jump into some of the technical details. And I also just wanted to reassure you that if you're not working in $100,000 studio with a $10,000 microphone and a singer that's been trained for 25 years, it doesn't matter. You can still get some great results. Does the music sound good? Does it speak to an audience? That's the main thing you're focused on, and does it translate well on a bunch of systems, so people camping can listen to it on their Bluetooth speaker or someone with their high fidelity home system can really blast it and get that full frequency range. So that's it for this class. In our next class, we're going to talk about gating and tuning. I'll see you there. 4. Tuning and Gating: No, I don't even know to play for you. Alright, first things first, let's talk about gaiting and tuning. Not necessarily in that order. We're actually going to do a little bit of light auto tuning before we go into our gate. What is a gate? We're gonna talk about that. How do you auto tune? We're gonna talk about that. Let's jump in. Now, something I want to mention straight out the gate is when it comes to auto tuning, you really want to consider what genre are you producing. If it's going to be Te Pane style hip hop, you want to go overboard with your auto tuning. But I'd say 90% of the time, you want to be subtle enough with your auto tuning that no one even knows it's happening. That's what we're going to go for in this rock song by Chloe Watkinson called Unsettled. You can find her on Spotify, Apple Music. I'd highly recommend checking out this talented Trono musician we're going to dive in and talk a little bit about working with her vocals. But first, I wanted to show you generally how this song sounds. So let's pop in. These are all the individual stems. This is unmastered. The full version is mastered. But the stems I was able to work with were the unmastered versions. So here we are. It sounds something like this. Pre expect D reject Well So some things we're hearing straight off the bat is that there's lots of harmonies happening, and there's quite a bit of grit and distortion in her voice. At times, there's a lot of dynamic range. Now, these, again, are the vocal stems that she had sent me. If you take a look here, they are quite healthy. They're not ever clipping. Like we're never touching the extreme edges of the tops or bottoms. The blobs, the wave information that we're seeing here, are not jurassically different most of the time. We can see here this would be much louder than this. If we just listen to this phrase, you'd be sat too. Ooh. Wow. Alright? So this is more of an effect that she's kind of putting on a little bit of a fry. But we could hear right out the gate there that we had this lip separation. You can zap those out automatically, so you could sort of highlight this area, control E, to cut zero to deactivate it, or you could do some sort of volume automation. We're actually going to use a gate to deal with this, and the gate is going to come second after auto tuning. So we're going to talk about auto tuning first. Then we're going to talk about the gate. Now, why don't I put the gate first? I'm going to show you how a gate can be set improperly. Give a listen. Up. So what's happening is when she's at her very loudest, we're hearing her poke out a little bit. This is kind of what a gate does, but we can fine tune it a bit more. Think of it this way. The gate says, If you are below this volume, I do not open, no one can hear you. But once you go above this volume, I will open up, and now your audience can hear you. So in this example, it was only the more extreme loud sections where we were able to hear her. It up. So let's say, I think that I have my gait set properly, and 90% of the song, that is true. But on one vocal phrase, it betrays me kind of like this. In your autotune software like Meldine specifically, you're going to be sort of recording the raw vocals into Meldin to be able to work with them from there. So if your gaiting isn't proper, then you're recording that improper signal into Meldin. So, first and foremost, record into Meldine if you're using Ana's Autotune or whatever it might be, it doesn't really matter. But I work with Meldine. It's pretty famous for being a great auto tuner. We're going to go through, and we're going to autotune not the whole thing. It's going to take way too much time, but we'll auto tune some of it, and then we'll kind of work within that section moving forward. So opening up Meldine, the first thing I would need to do is hit this little transfer button, and when you hit that transfer button, it's going to be ready to listen. So once you find your starting point, just before when the vocals kick in, you hit transfer, and then you just hit Play, and it's going to record those vocals into Meldine. Unprepadd unexpected not rechecked Wk Let's let it roll for a bit. Conscience face too Excuse me, if I see La dream. Excuse me, if I see you'd be sat too. Ooh. Wow. So we have one verse and one course, and after I hit Spacebar to stop it, you'll see it's pulled in all of this note information. Now, there's three main ways that we can play around with this pitch. And for the most part, you're going to be working with this little button here. You can also right click to find it. And these are your pitch tools. So there's a pitch tool, there's a pitch modulation tool and a pitch drift tool. Pitch tool is going to make your pitch higher or lower so it's more in tune. Pitch modulation is going to, for example, exaggerate vibrato or bring in the vibrato so it sounds tighter. Or even if you really flatten it, it sounds robotic. And then pitch drift is I started on pitch, but then I fell flat. So the tail end can be pulled up, or maybe I started flat, and then I pulled into tune so then you could take the initial part and pull that up. So it's really just doing like a bit of a tilt. This drift can sort of be leveled out a bit. So Pitch tool. Pitch modulation tool is sort of how wide is that information in terms of fluctuation, and then pitch drift is going to settle things out this way. Let's go through all of this information here and do our best to autotune it. I do a lot of it by I first, and then I'm going to go through and listen to it and see if anything else needs to be fixed. Straight out of the gate, I can show you this here. Do you see the drift that's happening here and pulling up? That's something I would probably address. Now, we're lucky that Chloe has very good pitch. So we're going to go through and just sort of zap some notes into place. You can drag around and you can see that she's pretty close to this G sharp here. So we draw a little square around. All I have to do is double click because right now, we're set to that pitch tool. So here, this is tough. I think the note she's going for is a C here. And some of these, you can just double click, and it's going to pull them into the closest pitch. Some of this Ooh, this one here, I'm going to have to listen to that by ear because you can see that this one here I'm going to have to listen to you can see she's moving up to about this F sharp, but kind of sharp on that pitch. I'm seeing an F sharp here. I'm seeing a bit of an F sharp here. It might be in key. So what I'm going to do is use the modulation tool. To pull this down a bit closer to the middle of that note. We're moving through a bit more. This note here, again, it's like right in between this B and C. Later, we're on a B. I'm going to leave that for now. We're just going to give a listen. Again, where we can work with our eyes, we will, where we need to work with our ears, we will. I'm going to narrow the vibrato a little bit on this note. Not too much, so it's only on the extreme edges of semitone above and below. Same here. Pitch drift tool. Something like that. Let's give a listen. I haven't touched all the notes yet, but again, this is like a rock song. She has a lot of folk influences. And she told me, like, she doesn't want her voice perfect. We didn't record it perfect. We didn't try to make everything perfect, but we made it suited for the genre or perfect for that genre. So we've done quite a bit of work on this part. We also want to scroll back a bit. There's still some of this verse happening here. This looks even cleaner, I would say. There's really not a lot do. I think that should be up there. It's really funny when you get doing this auto tuning some of the sounds you end up hearing, especially when it's your own voice. It's the cringe factor when you're doing this with your own voice is pretty high, but it's just kind of comical when you're working with someone else's voice. That's okay that this drifts down. Like, sometimes bluesy vocalists are going to bend notes. Like, you don't want to perfect everything straight into place. This one hears Kan itself. Same here. I think this being a bit more gestural is fine. Maybe I would take the pitch drift down a bit. Mm. Let's modulation. I'm trying to narrow things into that pitch there. This looks pretty good here. Let's give a listen. Let's see how it sounds. Hello there m. Prepat. I think this could be up a little bit. So it's a bit more on that B flat. The om. Pre T. That little voice crack? I'm not touching any of that. It's gonna sound weird if I try her auto tune. Expected. So here we can see she started on this F sharp, and she's like, right in the middle with some vibrato. Here, she's starting quite high, I would say. So the pitch drift tool can help us, but only to an extent, like you can see, it's not really addressing that first little bump there. So, again, I'm just going to tighten up the modulation a little bit and then use the pitch tool to pull up the average of what I'm visually seeing here. So if we go through, and right now we're gonna have to keep listening from that same point, so let's move it here. Expect nick. I don't like that. We're going to undo that. Un unexpected. Yeah, so here's the deal. She is not perfectly in the middle of this note, but look where things average. She's on the top part of this pitch, and then she's on the bottom part of this pitch. I could maybe pull modulation in the slightest little bit. But I think it sounds fine. It doesn't feel like it needs to be auto tuned. I'm going to keep it like this. The average of the fluctuation of the information is still kind of averaging out to the middle of that note. So let's just keep it. Unexpected. I think this note here It is supposed to be a little more on this F, I think. Let's try it. Unexpected. No rechecked Welco. That distortion, that's something I was dealing with. So we leaned into the saturated sort of sound. So there's almost always a bit of distortion. And when she's really pushing, you can hear the distortion that was baked into the recording. This was given to me. This was not recorded at my home studio. So something to consider is I cherry picked this example, this artist because I didn't want to give you something that was, like, recorded perfectly, and I barely had to touch it, and it's like, now, you just do the same at home. It's like, No, let's work with some dirty vocals. Let's get them sounding as good as possible. Unexpected. No prechected this is interesting. Both here and here, she's kind of in between the pitch. Lot. We want to kind of hear the separation of those notes, maybe a bit more. I'm gonna pull these down. I think she was a bit sharp here. Unexpected. No rechecked. Welcome. That sounds fine to me. Conscience pas to f two. Now, Melodyne is great, 'cause it tells us our BPM, which is 97. That might be just sort of synced to the 97 of Ableton, but one way or another, it's telling us it's in D major. If it can tell it's in D major, it can probably tell that it's 97 beats per minute. So we want to be finding notes that sort of confirm the key of D major. I'm just gonna go back, Wow, one more time. And just double check that Dmjor is looking like our key. I mean, this C should probably be a C sharp. We could try that. Let's see how this sounds. I mean, no, this is one of those areas where it could be like a domini chord. This is very clearly up on a C. I'm gonna leave that as a C. But again, that's where sometimes knowing this information can kind of doom you a bit. You almost don't want to know too much, but it's good to kind of have the key and the BPM confirmed to sort of confirm some of the ideas that you have. So we have this De probably wanting to be back down a bit lower. This will bring up this G. Bring this down to this A. Zap these into place. This is probably gonna want to be a B. You could take this Oops, this up a little bit, you. Up to here. A lot of what she's doing here looks pretty well tuned. If we're in D, we're gonna have more F sharps than Fs, but I'm not seeing her sing a lot of F sharps. I'm curious if I pull this up. Let's see how that sounds. Let's give it a listen. Conscience phase two, three, two. This may be. I think it's down here on the F sharp. Soon space too fat, so that's the F sharp. That's our third of the key. It's probably less sharp. Soon space, too fat Sounds good. Excuse me, asi. That's a nice solid root. One more time. Let's kind of just move forward a bit. Excuse me, as La D Excuse me, fuzsy. Look how complex this information is. She's bending. She's having some fun with it. She's doing textural differences. I'm not really getting granular here. I think I zapped a couple notes a little closer to their pitch, but only if it's very transparent. This to me here looks like it could be down on that D. We don't want to have a D sharp, especially in this key. So we're gonna take that down to the D just to make sure that root is well supported. Excuse me, fuzzy dream Excuse me if I see. You'd be satle too. Oh. Wow. I'm not too concerned with what pitch this is. It's just gestural. Say that ten times fast. So this is our Melodynee. We've auto tuned this section. For now, we're really only concerned up to that point of this, Wow, right? So we're going to kind of just put a cut there. I'm even going to just sort of let's do this. Let's duplicate the raw lead. Let's keep this with the Melodynee. So we'll call this raw lead Meldine. In case later I want to go back and fix anything up. I'm going to turn that off. You'll see up here, I've just sort of turned that channel off. So this duplicated channel, I'm going to get rid of the gate for a moment. This would be tuned up to this point, right? All this stuff is tuned. This we're not even concerned with. We're not going that far into the song at this point. So what I want to do is right click, raw lead, bounce track in place. And what it's going to do is take all the auto tuning and bake it into the wave file. So let's bounce the track in place. Might take a couple seconds, might even take a minute or two if you're working with a slower computer or a bigger file. But now, boom, Melodynee is gone, and all that auto tuning we did is now baked into this wayfle. Now, we're going to bring back in the gate as the second half of what we talk about here. Oh, I should also have mentioned, if there's some timing issues, you can play around with that as well, too. This is the pitch tool is the main one you're going to use, but you can also use this time tool here. And the time tool allows you to take beginnings and ends of notes. I'm holding Alt so that things aren't snapping into place. It's more sort of free I don't play around with timing too too much unless I'm doing harmony stacks. And even then, quite frankly, I use the warping within Ableton because I can see all the wave files and visually see how I'm warping them to line up with each other. There's also software like Vocaline where you can run a bunch of different harmonies into it, and it'll square up the rhythm of all the harmonies to one main harmony. So you fix the timing of one part and everything else gets fixed down the line. I've always done it by hand, but I wanted to mention it's a piece of software you might want to look into. Timing issues, use the time tool, pitch issues, use the pitch tool. But for now, those are the two main tools that you're going to want to focus on to get your timing and your pitch in place. So back over to this raw lead that we have auto tuned. We can see huge volume fluctuations between a section like this and a section like this. Now I want both parts to come through. What I'm hoping to zap out are these little sort of utterances, these little lip separations or sometimes breaths. Sometimes you want to keep breaths. Sometimes you want to get rid of them. I usually talk to the singer and ask, how many of the breaths do you want me to keep? Do you want me to keep 100%? Do you want me to get rid of the obvious ones, or do you want no breaths? And sometimes they'll say, That's up to you, and sometimes they want to have some input. We're going to use a gate to get rid of this. That's not how I usually do it, to be clear. I don't even really usually gate vocals just because I'd rather go through, listen to it, be very well acquainted with everything that I'm zapping out and everything that I'm keeping us sometimes those can be intentional effects. So we'll bring in our gait. Here it is. First thing we want to do is set our threshold so that everything above a certain volume is heard, everything below a certain volume is not. Let's loop this little section here. Control L. And if I bring that threshold down all the way, we can hear that little lip separation. Let's bring up the threshold. Until we can't quite hear it. Now, the other thing we want to set is the return. And the return is basically once the gate is turned on and we're letting the signal through, when does the gate return close? When does it close back off again? What I would recommend is that you take a dynamic section, something like this where there's some clear differences in volume. We have, like, a loud, a medium, and a soft, and you're going to adjust the return by ear so that it flows and it sounds natural within this. It's sort of like release on a compressor in that it's a bit of a feel thing. So we'll go through, and we're playing with the return too. Oh. Ah. See. This got cut a bit short here. Ah. Ah. Right? So the return all the way down sounds terrible. They're returning all the way up. Weren to hear that whole thing. Oh. Oh, I want to make sure none of that is being cut off, but as low as I can go here. Oh. Oh. That feels like it's being cut. Oh. Right around there sounds pretty good. So just to make sure that this is set properly, we've only used this little part here, mostly because it's very dynamic. But let's listen from the beginning and see that the gait feels like it's working properly. I'm not adjusting the attack. 3.5 milliseconds is fine. It's working fairly quickly. The hold and the release, you might want to change this, depending on the phrase, you could even automate these. This is where things get a little bit tough to dial in perfectly. It's going to depend on is your vocalist singing quickly? Are they singing slowly? Is it a rapper? Is it pitched? All this kind of stuff? Could make a difference. So I'm just going to keep it as the stock settings for now and change things if I need to. He, am. Un prepared. Okay, so some things are being cut out here. Hello there om. He Hello, there, om. Unprepared. So I just dialed the threshold down a bit in the return up a little bit, just to err on the side of caution and let a little bit more of those phrases through. Hello, there, om. Un prepared. I'm gonna bring the release up a little bit. If it's too low, it's gonna feel like it's clamping quite a bit. I want it to feel all very natural, so we're gonna bring up the release a little. Hello, there, om. Unprepared. And then all this stuff, if there's any amp noise, if there's any background wind sounds or truck sounds or whatever there is, you'll see this gate is clamping down. Give a look again. Kid. Alright. Do you see it here? This is when it's reducing Uh significant amount. Ooh, don't like the sound of that. Okay, so let's listen to that. Oh, Nick. Let's play around the attack a little bit here. Huh. Next. I'm going to dial it down to one. I want it to be a little bit more responsive. There's kind of this, as opposed to more glottal sort of sound, I think is what you'd call it. But it sounds like this with the attack down to one. Again, I'm gonna play around this threshold a bit more. Expect unexpected Noh, unexpected Noctk Conscience face to fa Ah. So you can see here the threshold is, like, significantly below. Any of this gray information. Gray information is the same as this information up here. The main thing I'm trying to do right now is in between phrases, create silence. I'm not trying to gate in between all of her words. If you are trying to do that, that's where the attack hold and release are going to be really important to dial in properly. Fast attack, fast released, and a relatively quick hold is going to get that a bit more nimble between. But I want it to be kind of like this slow gelatinous thing overtop where it's not really affecting the vocals so much as they're happening, just little mouth noises, little utterances, and if there's any silence between, we've made it from almost silent to dead silent. So, again, I don't really use gates for the most part. If I do, I'm very light with them, and I'll pair that with going through and listening to each phrase and zapping things out by hand. Sometimes I'll also take a breath and just lower the volume of the breath. Maybe I want it there as a convincer. I mean, this is more and more important as we move towards AI. Because we want to make sure that we're doing things that feel human, that feel like little convincers in the mix. But maybe the breath is just too loud and it's distracting from another instrument. So we just bring that breath down a little bit in volume. So I like to have a lot of control. With a gait, sure we can bring the volume of the breath down. But what if the next breath is a different volume and it's bringing it down 4 decibels the first time and let's say 4 decibels the second time, it's one of those things where you won't have as much control on the macro side of things, on the overall vocal part. But in this class, we are going to keep the gate on, and I'm going to show you how I would just sort of go through each phrase and zap out certain things by hand. In fact, I would even probably start with something kind of like this where I'm highlighting this area and