 In this video, we're going to be learning about mixing vocals in Cakewalk by BandLab. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Lead vocals are massively important in contemporary music. They have the lyrics which people get meaning from and of course they carry the main melody. So it's important that you hone your skills in terms of getting those vocals to sit just nicely in the mix. And it is a skill that you improve with over time. So in today's video, I'm going to be showing you my personal approach to mixing vocals in Cakewalk by BandLab. And I'm only going to be using stock plug-ins. So the plug-ins which come with Cakewalk. So you won't need to be buying anything to get a great vocal sound. So let's start off with the source. No, not the creative source, the other type of source. OK, so this isn't to do with the mix exactly, but it does have a massive effect on the mix. So talking about the source and getting the source right, I'm talking about of course the vocal itself, but also the room and what I'm going to focus on now, the microphone that you use. Now I happen to have a number of different microphones in my collection which I use for vocals and I like to try out different ones before I go ahead and really do the proper recording. Now I've got a little hint for you here. I don't always use the most expensive microphones. I quite often use the cheapest of my collection of microphones. It's not to do with how expensive the microphone is. It's to do with how suitable it is for the task at hand. That may depend on the person's voice and it may depend on the room that you're recording in as well as well as the kind of artistic choices you're making, the kind of sound that you want to get. So I know many of you will only have one microphone. That's fine. Don't panic. Don't think, oh my God, I've only got this one microphone. I can't make decent vocal recordings. No, you still can go ahead, but you may have to do a lot more work in terms of EQ especially to get the sound that you're looking for. So try to get the sound that you are looking for during the recording process or as close as you can get to it. So I just want to give you a quick look at the project that we're working in today. You can see, or maybe you can't see in actual fact, that this screen is split into two. This console view is split into two. I've got a divider here, which I'm dragging around. On the left hand side, we have the main tracks, okay, including all of the vocal tracks which are in pink. Now some of these are backing vocals and things. We won't be dealing with those today. But we will be dealing with the main or the lead vocals. There's actually two lead vocal tracks. We've got the first one here, which is just labeled Suzy. That's the name of the performer. And we have a second one, which is Suzy verse. I actually recorded this song, I recorded the chorus and the verse separately and I recorded them onto separate tracks. Now you don't have to do that. That just happened to be the way I did it on the day. Now the main thing is I don't really want to apply effects to each of those tracks separately. That would get a bit cumbersome. So I've got them both routed through to a bus. You can see that their output down here goes to Vox main. If we scroll all the way over to the right-hand side of the project and I scroll over here, you can see Vox main here is the bus. And that's where all of my effects are. Now you don't have to do it like that and if you've just recorded this on one track, you can put all of these effects and things that we're going to look at today on that track. Okay, that's absolutely fine. But that's why I'm doing it here. So don't get confused if you see that everything is on this bus. So before we start using any plugins, it's usually a good idea just to check that our gain level is nice and healthy. What's healthy for vocals? Well for me, I like the average or the RMS to be around about minus 18 dB. That's the one I focus on for vocals. Now the peak is going to be higher than that. Usually it's going to be around about minus 12 to minus 6. As long as it doesn't go over zero and clip, it doesn't really matter so much for me what the peak is. I do like that average to be about minus 18 because for some plugins, especially those plugins which have some saturation effect to them, then it's really usually a good idea to have the level of around about minus 18 RMS. Now it is of course a great idea if you get that right while you're actually recording the vocals. So when you're setting your recording level, then you won't really need to do anything here. But I've mocked up a situation where I wasn't careful with the recording level so that I can demonstrate to you here how to fix it. So I'm just going to play the vocal quickly and take a look at the meters here, see where it's peaking, see where the kind of average is. So you can see it's a little bit low. It's not even getting up to minus 18 as a peak hardly. So we're just going to push the gain up and we're going to just play the vocal, push it up until we get to those kind of targets that we're looking for. Okay, that's fine, but you may have heard there as we went into the sort of third section