In this video I will teach you how I've been mixing my vocals on my recent recordings.
Hope you find it useful.
Hail my friends!
I'm Dan Vasc and welcome to the second episode of AskDanVasc.
Today's question comes from Samuel and he says: "How long does it take to make a 'perfect'
take from a whole song?
Let's say you have heard a new album from a power metal band and you liked one song
so much that you wanna do a cover.
You have to learn the lyrics, the pronunciation and the melodies and the harmonies.
How long will it take?"
Well, this will be easy to answer.
Usually I don't record songs that I don't already know and love.
I don't record songs that I'm not already passionate about.
Let's say Bard's Song for example.
It was just rehearse a couple of times and hit record and sing, because of so many times
that I listened to this song before.
So this makes the job a lot more easy, but this is only a side effect from doing what
you love I guess.
This includes recording the songs that you love.
And if you love something, most probably you know it.
So that's it, most songs I record I already know them pretty well.
Now his second question is: "Can you explain how to set a good EQ, delay and reverb?
I was playing around with it in Audacity but it always sounded horrible!
What values do you use?"
Okay, let's hop into Sonar X1, my DAW and I'll show exactly what plug-ins I do use and
how do I use them.
But first, I little disclaimer.
I am not, nor I claim to be, a professional audio engineer.
I'm a professional singer.
But people have been complimenting my vocal mixes lately.
What I will do is simply show you what do I do to get those results from my last couple
of videos.
But bear this in mind, I'm not a professional audio engineer.
I'm a professional singer.
I'm a professional singer.
Alright guys, here we are on Sonar.
I will be using as an example my Japanese version of Chala-Head-Chala, one of my latest
videos.
I could be using The Bard's Song, actually The Bard's Song is my latest video, but for some reason
the project keeps dropping out on me when I try to record with OBS.
So I'll be using Chala-Head-Chala here.
You guys can check the whole video on the card I will put over here and it is my second
latest video.
So the principles I used both on this one and in my latest video The Bard's Song are
pretty much the same.
So my first advice for you guys would be: move on from Audacity.
Audacity is great for beginners.
It's great for you to start messing around with recording, mixing, start playing around.
But as soon as you get the hang of it move on, because it's very very limited.
You don't need to get an expensive DAW.
Actually you can get Reaper.
Reaper is a great professional DAW which has a great free version.
That is my first advice.
Move on from Audacity.
So let's get to it.
This here is my effects chain.
All DAWs are pretty much the same in terms of what they do.
There are differences on aesthetics and on keyboard shortcuts, but on your DAW you will
have an effects box.
A plug-ins box, where you will put your effects chain.
This is my effects chain and the order that you put your effects does matter.
Because the effects are processed from top to bottom.
There might be other DAWs that they are processed from bottom to top, so you need to pay attention
to that.
The order that you put your effects does matter.
So the first thing that you might notice here is that there's no noise gate here.
Why?
Because I like to remove the silences from my recordings manually.
It's just a personal preference.
I like to remove the silences myself, because there might be some parts that I'm not singing
but I want, for example, my breath to show up.
Like "Chala", you know?
Sounds more natural, less artificial.
So the first thing that you want to do with your recordings: remove those silences.
And if you want to use a noise gate, use it.
If you don't want to use it, don't use it.
But remove those silences, because they contribute to nothing on your recording.
Your recording will sound a lot more cleaner, because it's never just silence.
There might be the sound of your computer fan, sound that is bleeding from your earphones.
You want to clean those up.
So let's turn off all those effects here so you guys can check this performance raw.
Okay, that's enough.
You might notice that it's not completely raw, because I have some volume automations
going on here.
Some that are very loud.
I don't like to use compressor... we will talk about the compressor soon...
But I don't like to use compressor too much, because I like to keep some level of dynamics
on my voice.
But there are some parts that I have to use automation.
For example here.
This attack here: "Head Chala" It's very loud.