then doing a Control E to cut out everything before and then, in this case, we can zap that pretty close here. This is kind of redundant cause the gates are already doing this. If I hit A, I can go into my fades, and I would also do a subtle fade on each side of this as well, giving a listen. Hello there. Preparaked. Yeah, I'm not affecting any of the tail here. You want to make sure that you're not encroaching in territory that is still musical. We just want to have a bit of control here. So here we have unexpected no. So here's a breath right here. But I think it's fine. It's not too loud. It's not overpowered. We're okay there. I've created another cut here. This breath? Cut. Cut. That's actually not making it through the gate. Go. I'm okay with that, but either way, we're actually just gonna zap it. So again, kind of redundant, but at the same time, I want to show you a few solid ways that you can go about this. We're here. I'm going to give a listen to this spot. Yeah, the mouth separation. I'm not a fan of that, especially with my own voice. So I'm assuming singers feel the same way. Breaths to me, are a bit more musical. They're a bit more forgiving. Again, we're just creating some simple fades. So continuing on, let's listen to what's going on here. E. Now, the gates getting rid of that. Excuse. It could be considered a musical breath. Again, for the sake of control, for the sake of this course, I'm gonna zap it out. But that is a breath that I might decide to keep in. It's just a nice solid. Especially if it's in time. If it's in time with the song, it almost creates these little white noise sort of sweeps, which I use a lot in electronic music. So there's almost something kind of musical about those if they fall in time. Continuing on. You'd be unsafe. Now this got through the gate. You can see that for us to zap this out, we were compromising some other areas in terms of the way the gate was turning on and off. Now, I'm not saying that the gate can't be fine tuned perfectly for this vocal part, but I don't like fighting with gates. It's something that I've come to very much dislike. So we're actually just gonna zap this out. You have another fade here. Fuzzy. You'd be set up too. There's something wrong here. Yeah, the gate's catching it, but again, I don't even want the gate to have to do anything unless it absolutely needs to. So again, slightly redundant. We're doing kind of the gates work as well. But it might just sort of tighten up some of those sections between words where we're not going totally silent, but we're just sort of controlling the sort of bounce, the pulse. Let's see what the gate is actually doing. Let's listen from this point here. Hi. And we're looking to see when it's reducing volume, by the way. That's the orange bar that you'll see down here. Give a listen, take a look. Let's go for it. Hello there, m. Unprepad. Right here. I zapped out any little bit of almost silence and made it silent. So Watch Tom. Right there. Boom. The om. Unprepad. Alright, doing its job is expected. Hmm. Let's listen to that. Unexpected. That's fine. Preeck Welcome. Now, she has this at the end of this phrase. Come. I might consider doing, like, a long fade on that. Oh come. I probably want to hear that with the context of the mix, and we're not there yet. Quite often, mixing vocals with the context of the mix is super important. You'll see a lot of videos where people are like, Don't mix individual channels. Always mix in the context of the song. We're going to mix the individual channel, and then later we're going to mix it more into the song. So we're kind of taking a hybrid approach. But with something like vocals, where the whole song is anchored around, I don't like mixing the vocals from step one in the entire mix. I'll polish, and then I'll mix it into the mix from there, if that makes sense. So you'll see some videos that really fight this sort of approach of just starting with a track soloed. There's nothing wrong with it, but you need to make sure that you're not doing everything soloed and then just unsoloing and hoping it's going to sound great. Some granular detail, some soloing of tracks is fine, but you want to be generally mixing in the context of the whole mix, especially in Mono. I digress. Let's listen to this again. What if I just zap that out? Let's see. Welcome. Sounds a little artificial. Come. Welcome. That sounds fine for now. I think I might just keep that sound. Come. No, there's a squeak in there, too, if you listen. Wow. There's this little squeak is, so we definitely want to get rid of that. Maybe something like that. Yeah, I'm fine with that for now. Conscience Phase two f two. So keeps doing a little bit of stuff between some of these words here and here. You can even see there's something happening here. There's a little bit of a waveform, so it's zapping that out. A D. I'm gonna cut this 'cause this is where our chorus starts, boom. And a bit of a longer fade here. Now, something worth mentioning is I do tighter fades at the front end of a waveform and longer at the end, because people are usually coming in pretty abruptly, but they're coming out of the phrase with a bit more of a tail. Maybe a breath, maybe some sort of little vocal fry, whatever it might be. Either way, I do longer fades on the back end and tighter fades on the front end. Us. Excuse me, fuzzy. Dream Excuse me if I sing. You'd be sad too. Ah Alright, so actually, that sounds fun. Now Ooh, cool. So this part wasn't auto tuned. I didn't actually mean to keep this in, but we'll keep it there. Let's listen how bluesy this is. Do you want to autotune a blues vocal part? Not really. But in the moments when it's a little less bluesy, a little more pop or rock, a little more straight ahead, not bending between notes and being affected in fun bluesy ways, those are the sweet spots that you want to autotune and you won't sort of encroach in the territory of destroying the rawness of the blues. So this class was kind of a two for one. We talked about auto tuning and gating. Along with gating, we also kind of talked about just cleaning up or prep the vocal part by cutting out sections between phrases. Let's listen to it in the context of the mix. I promise you, it's not there yet. There's a lot of processing that still has to happen, but we're gonna be slowly getting closer as we go. Turning off any other vocal parts. It sounds like this. E prepe. Now, first of all, it's quite loud. I'm going to turn it down a few decibels. This isn't doing any crazy mixing, just trying to blend it in a bit more. No prechet well Excuse me. Excuse me. So, it's sounding right in terms of what we've done so far. It's sounding muffled, though. There's times where it's too quiet and other times where it's too loud. It sounds like it's recorded inside of a cardboard box. Like, we haven't put it in a room yet. So there's a lot of stuff that we're gonna have to do moving forward to get this to fit into the mix. But that being said, we're not hearing any unnecessary breaths that we don't want, lip separations, things are feeling tuned. We're ready to move forward. In our next class, we're going to keep things much more simple, much more quick. We're going to be talking about cutting below the fundamental. What does that mean? How do we achieve it? I'll see you in that next class. 5. Cut Below the Fundamental: Oh, I don't even know to play for you. Alright, let's have a little mini class this time, as opposed to the big double class like the last one. We're gonna talk about cutting below the fundamental with our EQ, let's jump in. So after you've tuned the vocals, if they need it, and you've done some gaiting and treating so that you're getting rid of any unwanted sounds, you're going to go ahead and you're going to pull in an EQ. In Ableton, I'm going to recommend EQ eight, but you can go with something like a fab filter EQ or isotope EQ. If you have the extra money, the extra plug ins. But for now, we're going to go more simple. Let's listen to these vocal phrases and watch the lower end of our E Q. We want to see what the lowest pitch is. Now, keep in mind, I'm not doing this on the entire song right now. So you might even want to just listen to the whole song and see, when does she hit her lowest note. We want to find that fundamental on the lowest note, and then we're going to cut below it. So first, we're just listening. Excuse me but Hey. Excuse me. So she never really gets below 250 hertz. I was kind of trying to draw squares as we were seeing rectangles as we see this fundamental pitch lower. If you weren't able to catch it, just take a look at the lowest spike. I'll try to highlight it. He there, pop dream. Now, the second harmonic of her voice, the second bump is much more exaggerated than the first. That could be her voice. That could be the microphone. That could be room. But one way or another, we're seeing the fundamental as that lowest spike. I'm going to set a cut off at 220 hertz. I'm playing it a little bit safe because it's going to start to roll off some frequencies just above. I may even want to consider bringing the up just a little bit to compensate, but we're cutting out all that little garbage information that we were seeing before. Just take a look at how many big blobs there are down here. It's pretty it's pretty intense. So take a look. In pre you want to get more surgical with it, feel free. You can do different types of E Q settings so that your cut off of these low frequencies can be more extreme or more subtle. He prep. Some people will talk about phase issues when you're doing these more steep cuts. It's not something that generally you have to worry about. There's full debunking videos on YouTube about these cutoffs causing phase issues. It really has to do, I think, if you're using a non linear phasy or something, don't worry about it. It doesn't really matter. These are all little micro hairs of inconvenience. It's really still going to sound fine in the context of the mix. I've got a little bit more steep, but I've also given it a bit of a cue, a bit of a bump to compensate a little bit for what we're missing down below here because we are cutting out information down below, and sometimes even though it's a steep roll off, it'll roll off a little bit of that low end. So we're just sort of compensating to keep it a little bit flat or even slightly exaggerated upwards. But it's all very subtle. Give a listen, and more importantly, watch what's happening down below, you're not going to see much activity at all. He. Prep. It looks pretty great. Now, this is a digital approach where we've gone pretty surgical. If you're going for a more sort of analog approach within this digital environment, you might want to consider something a little bit more like a shelf, where you're shelfing things down below, not even fully getting rid of that information. Like, I'll turn this EQ off. Watch what happens down here. We' still gonna have info. Prep. So that's going to be a bit more subtle. And then, even from there, you could choose to sort of roll off the extreme extreme lows. So you might have something that looks a bit more like this if you're going for a more analog approach where everything isn't surgical. But if you're really trying to go for control, which in some ways, I am and in some ways, I'm not. It's a blue song. We don't want too much control, but it wasn't recorded in a perfect environment. So I need to sort of unwind some of the issues that happened as a result of recording on NSM 58. Okay, so again, we have something that looks like. Prep. Alright, so we've cut out that low fundamental. You're probably noticing here there's a lot more EQ activity. Watch one more time. Here. And in the next couple of classes, we're going to make some EQ decisions to smooth things out to equalize the tone a little bit further. So it's a simple concept. Cut below the fundamental. Listen to the entire song or use Melodynee to see what that lowis note is and where it is within the song, and just cut below it. You can cut very gentle using something like a shelf. You could also do something like a relatively gentle, low cut or high pass filter, or you can get a little bit more aggressive like I have within this session. Really, it's up to you how much you want to clean things up and how gentle you want to be with your effects overall during this process. In our next class, we're going to equalize the tone using an equalizer. We're going to continue in this same environment, but I wanted to give this particular EQ move its own class because it's very important. I'll catch you in the next class where we equalize the tone. 6. Corrective EQ: I have energy to play for you. So let's get talking about corrective EQ and how you can use it to improve the tonal balance of your vocals. In this class, we're about to equalize the tone of Chloe's voice. I'm not too concerned with boosting at this point. I'm not trying to colorize the tone yet. We're going to do that more later. For now I want to control the tone that's going to be running through compression and saturation. Now, for the record, you can start this process with saturation pretty early on. You can put in saturation later. This is a hill that some producers die on that a vocal chain has to be set a very specific. Showing you the way that I like, but I also change it up from song to song. Sometimes some of these elements aren't needed, and sometimes the genre is going to affect how you go about this process. Putting a saturator earlier in the chain means that these moments where she's singing very loud, which right now is not controlled is going to really saturate the sound, and it's kind of already happening with that mic. So by sort of equalizing things out a little bit and putting a saturator which is basically light distortion later on, there's a bit more of a balanced tone going into that saturator. Anyway, I digress. I just wanted to mention you're going to see some things online where people say a vocal chain has to go this way or has to go this way. I'm showing you my way. It gives me good results, so trust the process. Let's get focused on some gentle cuts and maybe some boosts as we equalize the tone of Chloe's voice. Let's jump in. So as I mentioned in the last class, there's quite a bit of buildup around this one K territory. What we want to do is sort of smooth things out. So we're seeing things generally around this zero line. You're going to see a little bit more of a roll off happening here towards the top end, and you're going to see a little bit more activity happening down on the bottom end. And this is even true with how pink noise is going to look on an EQ. Let's bring in EQ eight onto some pink noise. This might be a bit loud. It's negative 6 decibels. It should be fine. Give a listen, make sure you brace yourself. It might be a little bit annoying sounding. Alright, so we're seeing quite a bit of activity even up to this six down here. There's sort of some grumbles happening up around, like, 3 decibels. That sort of halfway mark up around here. Things sort of balance out right around here so they're right on the line, and then they roll down. I'm not saying our vocals have to look exactly like this, but if pink noise is balanced, then our vocals can take some tips from pink noise and how it looks on this particular EQ. Watch one more time. It looks like this. Level, subtle bump, big bump. Roll off gradually. So I'm going to use that as a little bit of a guide to see where there might be some extremes happening in her voice so far. Let's give a listen. Hello there um and prepare k. So I'm going to pull down a parametric band around here and another one around here, just to start to kind of tame some of these frequencies down a bit. Hello, the m. Un pre pad. Hello, um. Un pre pad. Hello, um, prepare n. That generally looks okay. There's still some spikes on certain words which we can fix later with dynamic EQ. But you can see there's quite a bit of mid buildup in her voice here. Hello there, Rom. Also, the roll off up top is coming down quite steeply. I might want to consider adding a bit of a boost. I'm going to add more boosts later, but a bit of a boost to pull that air up a little bit. Air is going to be more way up here. Let's say air and high end. But again, there's quite a bit of S happening. The sibilance is also going to be exaggerated. So it's kind of like fixing one thing to cause a problem in another area, but that's okay. We're going to deal with the Ss later. Let's give a listen. Hello. Ram and prepaden naked. Without the EQ. Hello there op. With hello there, om. So we have thinned out her voice quite a bit. There's not as much of that low sort of muffled pillow effect over her voice. I'm not saying that we want to thin out the voice, but we've thinned it out, I think, enough that it feels relatively balanced. One more time, let's give it a listen. Hello, there, om tree. With the mix. He om. Are. So her voice lost some of that low end, so it's sitting a bit lower in the mix. I'm going to bring the volume up a little bit. Let's give it a listen again. Hello. Pre. It's coming along. So we were able to find some problem frequencies. I was doing this kind of visually. You could also do this the old fashioned way where you're just really listening deeply, but we could hear that pillowy effect right out the gate. I mean, I could. I don't know if you could, but it was all kind of like this a little bit. So after we cut out everything below the fundamental, we were able to sort of find where that issue was. Take a listen if I boost number four here, this parametric band. He He. There's that buildup, right? Hello there, pump, prep take. Let's also consider that we've brought this down, but this fundamental frequency is still below the secondary frequency. So we might also want to consider doing a gentle boost. Hello, there, pump. Prep take. Just so that they're a bit closer, this will smooth out as we do more processing. But we're trying to make sure that, even though this looks kind of wonky and kind of extreme, there's quite a bit going on with this EQ, but just watch what's happening around this zero line. Hello there prep. Everything looks fine, except for what's going on here. And if I bring this down anymore, it's gonna suck the life out of the vocals. So we need to use some dynamic EQ to help us out a little bit more. So, again, in this class, we were equalizing the tone as much as we could. There were some boosts only based on the fact that we were missing some frequencies with the microphone. There were some cuts because there were some buildups. It could be proximity to the microphone. It could be the microphone itself or the room she's in. But we only did boosts and cuts to try to equalize the tone. We're not coloring it too much at this point, but we're making some gentle moves, and I think we're that much closer. In the next class, we're going to add a dynamic EQ. I'll see you there. 7. Corrective Dynamic EQ: No, I don't even have not to play. So let's get talking about corrective dynamic EQ, making sure that those moments that build up a little too much in the frequency spectrum get dealt with in that moment. Let's jump in. Now, there's a couple ways that we could do this. I think some beginners might be tempted to bring in something like multiband dynamics, which is a multiband compressor, and it does allow us to see these moments of build up. Like, if we just listen. Hello. There, pump. Pre Looking at this mid band here, you can see it start. The Way up in this little sort of rectangular area here, and then it kind of floats around the bottom of this area. That also reflects what we're seeing here in the EQ. Hello, there, pom. So it's up here, hello, there and it pulls down. Hello there, pom. Right? So we could squash that down. He We're just looking at the blue, not that little orange top part. The orange top part is showing you what the volume was. The blue is showing you how it spiril um, hundred. So to give you the same visual of the EQ, if I throw one after, now take a look at what this multiband compressor is doing. Um, hundred pay. So, you know what? For all intents and purposes, that seems to be working pretty fine, but it might also be squashing some low or higher content that's still within this wide range. It's probably, so it's 2.51 20, so it's a here to here. This is the area that it's considering looking at and squashing when it gets over built up. We're not being too heavy handed with this, so sure, if you want, you can do a little bit of light multi band compression, but I'm more focused on using dynamic EQ. Let's keep this here and just turn it off. We might bring it back later. I'm going to bring in the ozone nine dynamic EQ. Now, I have ozone ten. Ozone nine ozone ten. Dynamic EQs going to work very similar. So giving a listen here and watch it. There, um. There's that problem frequency around 600 hertz. So let's pull things down a little bit wide and not too wide. And we're gonna watch this meter right here, and we're gonna want to pull this threshold down so that the amount of this pulling down is sort of balancing out what we're seeing visually and what we're hearing. Let's give a listen and take a look. He there, um. Ta prete So there's times where up around one kilohert there is too much buildup, but it's not as much as down around this 800 Hertz area. So I'm gonna pull up to one K, and I'm also gonna pull this down here. I mean, I might flip these. Let's keep the numbers in check. Three's down here. Fours over here. Watching four. He prep. We had the gain reducing. We're just doing some gentle gain reduction. And then here He there, pump. Pre fake. That's looking a lot more balanced. Let's bring in your standard EQ 81 more time and see what's happening after all this dynamic EQ. He there, pump. Prep. I might go a little bit more. I don't Like this doesn't have to be perfect. We're just trying to smooth things out a little bit here, so our compressor and saturator later have a healthier signal to deal with. Here. We might even want three areas, 'cause she comes in really hot right around this area. Let's actually loop this little area here. Just this really small section here. Hit. Listen to her voice. Han hand hand hand hand he Let it run through a little bit. There unprepared. Unexpected. No prechected Welcome. The only other thing I might do here is it does feel a little clamped down. Like, I'm hearing some of that compression. So I'm gonna click this little triangle here and open up some of the attack and release settings and just open up the attack a bit more. Like, let's go 18 milliseconds, letting a bit more of the transients poke through. And I might even do the same thing here. Let's bring that up to, like, 14 or so. Let's give it listen. Hello. There prepared. That's looking pretty balanced. And again, let's watch it in the original sort of visual atmosphere. Acted prechet Welcome. Say that's looking a whole lot healthier. We're going to be able to run this through some other effects now that are getting a nice balanced signal, relatively speaking, and that we're going to be able to work with our compressors and our saturators and our desers and all that kind of stuff with a bit more accuracy. So speaking of desers, we're still in this sort of corrective state of things. We're trying to correct things so there's no garbage below that fundamental frequency. We're trying to balance out the tone generally, and we're trying to find moments where that balance is disturbed and then in that moment, using dynamic EQ or maybe multiband dynamics, hold down those over exaggerated moments. Now, the Ss still have to be dealt with, so we're going to do that using a DS. That's it for this class on corrective dynamic EQ, but we're not done. We're going to work with a DSR next, which in its own right is basically a dynamic EQ specifically set to deal with those intense Ss. So we're going to talk about DSRs in the next class. I'll see you there. 