of this that went a bit quiet again, again, I've mocked something up for you to fix here. Get rid of a part of this console view and look at the waveform here. You can see the sort of four different sections to this chorus here and you can see in this third section that it's definitely quieter now as I say I mocked it up, but it could happen when you've got different takes which you've blended together with some comping or something. So one is a little bit lower or maybe you know the singer is not that great with their mic technique and they moved away for a moment and got kind of quiet and then they came back again. How can we fix it? Well, very easily. In fact, if we go to the top left of this track in this drop down where it says clips at the moment, I'll just click on that and go down to clip automation and click on game changes the color of everything here and you can see this red line. This is where we can adjust the game. So what I like to do with a section like this and there may be an easier way to do this than the way I'm going to show you. Somebody will talk about that in the comments if there is, but I like to create some nodes by clicking on that line. Okay. So left clicking on that line either side of that section, which I'm going to adjust. And then I create another couple of nodes just on the inside. You don't have to be that precise about it. Okay. You can be sort of fairly inaccurate with this. So I've got the one selector down here. You can see that highlighted. I'm going to hold shift on the keyboard and select another one. So I've just, I've just selected the two inside nodes there. And then I'm just going to drag them upwards and I'm just looking at the wave form here until I get it. So it's sort of consistent with the waveforms either side of it. Okay. So let's play from the one before. Only yesterday, honey, you and I were two. Only yesterday when the sun was shining through. Seems okay. I could possibly even push it up a little bit further. You need to experiment a little bit and just see how it actually sounds. You can't completely go by the visuals here. Now another thing that you can sort of fix here is any sort of transience or sudden sort of peaks that you can see here. Now they fixed in exactly the same kind of way. So I'll just sort of perhaps make some nodes either side of them, grab those and then just drag them around. And I could take that, that sort of peak which is happening there, which is really poking out. And if I play that, you'll find that although it appeared to do a lot, it's actually quite natural. Only yesterday, honey, you and I were two. And I do like to do that. I like to go through my waves and just look for anything which is really outstanding like that. And that's because it's sort of, although I'm going to be using compression later on, it kind of doesn't unnecessarily trigger compression if you know what I mean. So we're not sort of using compression in a really aggressive way to fix kind of errors like that. I would prefer to sort of eyeball that or listen, listen ball, hear ball. No, anyway, I would prefer to use either my eyes or my ears just to check out for things like that. And then you can fix them again by using this clip gain automation tool. Now I like to start off my effects chain with a high pass filter. If you don't know what that is, just think of the words high pass. It's only letting the high frequencies past. OK, so in other words, it's sometimes called a low cut. It's cutting the low frequencies, both the same thing. Now there's two reasons I'm doing it for this vocal. First of all, there's some information in the low end or there's some sound in the low end, which I don't think is necessary for this track. I've already got Keegan bass guitar down there. They're occupying that space. So the low end of this vocal doesn't matter too much at a certain point. Also, there's something which I'm kind of fixing there because there were some plosives in this vocal that kind of sound and some sort of low rumble, which I didn't like. Now, you may get it with things as well, like, you know, some reverberation or something happening in the room or maybe someone kicking a microphone stands around that. So this is going to help with that. Let's just have a quick listen to this vocal and listen out for that low end stuff that I don't like. We all mean to keep from trouble. We all mean to do what's right. Listen now. We can live a life that's double. Double. But I get along. So let's tidy that up a bit. This just really does help, especially doing this before you go into your other plug-ins. Now, I'm going to use the featuring cake walk called the Pro Channel here. This is really convenient because it's right at the top of the chain here. So on the track, I'll just open up my Pro Channel. I'm just using the EQ. I'm just going to double click on it here. So that comes out. I've actually prepared my high pass already. So to switch on the high pass filter, you just click this HP button. Using the frequency knob, you can change where you start to do your sort of cut off. And then you can adjust your slope here. So I'm using a really the most aggressive slope here for this. And I've just played