I had to lower it down a little bit.
Let's talk about the first plug-in here on my effects chain.
This here is an EQ.
Let's see if you can notice what it does to the sound.
It's very subtle, but very important.
What my EQ is doing here, it's cleaning up my voice a little bit.
My voice without the EQ can sound a little muffled.
Like this.
Like if I had my hands in front of my mouth and you can't understand what I'm saying.
So I'm opening my voice a little bit here.
How do I do that?
Well, first I have a high pass filter here.
Oh, before I begin explaining, I urge you guys, Samuel asked me for my values...
I urge you guys: Do not copy those numbers.
Do not copy my values.
Pay attention to what I will explain to you here and apply those principles to your voice,
to your mix.
I will explain to you why I got to those values and you should use those principles to get
to your own values.
Okay?
Do not copy those values, because those were thought to work with my voice.
So, that being said, we have going on here a high pass filter.
What this does is it doesn't let any frequencies below a certain value of hertz to pass through
your recording.
With vocals the value ranges from maybe 50 hz to about 100 hz.
I find out that my perfect value is around here.
70, 75...
And you don't need to use this specific EQ, but I like it, because it has an analyzer.
What you will see here...
The yellow lines are the frequencies that are going in the plug-in and the blue lines
are the frequencies that are coming out, that it's allowing to come out of the plug-in.
So you can notice here that... all of this is being cleaned.
This is just what I call useless sound.
It's not important sound for the tone of your voice, for the tone of your recording.
So it needs to get out.
It only muffles your recording and there's no use for it to be there.
I also use here a very high low pass filter, which is pretty much the same principle of
the high pass filter.
It will not let any frequencies higher than a certain point to go through.
You don't want to exaggerate with this.
It's very subtle.
And I also have here a very small boost on some higher frequencies around 2.5k.
Right over here.
Just 3db is enough.
They show a little bit more my consonants.
It gets more clearer.
And over here and take out a little bit of medium frequencies.
Those are some frequencies on my voice that I very much hate.
The muffling frequencies.
It's what makes my voice sound like this.
Like it's all muffled.
Let me show you.
I will raise the volume of this specific frequency so you can see what I'm talking about.
See?
This is normal, how I recorded it.
And here we have it, a little more clearer, a little less muffled.
So that was my equalizer.
Next plug-in is the compressor.
The compressor is a dynamics plug-in.
What it does is it raises a little bit the lower volumes of your recording and it lowers
a little bit the higher volumes of your recording, giving it more stability, if I can say like
that.
The problem with most heavy metal singers, specially heavy metal singers and rock singers,
is that our performances are very much dynamic.
And I say this is a problem, because sometimes our voices can sound very very low in volume
and sometimes very very high volume and blowing up everything and stuff.
So we need a little bit of control here.
A little bit more than most other styles.
On other styles of music you won't see such high ratio here, such low threshold.
So once again I say, do not copy those values.
Adapt them to your needs, to your specific needs.
So let's hear the performance without the compressor and then with the compressor.
You see, the compressor makes it a lot more stable.
The volumes do not vary so much.
Here's the threshold that I'm using.
That means that any sound with higher volume than this will be affected by the compressor.
And here is my ratio value and this number means that for every 4.9 db that goes beyond
this point the compressor only allows 1 db to pass.
The attack dictates how long the compressor will take to be activated and the release
how the compressor will stay activated after the sound ends.
And here's my gain reduction.
Over here I can see how much gain is being taken from my original performance.
So let's take a look at it.
So you can notice here that on the loudest parts the maximum gain that it's being taken
is about 10 db.
And this is a lot.
You won't see those numbers on every musical style.
Those are more common from rock music, metal music levels of compression.
If you are working with a musical style that is not rock, that is not heavy metal, I would
recommend that you try to stay at 7 db of gain reduction, no more than that.