8. De Essers: No, I don't even know to play for you. So in this class, we're going to talk about DSRs, taking those harsh S sounds and bringing them down a bit so they're not quite so intense. This, in its own right, is sort of a form of dynamic EQ or multi band compression. Sometimes they use some AI technology to solve these sort of issues, but we're going to jump in and see how we can use a basic DSR to help us tame those harsh Ss recorded on this SM 58. Let's jump in. So for the record, Ableton does have its own built in DSR. Up in the search bar, I'm just going to type in ESS, and you'll see here DSR pops up. We're going to pull that in. I'm going to get rid of this multiband dynamics that we saw before. And we're working with the basic compressor set up in a way where the side chain filter is making it so that only the highest frequencies are pulling in. In this case, everything above 6 kilohertz will be pulling into this compressor. I don't DS using this compressor. I'm sure it'll be fine, but I tend to use something a bit more high end like a UAD DSR. The reason for this is that I find that you can use five different DSRs on the same vocal part, and you get pretty wildly different results based on how the algorithms and the internal structure of that VST works. But for now, to keep things simple, let's work with the Ableton DSR. This was not what I used in the original recording, so just something I wanted to mention straight up the gate. So let's take a look at what we have here. Let's find a moment where the Ss get pretty harsh. Hello there Rom, and prepare it. Oh, she went through a whole line with no S. Unexpected. Ooh. Expected. Spect. Now, I don't want to just isolate the S all by itself, and then deal with the S, 'cause there's no context of how it sounds in a phrase. X. So let's take unexpected. Expected, expected. It's going to drive me crazy if that's not kind of in time. Expected expected. Expected. Feels a little bit better. Okay, so we want our attack, no matter what DSR you're using, to be pretty quick, 0.02 of a millisecond. As soon as that S starts to be heard, it's going to start to clamp down. The release, you could set that to something like the BPM, where you do some math to figure out what release works best. This is ultimately going to be something that you want to set sort of by feel. We're gonna start it at 100 milliseconds and adjust it if we feel it's necessary. How much do I want to squash the S once it starts to be heard? This is saying it's going to squash at a three to one ratio. So anything above the threshold as the S gets loud enough to go above the threshold, let's say, from there, it usually goes up a full 3 decibels above. Now it only goes up 1 decibel above. It's squashing it at a three to one ratio. It's like, here it travels through air, and now it's traveling through mud or like let's say, air, fog, water, mud. How thick of the resistance is there for that thing, in this case, to travel or how much ratio do we have as our sound goes above that threshold. So the first thing you'll notice here is that there's always some sort of compression happening. Look at this sort of goldish bar up here. Expected. I don't want there to be compression all the time from this dieser. Now, you can see on the S acted. It's much more, but our threshold might not be set at a very good spot. Let's try pulling up our threshold a bit. Expected. An x, an x, an x, an x, unexpected. Okay, so now I'm barely moving it, and then on the S, we're seeing quite a bit of reduction. Now I'm going to bring up the ratio a bit. We're still going to see. Barely anything here, but watch. Acted. The S is pulling down even a bit more. Acted unexpected. Unexpected. X expect expect next expected. Now, the truth is because it's using a side chain filter and it's using a bandpass filter set to 6 kilohertz, it's actually not 6 kilohertz and above. It's sort of pointed at 6 kilohertz, which is where these Ss tend to be so harsh. So what that means is that within the compressor, it's going to allow the full signal to pass through, but it has this sort of bandpass pointed at 6 kilohertz and it's saying, whenever that area feels or sort of over built up, we're going to reduce the overall volume a little bit. Not just in that area. Unfortunately, it's going to bring down the overall volume of that section. So let's say you have two singers on one track, and I'm singing an S and they're singing a vowel, my S will trigger the compression, so even their vowel that they're singing will get quieter. If you want to just trigger the S all by itself, you could also do this through some dynamic EQ. But generally, I find DSRs tend to work really well for dealing with Ss. I mean, they're DSRs after all. So going through a little bit more, let's give it listen. Expected expand expand expected unexpected, unexpected na Now, it is dealing with the S a little bit better when it's also dealing with some of these other frequencies. But at the end of the day, I think this is about as close as we're going to get with this particular DSR, and it's not even dealing with the issue all that much. There's a lot of s going on in this vocal part. Let's listen with and without. Here's without the DSR. Expand, expect. Here's W. It. Even though it looks like it's reducing quite a bit, I'm not hearing a significant difference. And this was the issue I had. The biggest issue and I mentioned that straight at the gate of dealing with this vocal part is that the Ss were really harsh. So I'm going to use a bit of a more powerful DSR. I'm going to bring in the UAD DSR. And just to be clear, this is just to give some more perspective. Seeing a couple DSRs, you're going to see the common sort of parameters that we're working with. Threshold, when do the Ss get considered to be too loud, and when do we start to clamp down on them? The frequency, again, 6.5 only a little bit higher than what Ableton's DSR was working with. And then this idea of setting things up as a band pass, you can kind of see the shape there or a shelf. I like to air more towards the side of band pass, but you can kind of amalgamate some shape in between a band pass filter and also sort of a bit of a lift so that you're being more sensitive to everything above this region, but also very sensitive to the region. What I'm saying is 6.5 kilohertz is where we're most sensitive, but we're also going to be a bit sensitive above 6.5. So what's cool about this is we can hit solo. First of all, I'm going to have this set to fast. I want it to be quite reactive. And I'm going to pull down the threshold until I see about maybe even upwards of seven dB of DSing. Seven on a lot of other vocal takes might sound very aggressive. On this one, there's lots of S to tame. So we'll see. But let's go into it. It sounds like this. Next acted. Sx acted. Let's exaggerate it. Acted. Sex. You can hear too much compression happening. So let's pull it back. Acted, ex acted, exctedxcted exctedxcted. I could only get away with about 3 decibels of reduction before we're hearing things that are not Ss, also being reduced. So at this stage, I've reduced 3 decibels off of that S. Again, later, I might add, I probably will add more DSRs to retame that S with little stages at a time, little reductions at a time. So if I hit the solo button, give it listen. It's gonna let us hear what it's reducing. So we can zone in to that S right here. Six, x, x. I'm actually just going to make it so it starts with the S and I'm going to deactivate everything after. So we're hearing. And if we go back into our DSR and hit this little solo button, this is the signal that the DSR is hearing. We want it to be as pronounced as possible. So if I move through the frequency spectrum, let's see where it sounds most pronounced. Ooh, actually, closer to eight K, 7.6, we're hearing a lot of that S. So that 66.5 default might be the average of where most microphones have their S built up. But on this mic, with this voice, it's a little bit higher up. If I turn off the solo, I haven't touched the threshold or anything else. Let's see how much we're reducing. It's still about three. That's okay, but we know that we're dealing more with the area where that S is. We're going to be reducing the Ss bit by bit. Because, again, right now, if I was to create more gain reduction, if I was to reduce the S even more, it's kind of bleeding into some other sounds. If I over exaggerate it, for example, let's give a listen. Right, that's already so compressed. So you might even want to consider setting the threshold, not just so you're seeing more activity on the Ss but to rather make sure that you're not affecting the other vocal parts. So if I sort of loop this part, Right around there, it opens up. You can see there's no gain reduction, anything below this point. We start to get gain reduction on something that is not an S. So this is the threshold that I can set it to that's not gonna affect this part of the vocal. This looks pretty loud, probably about a loud as this. Any of the other parts of these waveforms are not going to be touched, but let's just give a listen. Versus. We're still getting a bit of reduction there. I don't want reduction on things that are not Sa. Okay, like 0.2 fine. So let's give a listen and make sure that we're still reducing the S. Oh, the S happened, but there's no reduction. So maybe this width is what needs to be adjusted. Let's bring that up. I'm going to bring it up in stages here. Okay. I'm going. Yeah, I'm going to go kind of heavy handed with that. We're getting about two dB of reduction, which is not a lot, but we're not touching anything else that isn't an S. Hopefully, let's listen to the whole line. Pre check. Oh, okay. So yeah, when she gets loudest. We're seeing more reduction there than we are on the actual S. So some other options that you have are just automating the DSR on and off during those moments of Ss. How annoying is that? So, DSing is one of the things that I find to be most difficult. I already know that we're gonna get a bit of a better sound if we're not going with a shelf, because I want to make sure I'm not touching any airy, really high end quality of her voice. I'm gonna bring it back down to just closer to the band pass. And let's make sure if we are reducing other parts of the vocal in terms of compression, it's not much because we want to make sure the compressor that we use later is doing most of the compression. We don't want to be compressing too much with our DSR on things that are not an S. Let's give a listen. Pretect Well. Well. Well. This already sounds compressed on its own, even without the DSR. So that was kind of sort of tricking my ear a little bit. Now, I also want to mention, yes, I'm using a little Apple earbud. I'd usually be using my focal headphones. But when I have full headphones on, I end up talking too loud, and that disturbs the flow of the videos. Also, I can't have my speakers on cause then you're going to hear that coming through the microphone. So this is a calculated decision. I understand how it looks, but I can still make informed decisions using this. I just wanted to say that as a caveat on the side. So what we can tell is that right now, we need to play around with these three parameters so that we're affecting this S as much as possible without affecting too much of what's happening around it. So just give me a moment, and I'll dial in these settings the best that I can. Reject. Okay, so what I went with was a threshold very similar to what we had frequency, again, very close, kind of like 7.5. I did pull up a little bit more towards leaving the band pass filter and working a bit more with a shelf. I'm seeing more reduction on that S. What I would recommend for this phrase is that because we're getting reduction on the back half, if you listen and watch here, That's good. P check. And then we're getting all this reduction on this area here. So let's just turn off. We're going to automate. So if I hit A for automation, hit the little on off button, I'm going to have the DSR just turned on for this first part and then turned off here. You don't have to, like, turn it on specifically for that S. You could. You could get really granular with this stuff. But I'm going to recommend that you pair your DSR with a bit of automation if you feel like you're in a pickle. Let's give a listen and watch here. Pre jack well. So this might bring up this idea of why don't I just bring down the volume every time I see an S? Just like automate the volume down a bit. But you can see this isn't just automating volume broadband. It's considering, am I automating the volume based on a band pass, based on a shelf, based on a hybrid between the two? Where is it most sensitive? So are there certain parts of the S or S related sounds that are more harsh and need to be tamed? All of this stuff is considered. And you can even use DSRs to help tame hard Ts and other very plosive sounds that might be similar to S's. So again, for now, the way I would probably approach this is just have this turned on for this whole section and then turned off where there's no Ss here, especially because of this part here, where things get built up considerably. You could bring down the volume of this section a little bit more, so that way it's going into the dieser in a way that it's not being affected so much. But if we listen pretect She wants to be belting a bit more there, so I don't want to squash her too much. A compressor will do a bit of that more gently later. So giving a listen and watching and let's sort of refuse these back together, it sounds like this. Prechet Well. It's not perfect, but for this stage of things, it's getting closer. You may want to consider putting two desers back to back. That's another thing you could try out. I like to put the desers spaced out a little bit more within the chain. But if we duplicate this, for example, Even this second dieser still picking up quite a bit of S. What about a third? Now we're kind of starting to get into that territory of everything is being compressed. Like see that little bit of compression happening there? Bring up the threshold a bit. But we're not even really touching the Ss. So maybe two here is the most I could apply to bring down those Ss. So duplicating might give us a better result. But ultimately, if you want the most control, stick with one and the automation that you have turning on and off, have it turning on only during the S. So it would turn off here and here. And then you can get a bit more aggressive with the threshold setting from there. So we have. Now we're up to that like five to 7 decibels of reduction, and we're not reducing anything else around it. So this is a bit of a more separated S. It's a bit easier to automate the DSR on and off. It's not always going to be that way. Let's go through the rest of the phrases and try a similar approach and make sure that we're not being too heavy handed. I think we're okay right now with the amount of reduction that we have, so let's move forward. Was fats. There's an S right here, so again, we'll turn things on giving a listen. Big B. B. That's like 10 decibels. That's gonna be too much. I'm gonna take it down a bit. Even before when it was five to seven, doesn't have to be that much. We can add another dieser down the line. Big. B. That's hitting around negative eight. Still again a little bit on the high end. B. B. And let's listen back here again. That's like 3 decibels, and then this other one's about seven. That's the range that I like. Bio There's a little S at the end. It's a little bit harsh, not too crazy, but we can take our automation and apply that here. Ah. Again, it's a little bit on the high end. Ah. Excuse. Lots of S's in this phrase. The other thing, too, is you can get a little bit surgical with your DSR, because it's not just volume that we want to effect. Sometimes it's tone. So let's give a little listen. Ah, right here, there's a very pointed sort of frequency. Excuse. Excuse. That helps a little bit, but to give you an idea, like, when I was working with this vocal part, I was doing a lot of dynamic EQ and DSRs at all stages. Like, even when I was grouping vocals, I was reapplying it more and more. I can show you right now. I ended up sounding something like this. Excuse me, fuzzy. And that's about as much as I could deal with those Ses before things got too extreme and started to affect other areas. But in the context of the mix, if you listen. Excuse fuzzy. It sounds quite nice. Again, I would have probably recommended that we use a different microphone to record, but sometimes you're stuck with the files that you get, and you have to treat them as much as you can. So our last stage here is just automating the DSR on during the areas where the Ss are more harsh. You won't always have to do this. It really depends case by case how extreme the Ss are, how balanced the tone is going in. If someone goes into a compressor at the earliest stages of recording, then the Ss and the vowels will be closer to the same volume. So it's all circumstantial, but let's go through and automate as required. Excuse. Alright, so we're here and here. Excuse gotten. And here tEcusetEcuse. Alright, so at this stage of things, this is about as close as we're gonna get it with this diester. Excuse. Excuse. So again, we're between negative three and negative seven dB of reduction. More than negative seven, you're going to get a sort of lisp sort of sound. Less than three, you're barely affecting the Ss. So if you have only a little bit too much of an S, maybe you want negative 1.5 or negative 2 decibels. But I find generally negative three to negative seven is the sweet spot for sort of reducing these Ss using your DSR. Fit up. One more phrase to go. Is this the S here? Where's the Yep. Now, do you want to hear the lip sound that I was talking about? Let's go back to this first S here. PPP P. You can barely hear the S at all, so it feels like a bit of a lisp if we go forward. Again, just seeing where it sort of happens more next here, in this case. Use. Cute? It sounds like there's like a tongue getting in the way. So, again, you don't want to overdo the DS. You have to make sure that you're setting your threshold to the right amount. There's a lot of moving pieces happening here. Something that you want to consider is that you might have to use more than one DSR, and you might have to automate your DSR on and off. I wish someone had told me this because I always thought one DSR would perfectly tame all the Ss on every project if I got the settings just right. Sometimes you need more than one, and sometimes it shouldn't even be on all the time. So for now, we've DSed to the best of our ability. We can pop in with more DSRs and way to tame these Ss down the line. Our next two classes are going to be two stages of compression. One, we're smoothing things out so there's not too much variation between louds and softs. And the second, we're going to create a bit of punch and character to the sound. So I'll see you in that next class where we start to shape the sound using a compressor. I'll see you there. 