around with the frequencies around about sort of 80. Sometimes you could go a bit higher than this. It sort of depends on the song on songs, which say only have one other instrument you want to keep a little bit more low end in there. Now, let's just have a listen now with that switched on and listen for those low end stuff. This part was bad. So you can see that's fixed those plosives right away. Now, the key to this is you don't want to kind of destroy the sound of the vocal. You should really when you're sort of setting up the sound be listening with the other music playing as well. It's not a good idea to solo everything like this. If you want to get rid of problems like those plosives here, but listen to it in context. And what you want to do is as you're adjusting your frequency here, just switch the effect off and on. So bypass it. There should be a point where you really don't exactly hear a difference where if you get it to a point where you can hear the difference, then just back off again. That's usually around about the right point to do your cutoff. Of course, you need to make sure that you've got decent monitors to actually hear that low end well. Oh, by the way, are you finding this video useful? If you are, go ahead and hit the like button for me. Do it right away so that you don't forget. If you're not finding it useful, hit the dislike button twice. And if you do like this kind of content, make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos. Now back to this video. Now, in a moment, I'm going to talk about the one and only plug-in I've got on this vocal as an insert. That is the VX64 vocal strip, which comes with Cakewalk. However, for you, this may be hidden. So if you can't find it there when you go to insert it, I'll show you how to unhide it. Just go up to the top to the Utilities menu, click on that. Then go down to Cakewalk Plugin Manager. So click on that. Just wait for this to be populated. Then go down to VST Audio Effects. So we'll click on that. And then down at the bottom here, click on Show Excluded. OK, and probably in most cases, you're going to find that it's there in the Excluded list, so you just need to select it by clicking on it and then go down to Enable Plugin. Click on that. It will disappear from the Excluded list. And then when you go to insert it in your project, you should find it available. I'm not sure if you have to restart Cakewalk possibly to make sure it's there. I think not, but give it a go if that's your problem. So let's look at the one and only plug-in I have as an insert on this vocal track. That's the VX64 vocal strip. Now, if I click on that, you can see in all its glory. This is a great plug-in, first of all, because it sounds great. It's got almost everything you need to process your vocals in one little unit. And also, it's a great learning tool as well. We can work our way around it and see what each part of the processing actually does. So starting off on the left-hand side, we've got a saturation control here. This is to add some either warmth or some sort of texture and color to our vocal. It's great to have at the beginning there, because traditionally it would often be added at the beginning of a signal chain with things like tape or things like preamps, things like that. So I've got it switched on here. I've got it turned up fairly high, 75% or so. But that's still going to be pretty subtle. So I'll play the first part of this vocal here with it switched on. And then I'll switch it off. See if you can hear the difference. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Switched off. Only yesterday, honey, you and I were two. Now, it is very subtle. If you've now listened to this five or six times, you've rewound. Don't feel bad that you can't hear much of a difference. What I hear is just a slight amount of sort of grittiness there, a little bit of a grout, which I kind of like on this vocal. It's kind of much cleaner with it switched off. As I say, if you can't hear it, it is very subtle. Let's move on to something very key with vocals. And that is a DSO. That's to get rid of things like sibilants. Definitely make sure you deal with this because once it's heard by the listener and it can be annoying, it can't be kind of unheard. And they'll they'll just feel like they want to switch the song off to be honest with you. So what we'll do is switch this on. We'll have a listen to what it's doing to this vocal with it off. Sorry, it sounds like this. Only yesterday, honey. And with it on. Only yesterday, honey. So that in yesterday is still there, but it suppressed a lot. OK, now with each vocalist, it's going to happen at a slightly different frequency. So you've got a frequency control here and you can see the graphic on the right hand side, representing the point at which it's intercepting that sibilant. So you may want to fiddle with that a little bit, depending on the vocalist. And then a great tool they've got in here is the listen tool. OK, if you switch this on, then the only thing you're going to hear is the thing which is being removed by the DSO. So let's have a listen to that so you can hear on on the yesterday. OK, so definitely a tool that you should be using on