If you're dealing with rock or heavy metal, very heavy music, very heavy vocals, with
a very dynamic singer, about 10 to 11 db.
But you need to just use your ears.
Check if it's sounding too much artificial.
If it's not natural enough and adapt to it.
Okay, this plug-in is very interesting.
Let's see if you notice what it does.
Check this part here.
What is the difference?
See those "tss".
This here, my friends, is a de-esser.
This is a very good de-esser.
Tonmann Deesser.
It's free and very good.
It comes with a very comprehensive manual.
So I won't get into much technical stuff here.
Just download the plug-in and read the manual.
It's like 1 or 2 pages and you can understand everything about it.
But what what the de-esser does, it lowers the sibilants on your voice.
Specially after the EQ and compressor, the sibilants on your voice will be very loud.
This plug-in helps to control this, so your sibilants are not too strong.
Because if your sibilants are too strong it's very easy for your recording to be just annoying,
irritating and pretty much amateur sounding.
So this here is very important, specially after using EQ and compressor.
Now those next plug-ins are very cool.
Check them out.
This is the delay.
It's pretty much an echo.
And those are the values that I use.
This delay here that comes with Sonar gives you the option of controlling the individual
stereo signals of your delay.
So if you want you can make all kinds of crazy stuff.
I have here pretty much a simple mono delay going on.
But you can do pretty much whatever you want with it.
A very important thing to do is to sync your delay, to sync your echo with the BPM of your
song.
It becomes a lot more musical, it makes a lot more sense in the mix, in the song.
And you can change the time factor here.
I'm using 1, but I can make it slower.
Check this out.
See?
The delay takes a lot more time appear.
I can make it more faster also.
This is the value I prefer to use.
Now with the feedback here you control how long the echo will go.
See?
With the mix fader you control the volume of
the echo.
And those are pretty much the most basic and important things to know about a delay.
It's a very cool effect, very basic and necessary to give your voice ambiance along with the
reverb.
We will talk about the reverb next.
Because without ambiance your voice sounds like it's out of place.
Like if the song is being played on a room and your voice in another room.
It makes your voice sound like a separated thing and we don't want that.
Okay, next we have here the reverb which I have here as a send effect.
I will not go into detail about send effects here.
It can get very complicated.
There are plenty of tutorials on Youtube about that, if you want to know more.
But basically my favorite reverb here is Altiverb 6.
It's a great reberb.
When you're using your reverb as a send effect you wanna make sure that you turn off the
direct signal from your voice, because if you leave it on the signal of your voice will
be repeated by the plug-in and we don't want that.
We just want the reverberation sound coming through here.
So Altiverb is pretty cool.
I'm using a preset here that kind of imitates the sound of a chapel and you can see here
that the level is not too high.
This is a mistake very easy to be made.
Reverberation sounds cool, sounds awesome.
So sometimes you want to exaggerate with it, but reverb is something that can take out
from your voice a lot of definition, a lot of clarity.
And will make your voice disappear into the mix if you're not careful.
So, very subtle.
Again, use your ears for that.
I will turn off the delay here so you can hear just the reverb.
See what I'm talking about here?
Now, always test everything that you're doing here with the instrumental, with your mix.
So that's it guys.
That is my effects chain for you who were curious about it and I cannot...
Jesus Christ...
I cannot stress that enough: Do not copy those values.
Use those principles to get to your values, the ones that will work with your voice, with
your mix.
And again, I'm not a professional in the area of audio engineering.
There are very awesome people out there on Youtube, very awesome audio engineers offering
a lot of tutorials, a lot of cool insights in this area.
But since I received a question about this subject and it was not the first time I thought
it would be cool to show you guys a little bit of what you don't see on the videos, you
only see the final product.
So yeah, thank you very much for watching.
I hope this information was useful somehow.
And give this video a thumbs up if you liked it.
It helps the channel a lot.
And I'll see you on the next video and until then have yourselves, my friends, an epic
day.
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