9. Compression Stage 1 (Smoothing): No, I don't even have not to play for you. Up next, let's talk about the first stage of compression on your vocals. What we're trying to do at this stage is make the larger waveforms and the smaller waveforms a bit closer to the same size. It doesn't have to be exact. After all, expression in singing is going to change volume. We just don't want that volume change to be too extreme. So let's dive in and talk about that first stage of compression. Now, lucky for you, this is not going to be a super long drawn out class with tons of detail because the settings that you're going to apply are going to be generally the same. I'm going to use the approach of the 11 76 into the LAA, which are two famous compressors usually put in that order, and I'm going to explain kind of what those two compressors do and how you can achieve the same sound within Ableton. If you want to learn more about those compressors, check out the 11 76 and the LAA. Also, as a side note, if you do like this approach and you ever want to buy some hardware that emulates the 11 76 and LAA look into audio scape and SAM audio STAM, they have a long wait time, but their product is phenomenal. Now, you've probably seen these compressors before in different tutorial videos, maybe on YouTube. If you haven't, these are the two compressors that we're going to use as a bit of a model for our two stages of compression. Now, this bottom one, the LAA, we're not worried about for the sake of this class, so I'll close it. I'll turn it off. What we're focused on is this 11 76. It has a very fast attack time. It's down to microseconds. The range varies from 20 microseconds, all the way up to 800 microseconds. So it's a very fast compressor, and that's what it's meant to do. It's meant to say, Okay, as soon as a signal hits me, I want to clamp down on it, but if something isn't loud enough, I will leave it untouched. As a result, the larger blobs get squashed down a bit and the smaller blobs, waveforms, don't get touched at all. Now, when we raise both of those up together, amplitude of the larger waveform is back to where it was, and the smaller one seems a bit more loud. Now, usually, all the way to the left is going to be the fastest attack that you would have on a compressor, and all the way to the right would be the slowest. It's the opposite on this compressor. A fast attack time is going to be on the right, as well as a fast release time. Slow release and slow attack will be on the left side. So kind of backwards from usual, but try to watch out for this sort of reversed polarity of these knobs. Generally on vocals, we want a relatively fast attack and a relatively slow release. I say relatively because all of this is in a pretty quick environment. So I set my release to ten, my attack to two, and I'm going to go for about three to 10 decibels of compression. I'm going to go for a little bit more because as you can see, there's some great variance in some of these different waveforms from the louds to the softs. Now, what we can also do is create another audio track. So what we're going to do is on this new audio track, we're going to record enable it and make sure that it's set to resampling, and we're going to solo our lead vocal. Now we're going to be able to see the compression happening on this bottom chain because the information from our raw lead is going to be put down into or resampled into this other audio track. Let's take a look, two, three, four. He prepared. So you can already see the difference of this to this in terms of waveforms versus this to this is significantly closer. So if we also take a look at what's happening on the compressor itself, m and preparen. Up to about maybe negative 6 decibels of compression, I could maybe even go more heavy handed with it. I think I will just a little bit because it's not sounding too compressed at this point. There might be more wiggle room. Now, I forgot to mention your ratio, you're generally going to want to keep at four. You can play around with eight if you're going for a more aggressive sound like on maybe certain genres of hip hop, but I would keep it at four for now. And if you want more or less compression, you need to make sure that you're pushing this input into all of these settings. So it's not like a threshold that you can pull down like usual. It's a matter of pulling up the input and then pulling down the output to compensate. So let's see if we can get a little bit more compression on this vocal part here. Look there, Rom. Prepend So then what we might want to do is turn on the 11 76 and off and make sure that our level is about the same. Our vocal part is over here, raw lead. So let's just take a look. Here's without the 11 76. There um. Prepad. So around negative 12 with it on. The Rom. Un prepad Dad. We're still sitting at around that negative 12. So the good news is our volume is about the same before and after. Now, listen, when she really gets screaming, you'll see that there isn't this huge difference in volume now. Give it a listen. The Rom. Prepa It sounds nice and cushioned. It doesn't sound overcompressed, but it's pulled in nicely. And part of the reason it doesn't sound overcompressed is because we balanced our signal before we ran it through this compressor. So generally, fast attack, slow release, four to one ratio, and about maybe, in this case, five to 10 decibels of compression, which is a bit more heavy handed than you might expect. But again, it depends on the vocal part. I pull in Ableton'sompressor and turn off our 11 76, let's try to achieve the same sound. We have our four to one ratio. The best guess I have for the attack because it's a knob that doesn't have exact values is somewhere around one millisecond. We want it to be quite quick. Release will set to maybe five milliseconds. So that should get us pretty close to what we had in terms of the same settings on the 11 76. And then we reduce until our meter tells us it's about seven to 10 decibels. Sit there, Rom, and prepaed. So there's Ableton's compressor? There, um, prepend it. So once you have your output, making up some of that difference, in this case, about 7 decibels, you'll notice when we turn on the Ableton compressor. The Rom. I'm at about negative 12 decibels when I turn on the 11 76. There, Rom. It sounds very similar, and it's at the same volume. So I'm going to delete the 11 76. We've achieved something very similar using Ableton'sompressor, and we might even want to go ahead and call this something like smoothing. So we're smoothing out the dynamic range a little bit. So we're going quick with our attack at about one millisecond, slow with our release, maybe five to eight milliseconds, and our ratio is at four to one, which is pretty classic for vocals. So here's an analogy I want to give you. Imagine you are to sculpt a statue of a human. And you are given this stone that is a cube. It's, let's say, a rectangular cube, and it has all these blemishes, these little sort of like notches out around the outside, sort of permeating off of the rock. Step one for us is to file away all those blemishes. That's all the corrective EQ and meldine and all that stuff that we did. We wanted this nice rectangular cube to be as smooth as possible because step two is we're now going to use tools to carve out stone in the general shape of a human, like, really generalized. And that is what this first compressor is doing. It is sort of shaving things down into the general blob. But next, we're going to start to chisel away so that we get the image of a human statue kind of coming out of this initial blob that we've created. So we've done all the cleaning up of the rectangular cube. We've shaved it down into the general shape of a human. Our next compressor is about detailing. We're going to shape the sound. We're going to create punch and attack using that compressor. Again, we're going to use something like the LAA as an example for how we're going to achieve that, but we're going to then also do it with an AB of Ableton's compressor, and we will then AB it with Ableton's compressor to show you that you can do this same thing with stock plugins. So let's just go through and listen to a little bit more of the vocals that we have now and then we'll wrap things up. Now, we don't need this other audio track. It was just to show you that things are being smoothed out really well in these differences of volumes. So let's go ahead and delete that and give a listen. It sounds something like a there Rom prepared. Unexpected. No rechecked Welk Conscience pas two Excuse me, Fuzzy Okay, and it goes on like this where it's very controlled. We're almost always compressing some amount, and as she's singing louder, you can see the gain reduction pulling up more. Watch this area versus this area. So we're watching the small waveform here versus the bigger waveform here. Take a look at the gain reduction, which will be down here. Here we go. Two. So is that about here, and then it pushes down to about this spot? So we're always compressing a little bit. We're smoothing things out, and that is stage one of our compression. As I mentioned, stage two of compression is going to be more about detailing, and we'll talk all about that in the next class. I'll see you there. 10. Compression Stage 2 (Shaping): No, I don't even know I know you apply for you. Here we are going into compression stage two. At this point, we're going to be working more on the shape of the sound. We're going to be creating more attack or potentially less attack, but we're going to really work with the transients to dial things in so your vocals sound nice and punchy, but also controlled. Let's dive in. Now, as I mentioned before, we had the 11 76 style compression to smooth things out. Now we're using an LA a style compression to create some punch. Now, this is an optical style compressor which uses optics or in this case, light to determine when the compression is going to kick in. I want you to consider the release setting to be relatively automatic in terms of how it's returning, but the attack is going to be at about ten milliseconds. All LAA units should be about the same, and you'll notice there's no attack or release settings. So straightaway, attack about ten milliseconds. Release is pretty much auto. And then, again, for ratio, consider four to one to be a good starting point, even down to three to one. However, if you're using this as a limiter, I would recommend ten to one or higher. We're going to be using it as a compressor, but I will also say that quite often, the limiter function can sound great on vocals if you're trying to compress a little bit harder. So again, let's record our audio to a new track, and we're going to compare before and after. Now, right away, I wanted to get back to where we were. I actually shouldn't have deleted it in the last class just visually, I think this is going to really help. So let's get back to where we left off. It was something like this where we had a much more controlled unexpected Nojet Welcome. Okay, so that's what we had left off with. Now let's go ahead and compare that with another track. I'm creating a new audio track arming the recording to go to this and again, setting it to resampling. And in this case, we're going to now turn on our LA two A with all the basic sort of metering. I do want to make sure that again, I'm working 3-10 decibels of compression. So your threshold now is basically this peak reduction. You're going to be turning this up to add more compression. We're going to watch our meter. Let's give it a shot. Unexpected. No rechected Welcome. Okay, so around three or 4 decibels to me, sounded like the right amount of compression. When I went too much past that, it ended up sounding very overcompressed. So listen to this. Unexpected. No pre check, we. When I turned up the gain, it did help. I mean, I don't know that we have to limit ourselves to exactly four, but it just started to sound overcompressed. So let's go for a moderate amount of compression. Unexpected. No pre check, dad weme. So let's say 5 decibels of compression. It's sounding really smoothed out, but let's see how it looks different from the only 11 76 style compression from before. Let's give it a go. It sounds something like this. Unexpected. No pre check, dad we the first thing we're going to notice is that things look very similar to before. But there's one key indicator here that things are a little bit different, and that's right at the beginning here. Do you see that we have a little bit more attack happening on this LA a version of the recording? It's easier to see when you're zoomed out. But look at this initial little punch here versus this little guy over here. Now, when a word is more rounded like this one, we're not going to see that punch quite as much. But let's see if we can hear it. I'm going to go between this version, 11 76 only and this version 11 76 style into LA two style. So it sounds like this. Unexpected. Verses Unexpected. No it's just a little bit punchier. It's really subtle, but everything is just really glued together. And this is a classic tail as old as time version of serial compression, one compressor leading to another. They're both doing different tasks. The first one is going to be more focused on smoothing things out. The second one is a bit more focused on shaping. Speaking of shaping, let's try out the limiter, as opposed to compressor setting and see if that gives us much of a different result. We'll record it in again. Here we go. Unexpected. No pre checked. Welcome. I'd say that's even punchier. I don't know that I'm seeing much of a difference from what we had on the compression setting. But again, we can see from here to here there's a bit more of that punch happening. In other areas like here to here, things actually look a little bit more controlled. So we've gained more control and more punch. I actually like the limiter setting on her voice. I think in the initial production of this, I use the compressor setting, but maybe in the future on her voice, I would use this limitter setting. Let's give a listen one more time. Unexpected, not rechecked. Welcome. On second thought, I think the limiter setting is a bit too much on this voice. I'm just hearing that attack being too separated. It feels like this on off happening of there's this transient or attack, and then it's more compressed, and then there's a transient. I want things to feel more smoothed out. Like I'm talking to someone that has a really controlled voice. So for now, I would keep this set to compress, which means that when we're doing this with the Ableton limiter, we'd want to be at, like, three to one ratio or a four to one ratio. So, speaking of which, let's go ahead and duplicate our compressor from before. We're going to call this shaping our ratio, we can keep at four. Our attack, we're going to set to ten, and our release, we're going to set to auto. We want about the same amount of gain reduction, which I think we had about 5 decibels. So let's see if we can achieve that. It would sound something like this. Unexpected noche welcome. Unexpected. No, check. So there's always some compression happening Unexpected. Noche we. I don't think I would do more compression than that. We're at about three to 4 decibels of gain reduction, which we can see down over here. But these two compressors, if I turn them off, so I'll do a control G to group them. I'll turn them off. Give a listen before and after the two compressors. Here's without. Unexpected. No pre check, Dad. Here's W. Unexpected. No pre check, dad weme. It sounds good. It's very controlled. There's some good punch. I think it's a bit aggressive. So I'm going to set this to a three to one ratio as opposed to four to one. And let's keep it listen and see how that sounds. Unexpected. No pre check, dad, welcome. Let's listen to it back in the mix and see how it fits in. Let's go for it. Something like? Unexpected. No pre check. Welcome. Now it's sounding like it's always kind of sitting at the level of the mix or a little bit above. It's not that some words are poking out way too loud, and other words are getting too quiet. It also doesn't feel so muffled now like it did before. So our EQ decisions are getting us in the right spot, as well as the smoothing and shaping compressors. One more way of validating what we've been doing is let's group everything together, turn all the effects off and give a listen before and after. Here's without the effects. Prechet Welcome. I'm hearing a muffled sound. I'm hearing a hard S. Listen again to that S. Next taped. It's loud. And everything is not balanced in terms of volume. There's not much punch to the voice. You turn on all these effects so far and you get something. At Nojected. Well. It's all sounding pretty great that S is still louder than I would like it to be, but we can tame that more down the line. So there it is our two stages of compression. We're smoothing and we're shaping. The first one is meant to make sure that the louds and softs are closer together. The second one is to make sure that the sound is a bit more punchy and has a bit more bite. Next up, one of my favorite effects is saturation. We're going to be adding saturation, which will add subtly, a little bit more compression, but more so slight distortion. Very, very slight, just adding a little bit of fuzz to the vocals. So we're going to talk about saturation in the next class. I'll see you there. 11. Saturation: No, I don't even know I know to apply for you. Okay, let's talk about saturation, how we're going to be able to add a slight fuzz to the vocals, but also smooth out the dynamics even more very subtly. It's a very subtle unit, but you can push it quite a bit, as well, too. It's saturation. Let's talk about it. So, admittedly, I like to use Fab filters Saturn as my saturation tool. It's aptly named Saturn, as a lot of these plugins do when you go to type in saturation, you type in S, A, T, and boom, there's Saturn. It's sort of like transit by Baby Audio and Andrew Huang, where you type in trans as you're going to type in transition and transit pops up to help you with your transitions. So anyway, Saturn is what I usually use. We're going to try that first, and then we're going to try to achieve the same sound with the Ableton saturator. Now, here's where we left off. And I want to mention I've taken the ratio of the second compressor and put it back to four, and I've lowered the threshold a little bit. I do think that in the mix, we were able to get away with a bit more of a compressed sound. So I did change those back. Not huge changes, but just wanted to mention that. So we have. Next step ject Welcome. So it's sounding pretty smoothed out. Let's bring in Saturn by fab filter, and we're going to not saturate the lower frequencies. So we're just going to watch this for a moment. Expected. Now, if I create a band right here, what I've done is separated the fundamental frequency I was seeing here and the upper frequencies. This is at 577 Hertz. I might want to take it a bit lower, but let's take a look to see why I separated right here. Expected Nojet Welcome. So that fundamental will not be touched. If I solo just this low end, give a listen. We have this nice smooth and warm low end. I've taken the drive, which was automatically set up to about I don't know, 20%, and I just brought it right down to nothing. For the upper end, we're going to solo this, and we're going to add warm tape, which I generally keep at either warm tape or clean tube. We're gonna keep warm tape, and we're going to slowly add saturation from my experience, up around this ten to 2:00 area tends to be best. Generally, up around ten is where I tend to sit my saturator most of the time. It sounds like this starting with no saturation up to 100%, so you can hear the extremes. Next to check. Next stop check. Sounds like a megaphone distorting, right? So let's pull it down from here until we're happy with the amount of saturation. Next. C Store jet expected noche. That megaphone effect is lost right around here, so I know that I'm adding some saturation, but not so much that it's greatly affecting her voice. Now, some singers really like this sort of sound like Matthew Bellamy from Muse. Sounds great with that amount of saturation. Chloe already puts quite a bit of distortion on her voice. She has a nice thick voice. I don't need to do too much saturation just enough to give it that little bit of retro sound. So, together with the low end, it now sounds like this. Expected So pet. Welcome. Sounding a bit more retro. Let's take Ableton's saturator. Put that next, and we will A B the two. Now, the way I'm going to do this is a Control G on this saturator and I'm going to create a second chain. This is going to be our clean chain, and it's going to be the low end, and our saturator will be the saturator chain, and it'll be affecting the high end. If I go to Audio Effects and pull in the EQ, let's say EQ eight, we'll put this on clean. We're going to set a pretty aggressive low pass filter down at what was the frequency I chose before? Five something, 577. We'll just keep it the same so the AB is a bit more fair. I'm going to pull this EQ over into the saturator section prior to the saturator and I'm going to flip this so it's high pass. So now we have the low end, which will sound like this. Now, let's just make sure the low end by itself sounds similar to the low end on both units, the Ableton saturator and Saturn. Here's Saturn? Here's Abletons. I don't hear a difference. So that's good. That means our low end is being treated about the same between the two. If I now turn on the EQ ate and saturator for the high end, it sounds like this by itself. Recheck. Welcome. Analog clip is usually where I would put this. As you can see, there isn't a warm tape setting. So already, these are going to be a little bit different. There's, like, digital clip and waveshaper. You can get pretty extreme with this. I wouldn't recommend it generally for voice, but let's do the same thing where we turn up the drive way too much and then turn it down until we're not hearing the effect basically as much, it'll feel like the effect vanishes, but you'll notice there's still quite a bit being applied. That's the amount of subtlety I think we're going for here. Now, we'll try it with the drive all the way up, but 36 decibels is huge. It doesn't quite add saturation the same way as saturn where it really does add a lot of volume. So let's bring our output down about the same amount and try it in a few different stages. So up all the way, it sounds like. Stop check. Very overdone. Let's bring the drive down, the output up. Reject. Well. I actually really like that. It's just touching upon some of the louder parts a bit more, but it's overall slightly saturated. I want to mention this is actually something that a lot of people are going to bring up on YouTube videos, and this is their sort of I will die on this rock, sort of the saturator has to come early in the chain, or the saturator has to come later in the chain. Here's what I want you to consider. If you put the saturator earlier in the chain, when you have those big volume differences, the saturator will feel more distorted on the louder parts and less distorted on the quieter parts. That is always going to be true. What we've done by compressing is the louder parts are now a bit quieter and closer to the volume of those quieter parts. So saturation is being more gentle and gradually affected throughout these volume changes. I like to use the saturator later on, so it's kind of everything's a bit fuzzy, but the odd word that's a bit more extreme pokes out with a little bit more of that saturation. Kind of similar to a vocalist back in the 60s, 70s, when they be in a studio, and when they do sing louder, they're pushing that analog circuitry to distort just a little bit. We're recreating that with saturation. So when someone tells you it gives you that analog fuzz or warmth. I don't know that it's actually adding more warmth. Technically, we're not touching that low end. Remember, that is unaffected, but totally, we are adding a bit of fuzz and a bit of that analog feel to the top end. Saturation when applied to the overall