your vocals, almost every time. Next, we move on to this, which they've called compound, which is an expander and a compressor all in one little unit here. This is really quite nice. And if you're not used to using compressors, especially then this is a great place to start because there's not too many controls to fiddle with. But we'll look at the expander part of it first and expand. It's a little bit like a noise gate. It's there to get rid of or to help you get rid of very quiet noises, perhaps in between phrases of a vocal. But whereas a noise gate will have a hard cut off point and expand is almost like the opposite of a compressor. And that there's a little bit of a gradual cut off to it. OK, so it doesn't sound too harsh. So I'm using it here on this vocal. I'll go to this verse to get rid of some noise in between the phrases. OK, so let's just play it before I've switched this on. We all mean to keep from trouble. We all mean to do what's right. So you may get some voices, some noises in between the vocal, some breathing. But there I've got a little bit of bleed coming from the headphones. So I'm just going to use that expander to get rid of that. I'll switch this on. Now, the compressor is not working at the moment because the threshold is switched all the way up. OK, so we're only hearing the effect of the expander. Now I have a listen in between those phrases. We all mean to keep from trouble. We all mean to do what's right. So very handy indeed. Now it's not going to make or break this recording, to be honest with you. It's it's you may not even hear the difference. It's sort of a nicety, but in a track, which is very sparse, maybe there's just the vocal and acoustic guitar. That may be quite helpful to get rid of some of those noises that you'll have in between the phrases. So that's the expander. Now the compressor. Oh, let's talk about compressors really quickly. And a compressor is really an automatic volume control. And what it does is it says, hey, when things get a little bit too loud over a certain threshold, then let's compress them down. Oh, sorry, turn them down by a certain amount. That's a ratio. OK, that's a very quick explanation of a compressor. Now you may be thinking, well, aren't compressors there to make things louder? Well, because you can turn the peaks down, yeah, the very loudest bits, because you can turn them down. It means you can then turn everything up, yeah, without peaking, yeah, because those peaks have now been turned down lower. So your lower or your more quiet parts of your vocal can be made louder. And that's why compressors are normally thought of as making things louder, even though in reality, their primary goal is to make peaks or the louder parts quieter. OK, so that's how they work. So in order to make a compressor work, we're going to have to set a threshold. So that's a point at which it starts to happen, where it starts to turn things down. We'll adjust that in a moment. But I think you need to know that with this particular compressor, it's got an automatic make up gain. In other words, it's saying, hey, now that we've made things a bit quieter at the top using the threshold, we can make everything automatically louder. It does that for you automatically rather than you doing it manually. So let's start off with the compressor off so it's all at the top. We'll listen to this vocal and we'll gradually bring it down. We all mean to keep from trouble. We all mean to do what's right. So you can hear that vocal starting to sound louder. OK. What we're doing is we're sort of squashing the dynamic range of the vocal. So the difference between the louder parts and the quieter parts we're making more narrow. So we're making able to make the whole thing louder. So it's a key part in being able to make your vocals get louder in the mix without actually peaking. Now, we do have a ratio control here. So that's something you're going to have to experiment with your particular song to get that right. How much is it actually squashing those peaks and then an attack. Now, in most cases on a vocal, I like to have the attack down pretty low so that it really grabs those peaks, those sudden peaks, which are transients, grabs those and squashes them. You could try a slower attack for different songs. It's going to have a different effect. But in most cases, I like to have it down pretty low. So that's where I've got it there. And that's the setting I'm going to go with for now. Although I should say this is only for demonstration purposes, because in reality, you really need to be listening to this vocal in the context of the rest of the music. So you should have your backing playing as well. Please do remember that I'm only doing it this way so that you can more easily hear the differences. OK, so the next thing we have is an equalizer. In fact, it's called a tube equalizer here because it has a saturation feature attached to it. But we're just going to look at it in terms of an EQ. It's a three band EQ, which kind of makes sense in terms of vocals. We're broadly looking at the low end of the vocal, the mid end, the mid part of the vocal and the high end. They're all important. Now, the low end, we've talked about that a little bit earlier. We reduced the low end at the beginning. So we've kind of dealt with the very, very low end. But here we'll probably be looking at it a little bit higher than we were using earlier. So the easiest way to sort of sort of see what's happening to visualize it is to actually turn the level up of one of these bands. So this is the low end level and I'm pushing it up. OK. Now, what I want you to remember with the low end is if it's a very sparse track, again, if it's just play a vocal and acoustic guitar, then it's kind of appropriate to have a little bit more low end in there, that warmth. OK. But with a much more complex track where you've got other instruments taking care of that low end, it could be a bit too much and it can make things sound a bit sort of muddy. OK, so that's not a great thing. So just be careful of the low end in that way. But that's your control with it. And there's the frequency for that. The mid side of things or the mid part of the frequencies, which I'm turning up and down here, we can change the exact frequency, like so. Now, this is a part where things can sound a bit harsh and even a little bit sort of nasally in things. It's very tempting all the time just to turn this down very aggressively, you know, and you'll get this sort of sound of this. We all mean to keep from trouble. We all mean which sounds really sort of smooth. Yeah. But out of context of the rest of the song, what you can find is you kind of just lose all the definition of your vocal. So although, you know, quite often I will have it just a little bit turned down. Just be careful with this. And if you find that your vocals just sort of disappeared, it may be because you just cut out too much of that middle part of your vocal. So that's where a lot of the sort of pronunciation and the core of your vocals actually is. Now, in terms of the high end up here, what we're looking at here is the sort of airiness, the breathiness. OK, that can be quite nice to have in there. But if you go overboard with it, then you can make things sound a little bit harsh and maybe even piercing. And do think about the relationship between the high end and the low end. Yeah, sometimes rather than actually add more high like so, it's worth just trying reducing the low end. OK, just play around with that yourself, but that can often get you a better effect and you're avoiding all that kind of harshness and stuff. Now, with this particular plug in, and I don't use this often, I must admit it has this feature of adding saturation in on a per band basis so you can add it in on the low, the mid or the high end frequencies there. OK, and you'll just use that slider to add saturation. So that's that. The next thing that I'm going to look at is the next part of the chain is this doubler down here. Now, a doubler is mimicking the effect of recording the vocal several times. OK, and then having them play alongside each other. Let's just listen to it and see what the effect of it is first. We'll go back to the chorus and we'll have a listen to it quickly by itself. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. And with the doubler switched on. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Now, it's almost like a very short delay effect and kind of is probably more or less. There may be some detuning going on there as well. This is a great effect to have if, especially if you automated this switch on for choruses and things like that. However, I don't use this. I don't tend to tend to use doublers. What I tend to do is record vocals are doubling up of recording of vocals. So I actually rerecord the vocal again. The phrasing will be slightly different. It should only be slightly each time the singer sings it. But I find it just has a better effect than sort of doubling plug-ins. But you may not have the option. You may not have the singer available. You may not be able to record it again, in which case this is a good substitute. So that's the doubler there. The next thing, again, I think is really important with vocals is delay. And I'll talk about the way in which I use delay on vocals in a moment. But just so you know, it's there, of course, it could be a very overt effect. So if we just turn it up like so. That's fine. You know, if that's what you're looking for. Sometimes you'll have that on a track. But what I prefer to use delay is with with a very short time of a very short feedback to get this kind of effect. Now, it's similar to that doubler granted. But the idea here is just to put the person in a little bit of space. I've got it up a little bit high there, to be honest with you. Now, it's subtle, but we'll talk in a moment about why we use it. OK, we're going to get back to this. I don't actually use it from within this plugin. I use it as a bus. And as I say, we'll get on to why I do that in a moment. Now, you can with this plugin also add saturation in at the end as well. And apart from that, one of the great things about this particular plugin is the fact that you can change the routing. Now, sometimes, for example, you'll find that it sounds better to use the EQ before the compressor or vice versa. Sometimes you might need to add that de-esser