signal can apply a little bit more warmth, and it's also going to smooth out the high end a little bit. Maybe that'll help us slightly with our DSing issue, but ultimately, I think we're gonna have to add a bit more down the line. So now let's give an AB. Here's Saturn? Nectic. Here's our Ableton saturator. Next pact. One more time. Saturn. Act. Ableton saturator?ha. They sound pretty close. I think the Ableton one feels a bit warmer to me if we listen one more time. Expected. Hectic. It does sound a bit more muffled. To me, Saturn feels like it has a little bit more clarity in the upper mids. So I would probably opt to use Saturn. But for this course, we're trying to stick with Ableton stuff as much as we can. So maybe to tame that, we could take the clean signal and cut out some mud just to sort of get rid of some of that sort of pillowiness, that muddiness that we're hearing. So let's listen to that on its own. Feels a bit better. Upper end sounds like. Unexpected. The cool thing is, too, now, we can also go through and push sounds into the saturator more if we want to do it this way. But we can also say, Okay, post saturation, are there any frequencies that I want to get rid of? So if we listen unexpected. No. I don't know that it sounds like it needs much fixing. Right around here, there might be a bit of a buildup. Unexpected. Checed Welcome. Unexpected. J. It's really subtle. I don't even know that it needs this, but I'm going to keep it there just to keep things a little bit more under control. The low end and the high end together, we end up getting unexpected. No prechected Welcome. Alright, and then if we want, after that whole signal, we can then reapply a little bit of EQ. Eight, to not just sort of focus on the lows or highs separately, but just to see the overall signal and to make sure that we're dealing with any new buildups that might be happening. The lows still feel a bit sort of exaggerated. If I listen before and after the saturation, give a listen. Here's before. Unexpected. Here's after. Unexpected. Having some sort of compression in those low mids or just some sort of a buildup. So I'm gonna go ahead and just try to deal with that suddenly. Unexpected. No checked. Welcome. That feels a whole lot better to me. So there it is. There is saturation, a light fuzz that we add to the sound that gets amplified as the sound amplifies. You want more fuzz, push more signal through the unit. It also does some very subtle compression, and it's going to add potentially some warmth to the low end and warmth to the high end. Really, it's going to tame those higher harmonics, those higher frequencies. So it's not quite so harsh, especially if you use the warm tape setting in Saturn. Just for fun, let's see how our new waveform is looking. As we set this to resample. We're going to do the same thing as before, where we record to take a look at how our effects look when printed. Let's give it a listen. Unexpected. No p checked. Welcome. So we can see our punchy compressor working a little bit more with that higher ratio. Things are feeling punchy. Things definitely look controlled. Overall, the waveform could be a little bit bigger. Later, we're probably going to add a little bit amplitude to get that backup. But look at the difference. Look at this punch compared to before. And we can also, if this is too much, we can trim off those peaks but still keep it sounding punchy with things like clippers and limiters. All that is to say things are looking nice and healthy, so we're ready to move forward. Now is the time that we can add EQ to color the sound. We have the dynamics controlled. We have the saturation to put it in whatever time frame we're looking for. Does it sound like it's from the 50s, the 70s? Is it crisp and modern? Now that we have all of that shaped, we can add some colorized EQ. If that's coming up in the next class. I'll see you there. 12. Color EQ: No, I don't even know play for. Alright, now we're going to make some EQ decisions where we're coloring the EQ. This is where we start to get into that more boosted territory. We're going to be listening to the vocals in relation to the rest of the band. We may also go back and make a few small tweaks, whether it be to compression or saturation, but we're now kind of really zooming out, listening to the overall vocal with the entire band. This class is mostly about colorized EQ decisions. Let's jump in. So I'm going to be using the Ableton EQ in this video. To be honest, I would rather use something straight analog or analog emulating just because of the style that we're working within. Sometimes coloring EQ with analog gear or analog emulating VSTs is just more forgiving. There's not as much harshness up on the top end. There can be a little bit more rounded warmth when boosts are created in the low end rather than a muddiness. But just to let you know, I will use the Ableton eight EQ just so we're sort of staying in that Ableton environment. But if you are mixing rock or blues or folk vocals, consider exploring different EQs, as they're all colored a little bit differently. So I'm actually going to use the last EQ eight where I was just sort of slowly sweeping out some of this low end just to balance things a bit. The fab filter EQs have this tilt setting where you can set a node and then basically create tilt. And that's kind of what we're doing here. It's this sort of gradual tilt about halfway through, so there's nothing too extreme. But now we get to add some air, some color, some bite. So let's go through. And one other thing I'll mention is that I will be doing some of the EQing before the saturator and some after. Listen to the difference. If I run a hotter signal into the saturator, it will respond more to boost or to that frequency boost. Whereas if I put the boost afterwards, it'll sound more clean and digital. So even though we're using the digital Ableton EQ, we can get more of an analog feel by pushing into the saturator a little bit. Let's start here just to create some sort of tonal variation. And then here we're going to clean things up in terms of clarity. So let's give a listen where we left off. And again, with the context of the band, Excuse me. Excuse me. God Conscience. Excuse Excuses God be sad too. Ooh. Conscious space. Do. Excuse. So adding a boost around this 3 kilohertz region, a little usually goes a long way. Like if on the digital end, I add something here, like a boost around 3 kilohertz, you'll see it adds quite a bit of earbte so to speak. Give it listen. Space. Do. Whereas, if I do that before the saturator give a listen here. Conto space. Do. It's more forgiving. It's like it's running into the saturator which is sort of squashing down those frequencies a bit. So this is where informed decisions are really important. When people are like, I wouldn't boost around three K more than a few decibels. You can if you're running into a saturator or a particular type of tube compression, maybe. I'm gonna run this a little bit hot, and I just want to play around with this area a little bit here. Canto space. Do spade, tube. Consu space. And I'm trying to pull down right below the point where her voice is really distorted. I want a little bit of that distortion. I'm also pushing a little bit of these higher frequencies in. Again, it's more forgiving going into the saturator. And then I'm trying to pull this air band up on the high end, like 16 kilohertz, way up above where these Ss were giving us issues. Also, there wasn't a lot of super high end recorded into something like an SM 58. So the microphone plays into this. I might even go more extreme here. Let's listen again. Cons space. Bao Excuse. B. Excuse. Fantastic. Now, something else to mention is a nbton these little headphones here. If you click that and then move around a parametric band or a shelf or whatever it is, you can hear just that frequency range. I want to find where her voice feels most present and potentially give a small boost that's really wide in that area. I want you to think of boosting more like wide brush strokes. And when we're cutting, it's more about being surgical. Most of the time, it depends if a microphone is really unbalanced. You might want to sort of scoop out an area that is built up. But generally boost a little bit more wide and cut a little bit more narrow. And if adaptive cue is saying anything, it's also telling us that as we get more extreme, we might want to consider narrowing that band a little bit, although, I'll be honest, sometimes I do some boosts that look pretty crazy. It all depends on the source material. So let's give a listen and take off adapt cue. I'm not a fan of it. Let's give a listen. B. Ah, so this is a great area for her voice, but it's just disappearing on certain words. So in this case, what I would do is bring in a dynamic EQ. I know I'm going outside of Ableton stuff right now that's kind of necessary. Ableton does have some dynamic EQs with, like, Max for Live, but I'm just gonna use this. It's nice and easy PZ. We're going to boost this area, so all of it is louder. Now, I was saying that sometimes it's poking out as being very present. So I actually want to pull those moments down. So the whole area is boosted. In other words, the quiet moments are lifted. But now the loud moments are too loud, so we'll squash them down when this area gets built up. Let's give a listen. You Hey. Hey. Excuse. Is. Good. Alright, and now things don't feel like they have so much low end buildup because we've done little boost on the high end here, as well as here, as well as using this dynamic EQ. If I'm being honest, the Ss are still going to bug me, so I'm going to pull in another DSR. So it might be worth considering trying a different DSR, but for now, I'm just going to use the UAD DSR. Again, it's one that I'm quite familiar. And usually one will do the trick upwards of three spaced out in a vocal chain on different layers. Keep in mind that if something like the backup harmonies also have slightly harsh Ss, then maybe you want to deser on the overall vocal group. Everything runs through this just for some extra light dSing in the later stages. Let's solo this and double check where these Ss are, but we know it's around 7.5. Now, that was not on NS. It was on the word dream. We saw about 7 decibels of reduction on that D. But again, Ts, Ds, certain plosive consonants might also work well with a little bit of DSing just to sort of take away some of their harshness. Let's start this one on the shelf rather than the bandpass filter and see how that feels. Base. Ba. So this is why I don't like Ableton's EQ. We've increased this air band up here at, like, 16 kilohertz, but it's still adding so much more in this area down here. There's something about the high end boosts on Ableton's EQs that to me, just feel a bit digitally harsh. I would love to tap into a different EQ right now. I'm going to create a little bit more of a tilt here just to sort of get out of the way of these frequencies. Z. Pay. Go. I want that air band up, but right now it's only causing more of an issue. So what I'm going to do is just keep this flat. It still sounds fine. She's very intelligible. You can hear what she's saying. I do, like, a little bit of an airy vocal from time to time when I can get away with it. But I think with the mic used and these Ss, I'm probably just gonna have to kind of cut the difference and go for a bit of a warmer tone, which works well in this genre anyway. Gas. Bay us. Okay, so when she says rise, I want you to watch. Right here. So we're watching this spot right here. There's a really harsh frequency right here. What frequency is that? That is, like, eight point something. Let's see if pointing or dieser in that area might give us a bit more precision. And I'm also going to move it more towards bandpass because it was a very particular sort of bump in that area. It's not just overly built up from that area upward. So we'll solo our frequency. And let's just take this area and loop it. Loop. Now, watch what happens as I scroll through the frequencies. You'll notice that sometimes it's triggering more of that compression on the S. That's sort of the sweet spot. So I'll sort of go from this, like, 9:00 to 3:00 sort of dial here. And let's see where we can get the most activity for gain reduction. Interesting. Yeah, right up around that 8.7. And that's what we were seeing also visually on our EQ. Let's give a listen. Yes. Yes. It's still pretty intense. Yes. Like, if I really go extreme with it. Now she has a list. Let's pull it off until she just doesn't have a list. S. S. It's just so we're taming, we're bringing down that S, but it's the quality of the S. It's very harsh and pointed in that area. So this is why the right mic in the right room with the right treatment, all that stuff is very important. Admittedly, this mic sounds great on her voice. It's just the Ss that are a bit of a nuisance. So let's go through and just literally zap that out with a bit of an EQ and a bit of dynamic EQ. Let's get kind of extreme. We're trying to deal with these Ss. Has has, has, has, has, has, has, has, has, has, has, has. Okay, so I'm going to take the threshold up a little bit, in this case, so we're not reducing quite so much. And again, we've got rid of this point for the most part. Yes. But now things from here to here, we're still seeing a pretty good buildup. So this is where we might even want one more DSR. And this time we're going to put it over to the shelf so that we're dealing a bit more broadband. So we're not having a lisp sound, like it still sounds pretty pointed. Let's give a listen. Yes. This, you can see this S is just so hard to deal with. This is why I was working with, like, three or four DSRs before, but for now, we might just have to kind of call it. I'm gonna add a little bit more dynamic EQ, see if we can have a bit more control. But part of it is that we're stuck with the quality of those Ss coming in. Let's give a listen. Excuse. Excuse Thank Okay, so we're about as close as we can get. I'm going to do one other thing here that I think might help. I'm going to pull in Fab filters Saturn, and I'm going to take down the saturation all the way. I'm going to sort of isolate where those Ss are in the top band and try saturating them to see if we can just get a bit of a thicker, warmer version of that S because I think it's a tonal thing, and the DSR isn't going to change the tone. It's just gonna bring down the volume of those Ss. But if it sounds really intense, it's not going to change that tone. So let's give a listen. Let's do another little loop here. Press press press, please, please, please press press press, please, please, please, please, press press press press pasts, press please, please, please, press As, Pat I mean, that's sounding better to me. It's still not gonna be perfect. But at this stage of things, we've done all this coloring of the EQ only to find out that we were limited with what we could add to the top because of something like these Ss. But ultimately, I'm pretty happy with the tone of her voice overall. Just give a listen to it by itself. ContonsPasT theat. Maybe bring down that drive a little bit on the saturator. ContonsPas ContonsPasT thet Yeah, and you can see all these diesters are just doing a little bit. We have fab filter Saturn, doing a little bit of saturation up top to sort of warm up the top end a bit. So one EQ I might recommend you try out is the Siq by sound toys. This is very often free, and it might still be free. But what's cool is it has this little drive feature, and as you push certain frequencies, it will saturate them this is a coloring EQ that I really like to use because it's quite simple. Let's go through just Lupa section and see if we can add a little bit more colorization. So we're going to work with this EQ, because it does emulate a sort of analog, musical sort of characteristic to EQing, where you can get away with quite a bit, and it usually doesn't destroy the sound, really wide boosts, wide cuts. And again, this is an EQ that would be great for colorizing in the later stages. So, listening, it sounds something like this. She fade Excuse me fade Excuse me fade Excuse me. Two. Excuse. So I've brought up a couple DB around 1.5 kilohertz, just to bring out those mids a bit more, as well as the highs and added a little bit of drive. Watch what happens when I add a lot of drive on this. Cancun space To spade It doesn't add a ton of distortion. Like, it feels more like a clean tube sort of setting. This feels too loud now, but again, it thickened her voice a bit. So let's just take the overall channel volume down a bit. Concospace Sounds pretty good. Again, these Ss will drive me crazy, but I think we're getting pretty close. Conti pace fa gosh. Excused. One thing I would consider doing, too, is just sort of cutting out some of these extreme highs a bit, sacrificing the air of her voice, and a little bit of that sort of digital crispness. In this case, I might consider boosting one of the other instrument areas, like maybe drums. So they are the star of the show up here, and then just sort of dealing with those s in a bit more of an extreme way with all the subtle DSRs, but also rolling off some of that high end. Let's kip it listen. Constace Thank Excuse. Thank. Maybe something a bit more pointed like this. Let's give this trance. Z. BTEcusePEcuse. Pay to. So, this does deal with it quite a bit more extremely, and then we were losing just generally some high end to her voice. So I brought out a little bit more of that 3 kilohertz sort of really present area of the voice. Let's listen back with the entire mix one more time and make any other subtle adjustments before we wrap up this section on colorizing the EQ. Let's give it listen. Conscience B Excuse me Bao Excuse me. B. At Sonny pretty good for the most part, I think we're pretty darn close. We can start to affect C AtiExcuse pH. Alright, I think we're pretty close. The Ss are mostly dealt with. Her voice is sounding present. It has a nice sort of drive when she's really pushing her voice. I think we are colored in a way that works really well for this song, but she's not placed properly in the mix yet. A couple classes from now, we're gonna make sure she sounds like she's in the right room with the band. But the next class, we're gonna get a little bit more creative. In the next class, we're going to talk about layering artistic effects, like something like a vocoder or isotope vocal synth. A few different things that I often pull into my sessions. They're not Ableton plug ins. I'm going to sort of give you the caveat of that right now. But these are some of the best of the best artistic plug ins when it comes to playing around with vocals. I'll catch you in that next class. 13. Artistic FX: Oh, I don't even have not to play for you. Alright, let's get adding some artistic layers to Chloe's voice. We're gonna be working with a Vocoder, Isotopes vocal synth, as well as Microshift and Little Altar Boy by soundtys. Let's jump in. And I want to also mention this is not something I would be applying to folk or rock or blues most of the time, but I want to make sure I cover lots of bases within this course. So let's get experimenting. Let's get artistic. Let's jump in. What I've done is I've duplicated Chloe's vocal part, and you can see we have all these effects here. I've duplicated it, but then I also right clicked and went bounce track in place, which took all of those effects and baked it into the wayfle. You can see the wayfles do look a bit different from one another, the thickness happening here versus up here. So this is all of our compression and EQ decisions. There are still some rogue peaks that I would probably deal with through a bit of clipping or limiting. We can do that a little bit later, but right now we are in a good ballpark. So I've duplicated and I've bounced track in place. I've also created a synth part. So Control Shift T to create a mini track, and then you're going to bring in analog by Ableton. So if you go into instruments, you're going to be able to find analog right at the top. What you're going to do is turn off oscillator two, so it's not yellow. You're going to make sure you're set to a sawtooth wave. You can play around with that, but I like sawtooth for Vocode click in this gray area here and then square up any sort of ADSR setting, so you just have a nice sort of part of a square. And same thing over here. Initially, it's going to look something kind of like this, maybe with a little tail. Just drag that in, bring that up. And now when I play the synth, it's going to immediately start and then when I like, Oh, it will immediately stop. Alright, so this is a really clear electronic sort of sound. I have this and then I'm muting it. Unless I'm trying to figure out what the key is and what the chord progression is, in this chorus, I think it's D major. G major, C major D major. So it's kind of in the key of D major, but the C major chord is a little out of key, but we hear it all the time in rock music even back to the Beatles. So I'm going to mute that keyboard part, and now I'm going to add my vocoder under audio effects to my duplicated vocal part. I'm going to set the carrier to external, and then you're going to set the audio from to your keys. Voc keys. Here they are. Let's give a listen just to this by itself. I'm going to solo the duplicated vocal part. Scars Okay, and at this point, I'll bring in the backup vocals, as well, too. I've done the same thing. I've duplicated them. I didn't actually consolidate it. I didn't bounce track in place because there was no audio effect. So listen to these backup vocals. Little, unset up. I've added very light autotune. I did no timing correction. They're not in the right room right now. Like, I need to put in the right reverb. But even if I just sort of throw something on, like Little, set up. Sound great. These girls harmonize so well. So I haven't done much to this track. No consolidating needed. I just duplicated it and threw on a vocoder with all the same settings. It's still taking information from the vocal keys. And in this case, you might want to duplicate the keys if you want multiple things happening with different vocoders. But this outlines the main progression. It's just as though the backup singers are finishing the line for Chloe. So now it sounds like this. Fascinating. Then when we add that back with the original vocal parts, it