on a little bit later on after you've actually changed your EQ. So look, it's just nice that you can just grab units and drag them around, change the order of them there. So that's one of the great features of that plugin. So let's move on to the other effects, which I've alluded to, which I actually use on buses. So I'm adding my next three effects using buses. I'm doing that because I want them to work independently of each other rather than one feed into the next one. So with effects inserts, if I've got a vocal with a reverb on it and then it goes into a delay, the delay is receiving the vocal with the reverb and will add delay to the whole thing. I don't want it to happen. So you can see my three buses up here, reverb, delay and compression. They're all working independently. And it really doesn't matter what order they are here. Now, one of the main effects that people often think about with their vocals is reverb. As every karaoke singer knows around the world, the adding that little bit of reverb gives your vocals that professional sound. However, you can actually really ruin the sound of your vocals with reverb. I guess you're trying to put them into a kind of a space, make them sound like they're in a room, not so dry. But the problem with reverb is it can also make the vocals sound much further away. And that's probably not something you want. You probably want your vocals to be up front. I have used reverb on this track and I usually and often do subtly, but I've used it rather aggressively on this track for a specific reason. We'll get back to that later. But what I first of all like to think about before reverb in order to put my vocals into a space is the use of delay. So I'm sending my vocals through to this bus, which has the Sonosus delay in the insert section. So I'll just open that. This, of course, comes for free with Cakewalk. Now, the aim here is to just put the vocals in some space so they don't sound quite so sterile and I do it in a very specific way. So in terms of the settings with the left and right channels, I have a slightly different setting for the delay time, but they're both very, very small. On the left here, I've got about 50 milliseconds. On the right, I've got a 12. You could use different values. That's fine. But keep them rather short and keep them different to each other. That gives that sensation of space. The next important thing is to have the feedback and the cross feed controls down to zero. Essentially, the aim here is to only have one delay. OK, I don't want it to go on and on with lots and lots of repeats, just one repeat to the delay. And then the last control in these sections is that I have the mix all the way over to 100 percent. So I'm only hearing through this bus the actual delay effects because I've got the original sound on my original channel. Yeah, so often when we use effects like this on a bus, we have the mix all the way up to completely wet. OK, and then we blend them either using the send or using the fader on that effect. OK, now, the very final thing that I have set up here is a filter. I've got a low cut filter set up here, around about 550 hertz or so. This means that the repeats have that low end cut out of them. The reason I'm doing that is because if we keep repeating the low end of things with both the delay and the reverb, you can get a low end build up. It sounds very muddy and just not that great. So I love to use a low pass filter in there. Let's just have a listen to the vocal without this delay effect. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. And then we'll switch it on. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Now, that may or may not be too much of an effect for you. As I say, I would generally control that with the level control over here for the send. But as I say, you could also use the fader in the bus over here to adjust the level of that. So that's our delay. Now we can more safely add some reverb. So, of course, reverb can be used to put your vocal in a space like a cathedral or a hall or a studio or something like that. But it can also be used in a stylized way. So I'm thinking of certain eras of music, maybe the 50s and 60s where they did like to use a lot of reverb and echo. And if you want to mimic that sound, then you tend to use reverb in that kind of way. Now, I do find myself unusually in that situation because this track is trying to mimic something from the kind of Motown era or something like that. So I'm using much more reverb than I normally do because normally I find with more modern music just to have it kind of subtle so that you don't lose the definition of the vocals is a good idea. Up to you in terms of credit, creative decisions with that. So the important thing is it goes over to this channel here. And I'm not using a plug in this time. This time I'm using the pro channel in Katewalks. I'll just open that up so we can see it and you can see I've used the Breaver module down there, which I find to be quite a good reverb. Now, I've got the wet signal turned all the way up, of course, the dry all the way down. And I just use the whole preset here. OK, there's a few different presets there and a number of different shapes