sounds like Excuse me. I see. A little unsettled. This is interesting. It's so subtle on the backup focus. List, set up. Little, set up. Because they're already harmonizing such a big stack of notes, adding another stack of notes isn't as noticeable. When you put it on a melody line and add this harmonic stack of the vocoder behind it, it's more noticeable. But, man, does that ever thicken up? Little, set up. And just really bring the tuning into place for those backup vocals. They weren't out of tune, but we're adding the precision of tuning from a synthesizer. It just thickens up that sound. Let's listen in the context of the band. The vocoder is gonna be a little bit subtle, but we don't want to overdo it either. Sounds like this. Excuse. X. Okay, so let's keep working in this little area here. I'm going to loop that section. Next thing we might want to do is add a vocal synth by Isotope. I use this quite a bit, and it can give some really interesting results. This is not something native to Ableton, unfortunately, but we're going to bring it in and play around with it because it's something that one day you might want to try out. I think there might be a newer version of this. It's all kind of the same stuff. It's always going to change. But either way, we're working with these four main section polvox, Vocoder, compuvox and talk Box. I'm not going to go through every single setting of all these, but I just want to show you some other ways that you can affect the voice. What's important about this is that I do a Control G or Command G, if you're on Mac to create a group so that when I open up this little list right here, the chain, I can create another chain. So one of these is clean. Muske. And I'll rename that clean. I'll put up at the top. And then we're going to call this Effects one. Sounds like this. Excuse me. It. So very much like speak and spell. I'm going to go through. This is the compu vax setting. Let me go through the basic settings in this area. The bottom area is effects, distortion, filter, transform, shred, and delay. Feel free to play around with those, but there's too many possibilities of how these can all be combined. Pitch correction I usually keep off polvox. Let's start with that. It's gonna be a formant shifter, similar to what you would get with little Altar Boy by sound toys. So you can get the chipmunk or the demon from the formant shift. So let's give a listen. Excuse. Excuse. Fast. If I'm being honest, character and humanized. Sound like they barely do anything. Forman is really the most powerful effect within this unit. I'm just going to show you I'm gonna take character and humanize and go to extremes and show you it's not doing a whole lot. So foreman all the way down skis, a chance. Scholars, F a chance. Whatever's happen. Whatever's happening there is very subtle. So form a demon. C. Chipmunk. You can also go a little to one side or a little to the other to be subtle. You're gonna get a little bit of a bigger sound if you're down low and a little bit more of like a little girl sort of sound if you go up top, something like this. Excuse me. Excuse me. That's Poly vox. The vocoder is going to emulate the sound of a vocoder, but without all that harmonic information coming in, I'd much rather just use a proper vocoder. But it sounds something like this. And I should mention you also want to watch these little levels here. Right now, Vocoder was turned down all the way. Let's turn it up all the way so we can really hear it. Sky no. So shift is working very similar to fan. Let's try the contour knob. S fascinating. SkyscinPretty subtle. Scale. Sky So we're kind of in another one of these units where it's like, the first knob does a lot, and these are so subtle. It's kind of remarkable. But you can go through some different presets as well and just kind of trust that they've balanced everything out as a nice starting point. Excuse me. Face. I like that one. That one sounds pretty nice. We could turn back on Polvax and dial in these two knobs here and even some of the dry signals. So let's say we start with dry all the way up. It would sound like this. Excuse me, fussy. Excuse me, fase. So you can really hear her dry vocals, but then I'm also dialing in these different effects. Now, I already have a dry vocal happening over here. Remember, we had this clean version speaker is just turned off right now as we play around in this unit, but I don't really need to use this dry slider here. You can choose to. I prefer to do it where I have different effects underneath one clean signal, and then I can effect a clean signal even more with different effects if I so choose. Moving through, as I mentioned, compu vox is more like speaking spell. This is my favorite one, quite honestly. Sounds like this. You can really bit crush it. There's also something called bats. Bats is really funny. So bites and bats. These actually do make a pretty significant difference. Let's give a listen. So you So you're just causing more like digital distortion. Bats seems to add these little flicks of, like, almost white noise, and bites is just causing a little bit more disturbance in the smoothness of the sound. So I like playing around with the presets and then sort of dialing things in a bit more from there. I also wanted to mention that in Vocoder and in Compuvox, you have three different modes that are definitely worth playing around with. Going back to Vocoder for a moment, let's try smooth versus vintage versus hard. Starting smooth. Vintage? And hard. A lot of effect on hard. We're barely hearing the words. We know what the words are, but you can see it gets a bit more extreme as you move up. For comp uvax, we have Read, spell, and math. Spell is gonna be speak and spell. Read and math. Let's give a listen to those. Here's Read. Well, that's terrifying. And spell Dante. And then math. Dante. It seems to me that the read setting is actually more a white noise happening with the vocals. So if we listen again. There's this sort of baked into all of it. So this is really common. Like, if you were to use white noise through a vocoder, you get a very similar sort of sound. Math seems like a combination of spell and read together. We're hearing a bit of that white noise, but we're hearing a bit of that speaking spell as well. And then finally, we have talk box. A three settings, dark, classic and bright. So we'll turn up our slider, and we're going to start with dark. Sounds like this. And I'll play around with these three knobs, as we're going through the different settings. I'll just let it play through and feel free to watch around this area here. Sounds like this. We pE we poem I really like the classic sound with the formant down. You're hearing these sort of gritty thick sort of chunks of sound kind of poking through. Give it listen again. E. You can really feel that sort of, like, pulse of the effect on the vocals, which sounds really cool. So again, instead of going through every single possible effect, this isn't a product video on this. But usually, what I'll do is I'll turn on comp uvox. I'll set it to spell. I'll make sure bites and bats are relatively low. I don't want to destroy the sound too much, and I'll play around with bits until things are sounding right. Sounds like this. Mm. Now, there's, like, a really hard buzz to that. And if I pair that with the vote coder, check this out. Tomato, Blossom excess. So when I put the two together, check this out. Tomato, Blossom excuse. Let's bring back in the raw vocals and then blend those two effects with it. So here's our clean vocals again. Remember this little speaker button was turned off. Excuse me, fuzzy Excuse me, fuzzy. Okay, it's sounding pretty good. And then, lastly, I want to just bring in two sound toys effects that are pretty common. One is Little Altar Boy, and I use this one quite a bit. And then the other one is micro shift. I'm just going to show you what they do, and then we're going to apply them. Bring that one over here as well, too. Okay, so starting with Little Altar Boy, which is the one that I would use more often, this one's much more simple. So if we listen to what it's doing, and I'm going to turn off this effect here, actually, what we would want to do is bring these in as extra chains as well that we can then turn on and off and effect individually. So right now we have just the clean vx. You can see we have only the one speaker on, and I can sort of cue in other effects in different sections really easily using this method. So little Altar Boy, turning off our clean vocals, it would sound like this. Excuse, man. I. So you can bring it down a full octaverU. Excuse. And then you can also play with the formant. Echa people. So what's really neat is you can bring down the pitch considerably, but then also make it like a chipmunk singing low. Or you can bring the pitch up with the formant down. There's lots of possibilities. My favorite is to turn the formant down a bit and then turn the pitch down negative 12 and just add a bit of drive. Again, we're just adding a little bit of fuzz, nothing too crazy. It would sound like this. Excuse me. Posing. And then what I do, and I think I got this from either listening to pentatonics or Ed Sheeran, I just sort of reverse engineered what they were doing. If you sort of filter out all the high frequencies, We get this really nice, low rich harmony that can accompany the regular vocal part. Excuse me, fuzzy. It just feels like a nice, low sub scyth almost, maybe not sub, but a bass synth sitting down below that vocal part. Bring back in these vocal effects. Excuse me, fuzzy. Bring back in our vocoder. Excuse me, fuzzy. It's getting pretty extreme at this point. But again, you can rebalance things to go even more extreme or choose to be really subtle with it. And lastly, we had microshift. I realize I brought in little micro shift, which is like more affordable and simple version. Let's bring in the full version of micro shift and just go through a couple presets to show you what this thing does, because the styles are a little bit ambiguous, but generally we're working with this focus and detune. Let's go through a couple presets and give a listen. And this is basically just going to be like a vocal doubler or thickener, where it's playing around with little tiny micro shifts to make it sound almost like you double tracked or triple tracked your vocals. So it might sound like this. Excuse me. Fuzz. Double fat wide pads. Excuse me, fuzzy. Pretty similar heavy shift. Excuse me, fuzzy. So what's the theme we're picking up here? Everything is pretty similar. So what I would do is listen in context with the rest of the band, scroll through the presets, and usually you hit one magical preset where things just fit really well. For now, we're just going to go with double. Excuse me, fuzz. Which is like a slap delay. We're hearing something like excuse, right? You can really hear the individual slaps of those sounds. Vocally hears everything together. It sounds like this. Excuse me, fuzzy. My favorite part is that sort of filtered little altar boy. It sounds so great with that octave down. If I only had one effect that I could use pretty broadly on a lot of albums, I would consider using that either heavy handed or very light, depending on the genre. Um, again, in a style like this, I would probably just avoid it altogether, but I produce a lot of electronic music and hip hop, and it can sound fantastic in those settings. With the rest of the band, we have Excuse me, Pats Sounding good. And then the back Excuse me, Platz. So, there it is. So fantastic artistic effects that you can add. These are not Ableton stock plugins, but I'd recommend experimenting. You might be able to find some stock plugins that you really enjoy using, I would recommend starting with redux, which is going to bit crush your sound, overdrive, and something simple like chorus ensemble, as well. So, sadly, I will be taking off those artistic effects. They don't necessarily fit this particular song, but I wanted to make sure there was a class that outlined things that are a little bit more outside of the ordinary reverbs, delays, compression, EQ, those sort of effects. Speaking of which, we're going to dive into reverbs and delays in the next class where we talk about spatial effects. These are very much used all the time on vocals, very safe in any style. Let's get talking about them. I'll see you in that next class. 14. Spatial FX: No, I don't even know. I know you to apply for you. All right, let's get talking about spatial effects, reverbs and delays. Let's jump in. Now, of the effects that I added in the last class, we're going to get rid of the duplicated voice with the vocoder, the duplicated backup vocals with the vocoder. We're going to get rid of that low sort of muffled sound of little altar boy, the speaking spell from Vocalsynth by Isotope. But we're going to keep micro shift as our slap delay because after all, we're talking about spatial effects. Reverb being a room sound, millions of little delays that you're hearing to create a tail sort of like when you shout off of a cliff, but you're also going to hear some delay, some echo. But this slap delay where you're hearing data, Data, right after the impact of a sound, a duplicate of that sound, but no more is also really common, especially in old, like, hair metal. If you're doing, like, 80s metal, slap delay is gonna be really important to play around with. So let's listen to Microshift with the clean vocals just by itself for a moment. Excuse me, fuzzy. Was heavy handed. I'm going to really bring that down. Excuse me, fuzzy. So we're just thickening up her voice a little bit to start. Now, I don't want this on the backup vocals. It's going to make the intelligibility of the backup vocals really tough to understand because they're already so thick. So in this case, I would add something like a slap delay in this sort of chain setting. But we also need to talk about these guys over here. I have all these reverbs and delays already set up in every session when I open them. Now, something you should consider is that when I double click one of these and hover over little plate, take a look below it in this area down here. You're going to see the latency that is created. So 32 samples, 0.73 milliseconds, a very small delay. This one here is zero samples. Good job, RC, Valhalla, zero samples. And now, as I go through, these three here are all zero millisecond delay, as well as the ping pong delay. This slap delay has a 0.73 millisecond delay, as well as this plate reverb. It's not a significant delay, but when I'm playing in keyboard parts, that delay is going to be there. It's baked in latency when you end up choosing these sort of higher quality effect units, whether it be reverb or delay or whatever it is. So just something to consider if you're getting this latency from your session and you can't figure out where, I found that as you scroll over these plug ins, the fact that they will tell you the latency down at the bottom is super beneficial to find out where that latency is coming from. There are other ways to achieve that, as well, too, but we're just going to try to stay focused here. We are working with plenty of different delays. I have a plate reverb, medium haul, vintage, shimmer, which is more for, like, really huge effects, a slap delay, which we've already done with our micro shift, and a ping pong delay where the delay is moving back and forth between the speakers. We're going to be working with plate delay, and this is really common with vocals. I'm using something called Little plate by sound toys. It was free when I got it. It's constantly free throughout the year. So keep an eye out for this. The plate play is going to give a great sound to your vocals. Now, the presets would definitely be the place to start on vocals. I like the 1 second warm up the sort of basic version that they start with, but you can also try out some of the Abbey Road settings and play around and see what works for you. Let's give a listen. The way we're going to do this is you see these six little boxes. Here, these represent dialing in a separate signal, reduplicating the signal, and sending it to these other buses or sends. Sometimes people call them returns or sends or buses. There's all these different names for it. All you need to know is that for now, this is where you will dial in that sound and make sure that your reverbs are all set 100% wet. We already have our dry signal as our main signal, so we only want to be adding a fully reverberated sound. So you'll see here the mix is set 100% wet. And also, I've gotten rid of a little bit of mud and some sub frequencies. It's very often that I will EQ something similar to this after my reverbs and delays. You can even be more heavy handed with it. You can even get rid of some of the highs. There's lots of ways you can play around with it. But if you get anything from this class, anything at all. E Q your reverbs. They will sit in your mix so much better. Back to our scheduled program. So we're going to go through a couple presets and just give a listen. We're going to dial things in. I think a lot of people prefer to see it in this sort of view where you're seeing the sends in this sort of knob fashion as opposed to those little squares. So let's play around in this area here. So our plate reverb was A, so I'm going to send in to A, and we're going to hear that reverb get added as we go.et's give a listen. Actually, it's this one here. So here we go. Excuse me, fuzzy. La Excuse me. So let's go pretty extreme and go through the presets. Excuse me. That's huge. Excuse me, facet. Excuse me, face so what's interesting is the 1 second warm up. If you look to see where the low cut is, it's cutting out. Does it tell us? It doesn't really tell us, but it's cutting out, like, some significant low end. If we go over to the Abbey setting one, it's the same. It's 1 second decay, but now they're cutting out even more of that low end. So the vocal Abby setting might be a little bit safe. It's essentially kind of like they're doing something like this, but I think we're being redundant here one way or another. I would recommend vocal Abbey one or maybe something like the 1 second warm up. I think Vocal Abbey one sounds better on this particular vocal part. Let's give a listen. Excuse me, fuzzy. Le dream. That's sounding pretty good. And the cool thing about doing things through sens is that I can also send the exact same reverb into the backup vocals. I can now say, Okay, they're a little further away than our lead singer, so let's add a little bit more. If that adds more volume overall, just compensate by bringing the volume down a bit on the actual channel fader. Sounds like this. Together? Excuse me. I see little set up. La dream. So that's sounding pretty good in terms of the reverb. And again, the reason why I didn't bring the reverb into this chain is because if I do want it on other parts like the backup vocals, it makes more sense based on CPU and workflow to do things through a bus or a send. Also, it just so happens that my Ableton template has that available as soon as I open up Ableton, because I know I'm using it all the time, I want it to always be available. Now, another thing that can be really fun to add is delay. I don't want to add delay, in this case, to the backup vocals. Let's say I just want it as a fun effect on the main vocal part. Let's go ahead and bring in delay, which is a standard sort of plug in within Ableton. And I'm not setting it just on the micro shift. I could put it just on the clean or I could put it after everything so that it's affecting the entire vocal part. I'm going to set it after everything because we're going to do something kind of particular in terms of side chaining. Allow me to explain. So right out the gate, we can see that there's a bit of an E Q that we can add by sliding this around. Let's give a listen to the delay. It sounds like this. Skill, skill I see, I see. I see. That's so chaotic. So something we want to consider is that we want to dry down all the way. And then as I want to accent certain words, I can turn up the delay. And this is going to have an issue, and I'll show you in a moment. But it would be something sort of like this. Excuse me, fuzzy Let's keep it listen by itself. Excuse me, fussy. Now, the problem here is I've started this automation on the word Sm, but we're hearing this II even though I didn't start to turn up the wet dry until after. So I would automate on and off the delay. So by turning it off, we can now automate. So it's only on from here to the next word she sings. That would sound like this. Fuzzy Now, it's just echoing the word Seam. Now, you have to play around with this wet dry because if I'm 100% wet, watch what happens. Fase There's this delay, right? Because keep in mind, there's usually a regular signal, a dry signal, and then this delay signal starts after a certain amount of time. So if all we're hearing is the delayed signal, then we're going to hear that gap. In this case, you can set it 100% wet, but pull it back into your chain, and then you can just play around with the on and off of the delay automation. Sounds like this. Excuse me. Face Okay, so now we have the clean version and the delayed version only coming in on certain words when we want to. So keep it fully wet. In this case, you can also, like I said, play around with wet dry as a starting point, but you're going to be echoing some words from before the point that you've caused your automation to happen. Like when I was trying to apply the echo to the word Sam, but that if I was coming in, sometimes that can be something you want and sometimes it's something you want to control. Okay, so we're making some headway, but something else I wanted to mention is that you may just want to leave the delay on all the time and side chain the delay to the vocal. Now, you can't really do that as easily in this sort of chained version that we have here. So what I would recommend doing there is having something like a send that you would then side chain. You could also duplicate the vocal part and then send that to the delay. So there's a couple ways we can do it. I'm just going to do it through the sends. So let's go slap delay, we're just going to call delay. We're going to bring in the delay that we had on our vocal part. Boom. And we're gonna bring that onto the delay track. We're gonna get rid of anything else I had before, maybe outside of the EQ. And now, when I dial in E, which you can see is the letter assigned to this particular bus, then we're going to be able to hear that delay on whatever we are dialing into that E, send return, whatever you want to call it. One other quick thing is we want to make sure we're getting rid of any of that automation we had and just leave it on, in this case, all the time. So dialing back into E, it's going to sound sort of like this. Fuzzy L there's so much echo happening all the time. But what if I was to go into Audio Effects, pull in a compressor, after everything else, open up a external side chain. We've clicked this little triangle right here. Once it's opened up, you make sure you're set to external, so there is some external source compressing your delayed signal. And that external source is going to be our raw lead vocals. Now, whenever she is singing, the delay is pushed down, and when she stops singing, it returns back up. So let's give a listen. I've pulled the threshold way down. It's gonna sound like this. Fuzzy. La Excuse me, fussy. So do you hear what's happening there? When she's not sing, the delay gets brought up in volume. Now, the delay is a little bit chaotic. You might want to thin it out a bit using EQ, maybe even play around with what the delay time is. Is it 16th notes or eighth notes? Let's play around the couple and see if one sounds better. Faci. That was pretty quick. This is better. Fuzzy. That sounds terrible. Fas So, I don't know that any of these sound particularly great. Three was the best. You can play around with this using ping pong delay, which I find has some slightly better results. But again, what's cool is you can keep this delay off and then only turn it on. You can even automate it in this ascend return environment. Only turn it on on certain words. Now, it's a bit of a self defeating purpose at that point, because if you turn on the delay only on certain words, then why are we compressing all the other stuff? So you have to ask yourself, do you want the delay to sound quiet when they're singing and then loud when they're not or no delay when they're singing, and then it's present when they're not. If you're using this automation on your delay on off, then you're going to hear nothing when they're singing, except for the tails that you're going to pick up. And then when you use this sidechain compression version, you're always going to hear a little bit of delay when they're singing, but then when they're not, it pulls up. You can control how fast it pulls up using release, and you can control how quickly things clamp down using your attack. So I would maybe recommend setting your release to auto and keep your attack at around one millisecond. Play around with a ratio that's not too extreme somewhere between, like 12:00 and maybe 4:00. Like, you don't want to go infinity to one. It's gonna sound really extreme, sort of like this. Fuzzy. It's just all the way up out of nowhere. And then your ratio and your threshold together are going to determine how much of that delay you hear when she is singing. So if we turn the ratio down to around two to one, let's give a listen. Fussy. So we're hearing quite a bit of delay. If I pull the threshold up, same idea. Fussy. We're hearing so much of that delay. So we want to control it, clamp down on it. Threshold is down. Ratio is up. Fussy asi. I'm hearing just the tiniest bit of that delay. Now, I don't love the auto release setting on this particular release. Like, it's not sounding quite right, so I would probably dial it in and just play around with that release until it sounds right. For now, we'll keep it Auto. It's close enough. But that being said, I don't want these huge delays on her voice in this song. So all I have to do is dial back E, so it's all the way down, and now we're not hearing any of that delay. Fossi. Only delay we're hearing is the slap delay that we added from that micro shift. So we have micro shift, adding slap delay. This is also going to increase the volume of the vocal, so you have to consider you can shift, click these and sort of drag the volumes up and down together. So if at any point, the tone sounds right, the effects and the balance sound right, but you've added too much volume, just shift, click this little list here. So you click the top one, hold shift, click the bottom one, and then adjust the volume as needed. Let's get the balance right and then put it back in the mix. If I see. Something passe. Fuzzy. Now, the last thing is, we can also start to compress the vocals and the delay and the reverb altogether. If you want that sound of the reverb and the clean vocals to be compressed together, then you wouldn't do this ascend to another reverb channel because then you have to send it back to some other, like, vocal group. It gets really complex. So if that's the case, just bring a reverb into this little chain selector here and do it this way, the same way we did with all the other effects. I promise you that if your computer's half decent, you'll be able to get away with adding a few reverbs to your session without bogging down your CPU. You don't always have to use, send in returns. It's just really handy if you want to improve your workflow. But in terms of CPU, it's not a massive difference unless you're using the top top top end gear that might be more CPU intensive. I'm not going to compress the clean and the reverberated sound, but I do want to play around a little bit more with some compression and clipping just to make sure that we're not getting huge spikes and control the overall volume balance of our voice with a little bit of glue right at the end. Maybe we can actually pull in something kind of unique like a solid bus compressor by native instruments, emulates the solid state logic bus compressor. We're going to set the attack either to ten or 30. I'm probably going to keep it at 30. We're going to let a lot of the transient through. Ratio is going to be at three. We're going to play around the threshold and keep our release at Auto for now. Let's give a listen. He something better. Excuse me. Now, I want to control the peaks just a little bit more at this final stage of things and just make sure that things are feeling balanced with any effects we might have added, with any extra colorizing or saturation that we might have done, a little compression at the end couldn't hurt. Just make sure that you're not being too heavy handed with it. There are some times where some of the clos of sounds like Ps and Bs or glottos, that sort of sound is a little bit too much. Like, let's listen here. Excuse. Do you hear her really poking out on the excuse? So let's use a compressor here with a pretty quick attack time. One millisecond might be great. I'm gonna go even a little quicker. We're gonna set the release to Auto, and we're just going to try to pull down to clamp down on the initial glotto. Eh. Let's give Alissa Excuse Excuse, excuse. Excuse. See, Sassy. The auto release is gluing things a bit too much. I'm gonna play around with it by hand. Excuse. Sassy. Excuse. Excuse. Bringing the ratios to really clamp down on the sound. Let's take one more other view to this. I'm also going to bring the knee down, so it's a little bit more of a harsh clamping on that sound. Esc excuse. Excuse. Ice. Excuse. Fast e. Goody, S. Excuse. The other thing is, this was set to RMS, which is going to take the average sound and compress it. I want to just be compressing the peaks. So I'm gonna set that the peak. Esc. Excuse me, faste. That feels more controlled on that. One more time. Excuse. Excuse. That feels fine to me now. Let's give a listen back a bit further. A Something. Excuse me, paste. Good, too. Oh. Wow. Now, I could start to wrap up the class here, but I'm going to show you something that I do very frequently that I think is just a broader mixed tip. I'm going to go over to the main channel that I have here, and I have these two auto filters. One is set at 200 Hertz, so I'm not hearing anything below 200 ish, considering that there is roll off or anything above 5,000 hertz. I turn both of these on, and then the group. So if you shift, click these, and then go Control G, you can group them so you can turn them on and off together. I want to just hear there's still a bit of a balance issue with her voice, and I want to hear exactly where it is. So let's isolate the mids, the lows, and highs and see what's happening. Remember, the music is in the mids, so I'm most focused on starting with what's happening in the mids. Ainge. At. There was still a big buildup around this 800 900 Hertz. I thought it was down around like, five, six, but I'm actually getting a better result. Just listening to these mids as their own little mix. I'm hearing a better result by being closer to this 800 Hertz range. Shay tree. And you remember that's where we were getting build up before. So it kind of makes sense. Let's go a little bit more just through each unit and make sure that we're doing some fine tweaks so it sounds nice. Something better. And He Something better. Something better. I'm actually going to bring this final compressor on the clean track, so it's not affecting that slap because the slap is getting like two transients and the attack time kind of gets a little bit has to be more broad. Like, you have to really open up that attack time to let both slaps through. So I'm just gonna pull it straight onto the clean track. The now, I almost made the mistake of adjusting this high setting here. Remember, we're only in the mid, so don't make any adjustments in the highs or the lows. We're not hearing those right now. You can do some shelves and be gradual, but keep in mind that they have to encroach into that middle territory. And then later, when you're listening to the highs and lows, you might have to adjust things back a little bit, maybe with some roll offs or maybe with some extra little parametric adjustments. And when I say parametric, I'm just talking about the circular bump that we get in EQs. Something better. S. I think I'm actually going to add a little more saturation to all these lower frequencies. Oh. Something better. Okay, that's getting pretty close. Let's listen back to the full mix again. Okay. Something better. The only thing I'm hearing is that I might want to go back right to the very beginning and just make sure that my first two compressors are not sounding too over compressed, because of the saturation we've added, all subtle versions of compression and the light little peak reduction that we have at the end, I think now things feel maybe a little built up. So we're just going to listen one more time using these two compressors. They're both set to RMS. We're trying to be more broad. Let's give a listen. G. Something better. Fantastic. I mean, that's sounding pretty good to me right now as a sort of basic mix for the sake of these tutorials. But you can see, like this vocal chain has gotten pretty long. Sometimes you're going to find these plugins that have an all in one sort of solution, but I want to make sure that if you do end up getting one of those, you kind of understand how they're thinking about routing. And it's not always the same. If you look at an SSL strip, gaiting comes at a different time, DSing comes a little bit earlier. It's really going to depend on what sort of style you're mixing and what your preferences for the tone and the shaping of your vocal part. So this was a bit of a longer class. I did digress a little bit outside of the basic spatial effects that we were adding, but I wanted to make sure that you had some context for how I would go about listening just to the mids to do some more mixing. We did not flip it to listen to the highs and the lows, but the class was getting a bit long, and the issue that we were hearing or I was hearing was mostly in the mids, and we were able to address it by really narrowing what I would call like a sub mix, listening in Mono, listening only to side information, listening to mids separately or highs or lows separately are like little submixes. It's kind of the same reason we bring our mixes to the car and listen on headphones and whatever else. We're trying to make sure that we're giving our mix many dimensions in terms of how we're hearing it. So I like doing these submixes quite a bit, Mono being my favorite, but also just listening to the mids and then just listening to the mids in Mono super powerful. If you can ace the sound in that environment, your mids are going to bloom when you open up those highs and low frequencies again. So I was going to do a class called final polish after this class. I actually just kind of ended up fusing the two together by adding that little compressor at the end to deal with some of those little glottal or plosive syllables. We also went back and made some small adjustments. That was the main thing I was going to show you in the next class, but now we have to jump over to creating space and essentially creating the hierarchy between the instrument relationships with your vocals. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry. I'm going to make sense of it in the next class. Let's talk about it. 15. Creating Space: No, I don't even have andy to play for you. Oh. Alright, let's have a bit of a shorter class here. We're going to talk about creating space for the vocals. The big thing here is we want to ask ourselves, are any other instruments happening at the same time that the voice is happening? And is it making it hard and distracting to hear what the voice is doing? If so, we either want to do some side chain compression or use something like sooth or track spacer to take a more spectral approach and only bring down certain bands and frequencies when those frequencies are conflicting with the voice. Let's talk about how to achieve that. Let's jump in. So what I'm going to do is solo the lead vocal part here, and I'm going to go through, and on the master channel here, I'm going to a band pass filter at 33%. So the tip of it is sort of right along this zero line. I'm going to scroll through, and we're going to ask, where does her voice really sit with the most presence? Let's give a listen. Excuse me, fuzzy. Good. Right around there, we're really hearing all the consonants, all the plosive sounds, everything, lip sounds, a bit of airiness almost. We're just hearing a good summarization of her voice, 2.23. Let's listen to the whole mix now and see if any other instruments feel built up in this area. Alright, so the guitar is very much in this area, as well as the drums. But the drums are occasional smacks. So those little quick transients aren't too distracting to the voice, and we don't want to say, Okay, every time the voice is happening, the snare comes down a little bit. That's going to really weaken the main part of your beat. Now, if you're like Haley Williams from Paramore, for example, and you have a pretty bright high range, you'll hear in their recordings that they bring down the high hats a little bit when she sings, but only those overhead symbols like crashes and high hats, kick and snare remain unaffected. So we're going to focus mostly on bringing the guitar down when she is singing. So we're going to take off this filter here. And we're going to bring in a compressor onto our guitar and keys. We're going to open up this little side triangle, set it to external, and then make sure that raw lead is the signal that we're sending into this compressor. So now, every time she sings, the guitar, in this case, guitar and keys will come down a little bit. We want to be subtle with this, so make sure that you're not being too heavy handed. Let's just solo those two together. Let's give a listen. Let so we can go extreme with it. Like, here's extreme. L Dre. It just vanishes. When she sings, it's like the guitarist just mutes their guitar. So let's bring up the threshold until the balance feels pretty right. Ler Excuse me. It's I see. Alright, so we want our attack to be pretty quick. I don't mind this release of 30 milliseconds. You could try setting it to auto or play around with it, but you just don't want anything too extreme. You want the compressor to be basically working as soon as that guitar hits, and then pretty quickly returning back to full volume. Ratio of four to one is fine. I might even go more subtle with three to one. Let's give it a listen. Excuse me, Sassy. So we're only taking off about 1.7 decibels. I think this is going to create just a little bit more space in the mix just to help her voice sort of have a bit more command over what we're hearing from those other instruments. Let's give a listen in context. Excuse me, asi. Me, tasty. I'm gonna push I'm gonna push these mid highs up a little bit more. I think she could still be poking through a bit more in this mix. Me, tasty. A medium. Yeah, we're still keeping a lot of that warm low end of her voice, but she's more intelligible now, as well. Now, I want to show you how you can get more surgical with this. Instead of using a compressor and side chaining so that all the guitar and keys, in this case, get quieter when the voice happens. What if I want to keep the base of the guitar? What if the base of the guitar is not conflicting with her voice because the ranges don't overlap? Well, I don't want to bring down the base of the guitar when she's singing. I want to only bring down a certain frequency range. So also, you'll remember we cut out some pretty extreme highs. So my guitar can sit up in that area, and it will be fine. The vocal was cut from that spot. She also doesn't have a voice that goes as low as a guitar. So we can keep some of the extreme highs and the lows and only side chain the middle section. And what I use for this is track spacer. You can also use sooth. There's probably tons of options. I can't give you every single one, but here is track spacer. We are going to turn on the side chain here so that it is affected by the raw lead vocals. And then I'm going to set the low cut so that this unit is not touching anything below about 170 hertz and the high cut. So it's not touching anything above 10 kilohertz. From there, we're going to dial this in. And again, I'll start extreme and then dial it back. But this unit, you only need a little bit for it to do some pretty significant work. We're going to check it out starting all the way up with just the guitar slash keys and lead vocals. Excuse me, if I see. Still hear a little bit of that low end of that guitar. I might pull this up a little bit more. Excuse me, as. Excuse me, has. You can see it's really the low part of her voice that's conflicting the most with the guitar. So watch the action that's happening right around this area here. Excuse me, is. Goodis. So it's really subtle, but we're still creating that effect of the side chain just in those mid frequencies. Let's listen to it in the rest of the mix. Excuse me, sassy. Alright, so things are sounding pretty good in terms of that hierarchy. There's not too much conflicting with her voice, but we brought just the right frequencies of the guitar down just the right amount only when she's singing. And when she's not singing, the full guitar part resumes. Now, I also want to go through and talk a little bit more about submixing because I showed you before how quite often I will take these filters and just listen to the mids. I didn't actually end up flipping to the lows and highs, so we'll do that in this class. And then I'm also going to show you how I might use a band pass filter to see if there's any other frequency issues within the mix. Let's give a listen. There's a bit of muddiness maybe in the bass or the guitar. I'm not going to deal with the full mix right now, but her voice sounds fine down there. I might be able to add a little bit more low end to her voice, but I think it's sounding fine as is. Here's the high end of the mix. So she's a bit weak up in this top end. I would like to hear a little bit of sustained vocals all the time up there. But again, we were dealing with this S that on that mic just did not sound great. So this is the art of compromise at the end of the day. We boosted up the mids for her a little bit more, especially the high mids, so that on every system, she will still translate well. There's no system that I know of that only plays like eight K and above, so we're not too worried about that. We sacrificed some air and leaned a little bit more towards the vintage sound, which wouldn't have had a lot of air anyway. Listen to an old Ella Fitzgerald record. You're not going to hear tons of air on those old mics. So we kind of just pivoted and leaned into that more retro or vintage sound. Let's listen to the MIDS again. But this time, I'm going to scroll through. Again, I like to set my resonance at 14% as the basic version when I'm doing something that sort of looks like this. But I'm going to set it to 33% when I'm doing the band pass version. So, the other thing to mention is, I like the legacy version of this auto filter all the auto filter modes are really easy to see. You could do this just the same with the newer filter, and just to quickly demonstrate, I'll pull it in. So here's the new one. Works the same way, but everything is contained in this little list. I don't prefer that, to be honest, but high pass set to 200 Hertz with a resonance of 14%. That gives you the same sort of thing that we had here where we had 214%. But again, when I'm doing the band pass filter, these ones here, I like to set the resonance a little bit higher to 33%. So it sits pretty close to this middle line here. You can also just do this by hand in terms of resonance and then set it and forget it and then just slide around the frequency. But for now, 33% let's give a listen to different parts of the mix and see if anything stands out. Vocally, that's mostly what we're listening for right now. This 400 Hertz on that oh that she's singing is a little bit built up. It's really poking through. So again, I might go back into my dynamic EQ, look around 400 Ihrtz which is here and just do a little reduction. Let's watch as we're listening here. Okay, so we're just going for small adjustments at this point, moving through a bit more. This area here feels a little bit weird on the guitar. There's a little bit of this sort of nasaliness to the guitar. Like, listen. Right around there, I'm just gonna pull that down a little bit. Also, her voice was really built up here, so it's definitely a big part of the natural range of her voice. I can actually get away with cutting quite a bit of the guitar there. Sounding nice. Moving up. Psi. I might take some of the symbols down a little bit in this area. And again, I am adjusting other instruments right now, but it's all in relation to her voice. So let's give a listen. Fantasie Right around there, there's kind of an annoying ring, and the high hats are really washed out here. Now, I might want to consider using dynamic EQ so we're not touching the snare too much, but for now, I'm not going to go too extreme, so this should work just fine. Let's give a listen. FantastiRight around there, so we're going to zap some of that out, continue moving up. As This area here, I feel like her voice could be a little more consistent in terms of volume. So again, we're going to add a little something to the end. In this case, I'm going to add the multiband dynamics and really zone in to that range. So right now we were at 2.6 kilohertz. This is actually already splitting 2.5 and above. So let's say, like three and above is going to be untouched, and we're going up to, let's say, 1.6. So we're kind of treating this mid band as being 3-1 0.6. So we're just going to solo those mids. We're going to pull things down and squash a bit. Let's push a bit more volume in. Bit more volume out. It up. Let's see how that sounds in the context of the mix with this off. It up. And then without the filters up Ooh. That was kind of magical. At least for my listening environment, it really feels like her voice is forward, and all of that rich sort of sensitive part of her voice around that sort of 2 kilohertz region is really pulled forward. So in this case, the multiband dynamics worked out really well, similar to dynamic EQ, but we were kind of being a little more broad with the area we were affecting. Let's continue to scroll through. That feels good. And then anything above here, we're going to start to really roll off because we cut off quite a bit of those highs on her voice. Again, in the entire mix, we end up getting something that sounds like this. Here. Sounding pretty good. So if I turn off all these old vocals and bring in the treated vocals, these are the stems of the actual treated vocals. Here's what we had in the original recorded. Boom. Prep. I mean, we got pretty close. These vocals were using multiple sets of bonitors. I was using the car and headphones and all these things to double check. And I also had multiple days to go through with a fresh ear and adjust. But when you compare these original vocals Em. Treat First is the vocals that we treated in this course. Hello, there, um. Prep. They both work really well. Admittedly, I thinned out her voice quite a bit more for the original recording, just based on the balance with the band. And in the original, there was more of these track spacers and side chain compression and really working out all the instruments to fit together. But we got pretty close. I think the only thing we might want to do is maybe bring down the low end a little bit, but things are sounding similar in terms of that vintage tone. Here it is now. Hello, there, um. And here it was before? There ram. So we have a little bit more it. We have a little bit more reverb on there. Hi. Compression sounds pretty similar, but again, the main difference is just in the low end, but they're both passable as just different variations of this voice and what could work within this mix. There's not one exact solution, but both of these versions work in the overall mix, and all the things we did in this course got us pretty darn close. To wrap up this course, I'm going to open up the original session file show you just how much processing there was to get all of this to sit in place, I'm going to sort of go through the backup vocals a little bit more so you can see how those were treated. I was pretty subtle because, again, the backup vocals did sound great. But if you want to see what the overall session file looked like and explore that environment a little bit, then we're going to jump into that session file. So in our last class, we're going to go through any extra notes in that original session file. I'll see you there. 16. Final Notes: No, I don't even know but I know you apply for you. So to wrap things up, we're going to talk about some extra notes in the original session file for this song. I did have to consolidate the drums, bass, guitar, and keys so that all those effects weren't happening as I'm using OBS to record this course. Otherwise, there might be some CPU issues. So I consolidated some of the instruments down, but all the vocal effects, all the ways the vocals were grouped, everything is still intact. So let's dive in and let's take a look. So the first thing you'll notice in this session is that there are a lot of different lanes for all of these backup vocals. If we start to listen to Briana Gale and Kate, the backup singers separately, they sound sort of like can stop, f, Breaking Can't stop MF, breaking. Can't stop, from, breaking. Together? Can stop, from breaking. And Chloe is also singing some harmonies with the girls, as well, which sort of ties in the sound of her lead voice and the backup vocals in a fun textural way, where the texture of her voice, the grit, and that sort of deep punch that she has is always permeating in the vocal parts. With her parts, they sound something like this separately. Stop Break. Can stop breaking. Can't stop breaking. Can't stop breaking. If we take a look at each of these individually, I'm not really using any effects down here. If I did, it would have only been Meldine. And there's a chance on Chloe's vocals that I Meldne or auto tuned her slightly and then just consolidated. In other words, right click, bounce track in place. But I'm not doing much in terms of effects individually. Now, I do have these harmonies within a backup phrases group, and I'm just using some light compression. I do have a pretty significant boost in the EQ and cutting out some lows just so that they're cutting through. Radiator, this is a tube compressor that's meant to be kind of dirty. You can even literally turn it to noisy mode, so there's a little bit of extra noise happening all the time, which I did not. But radiators great if you're looking for a sort of tube style compressor also by sound toys. And then there is some side chain compression to the lead vocal part. So anytime there's an overlap of the lead and the backup vocals, the backup vocals are ducking down in volume just a bit. Together, they sound like this. So big. Wow, take me to church. That sounds great. Like, it's one of those things where I didn't have to do very much. I just did some light backup group processing. As we move higher, we'll see that later. There are some other backup parts. This is a group backup that was recorded. I think all the girls were at the microphone at the same time. Little unset. So that's working in conjunction with some of these individual. A little set up. Put it all together. A little set up. Super beefy. So again, we have those backup phrases in a group, and then that goes into an all BG vox background vocals. And then, again, there's more processing for the Three girls plus Chloe's stacks happening together. We have some treated EQ, again, mostly corrective on the low end, sweeping out some build ups. Although I'm also cutting out quite a bit of the highs, probably trying to deal with those crazy Ss, but at the same time going for a retro sound that isn't too high fidelity. Side chain compressor, a glue style compressor, a dieser. We have the PSP E 27, which is my favorite EQ for adding air. So 17 kilohertz, we're adding some really, really high end back in even after we've got rid of most of it, just to sort of pull some of it back into the mix, but in a more controlled, extreme high environment. We have the solid bus compressor. Again, this compressor is not so much for glue. The 30 millisecond attack time tells me I was trying to let some transients through. I was probably trying to get a little bit more punch or bite onto the sound. From there, we have a dynamic EQ that's just dealing with certain built up frequencies in different bands. Let's give a listen here. On setup. You can see how nice and even the tone looks just visually. One more time? A little alone, set. Sounds great. Moving forward, we had that dynamic EQ. Then we have another compressor with an extremely quick attack time, probably trying to clamp down a little bit on some of the punch that we added from earlier while keeping the tone of the punch but dealing with the signal, so it works well later in the final stages of trying to get things nice and loud. Then we have two compressors at the end. This one here is basically taking the lead vocal and telling the backup vocals to crush down. Originally, this was set to the lead vox group. So any of the lead vocals, for some reason right now, as I play it, It's not responding properly to that group. So of these last two compressors, I'm not certain what this last one is doing. Now, the truth is it's not doing anything if you take a look. These you all, baby butted So it's like I had the intention of doing some sidechain compression, but maybe I decided in the end that I didn't want it. Instead of deleting the compressor, I just sort of unwound the settings. Anyway, I digress. The second last compressor, and we'll just close this one up is set to side chain from the lead vocal group. Any lead vocals are telling any background vocals to get quieter. So the volume of the background vocal group is being determined by the lead vocal group. You put it all together, and this is what you have. Something excuse me, fuzzy. A little unset up. You'd be unsettled, too. So not a lot of reduction, like 1.5 to two DB. Now, you'll notice that I had a lead vocal part here that is turned off. I believe this was a non auto tuned version in case I wanted to go back and make any changes later. So I'm just going to consolidate that. The main lead vocals are up here. So those background vocals, as well as this muted lead vocal, all went into an all vox channel. So these backup vocals, as well as this muted lead vocal, all go into an all ox channel. And I have two of these. I have an A vox group and another A vox. This one you can think of as more backup vocals. This one you can think of as more lead vocals. At some point, I had them all in this all ox group. But I think due to DSing and some other things where the lead needed a bit more control, I ended up separating things. Sure, from here, I could shift click Control G, and then do a truly all Vox and then do some sort of batch processing like compression at the end, but it didn't need it. This didn't need to be an incredibly overcompressed or overprocessed sort of song. So it worked fine having those separated. But for now, you can think of, again, this would be like all background vocals, and this would be all lead vocals or Vox. So for lead vocals, you'll see there's too many effects to go through right now. Lead vocal group, this was templated from another song where she would occasionally have lead vocals interjecting with each other or layered, but they weren't necessarily harmonies. Now, even though there's only one lead part this time, just to keep the same texture, I kept all the same effects on the lead vocal group, just to template out this album that we were working on. So her voice always sounded relatively the same. And then, again, from there, it's going into this all lead vox group. I'm going to go through it kind of quickly, but not with tons of detail, but just to show you kind of the process that I took here. So a corrective EQ, DS Compressor for a bit of punch. I'm not shaping yet at this point. Again, you can mix and match the order of things. In this course. I have a recommended order, but feel free to play around with it. Slight EQ bump and a little bit of control below the fundamental frequencies. Ozone, we have a little bit of corrective dynamic EQ and sibilance, which is yet again another type of DSR. Here's where we have some of the magic happening with Echo Boy. So if I listen to it solo, just the effect. Ah. Cross to do. Ah who saves that. So I went more delay than reverb for her voice. It was just a sound that suited her voice a little bit better. I'm not saying there's no reverb on her voice, but the delay just worked so well using this echo Boy unit. Again, the same way that I EQ after reverb, I'm EQing and treating the delayed signal. Here we have an EQ, mostly corrective. Again, we have another EQ. This one's adding a bit of low end warmth at 300 and taking a little bit off of 2.5, probably a bit too much bite in that area. Another EQ. This one, again, is dynamic. Another EQ that's corrective. Thing I'll mention right now it's kind of bad to have this habit of having this many plug ins. The mic used required a bit of extra correction, and I went about these songs over many days of constantly coming back, re listening with fresh ears. And at some points, I don't mind having more EQs because visually, I can see what's happening. Do you see how this is starting to pull down over here based on the EQ that I have? It's a little bit harder to tell if I'm taking down two DBs here, because from this point of zero up where it's leveled, twoDBs looks like this. But from here, it's natural 0.2 DBs looks like this. So I have multiple EQs not out of necessity, but just to help visually confirm what I'm doing a little bit more. So I don't have one super complex looking EQ in the end. And then we finish it all off with a little bit of reverb. We're using little plate just like I showed you in the course and check it out. Vocal Abby one. There's that preset. Ah. To by itself? So I'm putting the reverb after the delay. So even the delays even the echos have a bit of this reverb on them. Ah. Then from there, it goes into the lead vocal group, another dieser, another compressor. This is an upward and downward compressor that I highly recommend you check out a bit out of context of this course, but just pulling up the low sounds, pulling down the high sounds. That was actually something we had a little bit of trouble with when we first started mixing her vocals within this course is that there was a really wide dynamic range. This isn't going to create punch. It's not going to do anything like that. It's not going to add a lot of color. It's just meant to clamp down on the highs and bring up the lows so the dynamic range is more narrow. Then I go into a manly vox box. This is getting a little bit saturated with, like, tube compression. I wanted a more vintage sound, so I was finding a few different ways to achieve that. Now, something to note is that this isn't actually compressing. I mostly just used it for the EQ. I liked the color of the EQ on her voice. More than anything, I was taking down around 300 hertz. We added some earlier, but this was just giving a different characteristic, and I was bringing down a mid dip at 1.5 kilohertz. From there, again, I'm doing some subtractive EQ and a bit more of a colored EQ, in this case, dynamic. And then into another PSP. This one's flat. I probably just forgot to delete it. We could delete it, but it's one of those sometimes as you're correcting as you go, something gets flat lined back out, and then you just might forget to delete it. So full transparency, that one is not really doing much. And then these utilities, at the end, also useless. At some point, I probably just forgot to delete them. We're going up to the all lead vox to finish supercharge your GT. This is a compressor that also adds a little bit of tube saturation. I love this thing. It doesn't look great and usually native instruments doesn't give me the retrosund that I'm going for, but this thing is decevingly great. This character knob over here, being able to add some warmth is fantastic, and a little bit of saturation they fought you. About four DBs of compression. We have Oxford inflator. This is just pulling her voice forward in the mix. Something we had a little bit of an issue with. You might remember I used the multiband dynamics to squeeze those mid frequencies. Oxford Inflator is doing that in a much more simple way. There's not nearly as many parameters available, but it's doing a fantastic job at bringing things forward. From there, a couple of EQs. We can take a look at them, Fab filter with some extreme S correction, even at the very end stage of things. Look, there's also more dynamic EQ here. I was really doing everything I could to deal with those Ss. And then we finished with a DSR. Like, it's I had to do a lot to tame those Ss. So that's the lead vocal running into a lead vocal group. Not as relevant for this song, but if there was multiple lead vocals, it would go there before going into an all lead vx. What I would recommend is that you have your backup vocals going into a backup vocal group, your lead vocals going into a lead vocal group, and then those two groups getting grouped into an all vocals group. That's what I had at one point, but this is like, I think, a 12 track album. And there was differences between the songs and what vocal layers I was given. So some of this looks needless. It has to do with the fact that it's coming from a template from the first song that I mixed, which is, I think it was There Is Still J. But I'd have to double check. So I would recommend check out Chloe Watkinson on Spotify on YouTube. I was thankful in that I got to mix and master that album. She did a fantastic job. Chloe, if you ever see this, I hope we use a different microphone because those Ss were crazy, but your voice is so crazy. It made up all the difference. Things were really sounding awesome. And you can see that no matter what vocal part you're working with, there's probably going to be something that you have to troubleshoot a little bit more than some other areas. In this case, it was the Ss but, man, am I ever thankful that Chloe just has a naturally great voice. I didn't have to do much to make her sound great. It might have looked like I was doing a lot of effects, but they're all really gradual. Nothing is too extreme. If I had to get her voice to sound as good as possible in four effects, I could probably do it. But bouncing between all the sessions, constantly readjusting this template, just made things a little bit bloated. But you can see I'm still using all the same things that I showed you compression, EQ, spatial effects, DSing, saturation. It's all and what I want to show you is that I've given you an order that will work well, but feel free to break the rules. Experiment. Don't worry if you have a couple of extra plugins. If your computer can handle it, at the end of the day, what's most important? The sound, the finished product. So do whatever you have to to achieve that sound. I am going to give you a proper goodbye, but I just wanted to say thank you for taking this course. I hope you learned lots from it. Do review it as many times as you need to, and there it is. There's the session file for Unsettled. Feel free to check out the rest of the album on Spotify, on Apple Music, whatever music distributor you listen to. The album is called Skin Writer You can check it out wherever you see fit. So you can check out some of the mixing and mastering that I've done, as well as some of the fantastic work from her backup vocalists, her other instrumentalists. It's all there. Check it out. A great band. This has been a pleasure. I'll catch you in the rap up video. 17. Outro: Congratulations on finishing this course on vocal processing and music production. By now, you should have a pretty good idea as to what steps you need to take to make sure that your raw vocals sound as professional as possible. From the right setup to tuning to compression to EQ, saturation, dynamic EQ, final polish, spatial effects, all that stuff, my hope is that you now have a bit of a library of videos that you can come back to in case any one of these areas is giving you trouble. If you start to find that an area is feeling foggy, how am I supposed to compress these vocals again? How should I treat the equalization? You have these videos to be able to fall back on. Now, ultimately, this set of processes works really well for me. And you're going to find sometimes on the Internet some contradictions. Some people like to saturate earlier, some people like to saturate later. Some people like quite a bit of Autotune, some people like very little. It's going to come down to your own preferences, but I do think that in terms of the modules that I've laid out for you, setting them in that order is almost always going to give you a fantastic sound. And over time, you can ask yourself based on other resources on the Internet, do I want to make any changes to the way this is set up and why? But this course is really meant to give you a foundation of understanding that you can build upon moving forward. Now, don't forget there is a class project for this course. So check out the class that outlines all of the details for that project. Make sure you're submitting it to me so that I can give you some feedback. And again, this is also going to give you a really solid understanding of what you've learned from this course, taking raw vocals, applying all the techniques I've given you, and really seeing the A and B in terms of how much you've improved these raw vocals into a very professional, finalized and polished sound. So I want to congratulate you on finishing this course. It wasn't necessarily easy, and there was a lot of theory along the way, but it really goes to show that you're taking yourself as a music producer seriously enough to make sure that there's no rock left unturned. If you want to learn vocal processing, congrats. You've taken this course. But there's plenty of other courses available on drum processing, bass processing, and much more to come down the pipeline. So give yourself a big pad on the back for taking your music production seriously enough that you're not flying solo and blind and hoping to find out things along the way, but rather investing into your future as a music producer. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. And one more time, thank you for taking this course. It was a pleasure being able to share all these techniques with you, and I hope to catch you in another course in the future. I'll see you there.