so you can control so you can adjust them. But that's all I did in this case. Importantly, and what I'd suggest is always use an EQ before it to do a high pass filter or a low cut filter. So in this case, if I just open that up, you can see I've cut everything sort of down below one K or so. So fairly aggressive there. I could even push up a little bit further. That would be fine. I've just got the reverb happening on that sort of high end of the frequencies. Again, this is to avoid making things sound too muddy. So let's take that vocal. I'll start playing it with the reverb level all the way down and I'll gradually introduce it. OK, let's have a listen to that with the rest of the song happening. That's the kind of effect that I was looking for. But most cases, it would be a lot more subtle and subtle than that. OK, so that's that sort of those spatial effects done. Now, let's just make sure that that vocal stays more present than the other instruments. So parallel compression is extremely effective and extremely easy to use. So grateful beginners. I have my vocal here going through to my vocal compression bus. You can see it here. And the actual compressor I'm using is on the pro channel. I'll just open that up here and we can see it inserted here. And it's got the easiest settings you'll ever use for a compressor because I've just got the input turned up full. OK, I've got the ratio set up very, very high. I've got the attack on very quick as fast as I can make it. So just grabbing everything and I've got the release on so that hangs in there for a long time. It keeps that compression switched on for a long time. So basically it's just crashing everything. OK, removing all the dynamics out of it. OK, so when I send it from my vocal, I then blend it in using this fader. That's the key. OK, so let's have a listen. Look at the needle. See what's happening when I play the vocal. So so it should sound awful, right? Well, it does actually sound awful, but because it's blended in, you can hardly hear. Let's just try and get an idea of how it sounds. I'll turn off all of the other elements. I'll get rid of the reverb. I'll get rid of the delay. I'll turn down the main fader. And so we won't be hearing the main vocal. Now we'll just be hearing the compressed vocal. It sounds like this. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. It's a bit mental, isn't it? You don't want your vocal to sound like that. So as I say, if you blend it in, so I'll bring the main vocal back up, I'll play it and then I'll gradually blend this in. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. So it's very effective at generally keeping the vocals up front without you necessarily hearing that anything is going on. So if we switch on what we've got so far, switch the reverb back on, I'll switch on the delay. And we've got that compression on. Now let's have a listen to that vocal in the mix. Now, only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Now, there's one more thing I can do here was more than one thing. But the next thing we're going to talk about, I alluded to earlier and that is with doubling. So something that can be very effective is doubling. This can really add impact to a vocal. And I like to use it on any part that I want to have extra impact, but it's normally going to be something like a chorus. OK, now with doubling, what we do is we re-record the vocal several times, in this case, only twice. And then we pan hard left and hard right. It's important here that you do re-record the vocals. You can't just copy and paste them. That doesn't work. That's they're too close to each other. They're identical to each other. We want those slight differences, but roughly the singer should feel like they're just singing the same thing again. It's the slight differences which make this work. So I've done it here. You can see my main vocal is over here. I've got, as I said earlier, the chorus and the verse parts. And then I've got these two, Susie, Duplicate, Left, Susie, Duplicate, Right. They are over here and they are both going through all the way over here to a bus. OK, the Duplicate, Vox bus. Let's have a listen to the vocal by itself. Let's listen to the duplicates by themselves. Today, honey, I was there with. Now, listen to both together. Only yesterday, honey, I was there with you. Now, this is my personal choice, but I like to leave those duplicates completely dry. I don't send them through delay or reverb or anything like that. I think it helps for the presence of the vocals for those to remain dry. But you can experiment with using effects if you wish. So those are the key components of my vocal processing in a mix in terms of the way I've got things routed and the plugins. But what about the actual mixing? OK, so this video went on much longer than I thought it would. So I'm going to give you a quick explanation about how I set the levels of the vocals. And these two things are very, very important for me. First of all, I start off with the chorus or the loudest part of the song. I always find it's best to start there and then work through to the other sections of the song. I used to start at the beginning of the song, yeah, which is normally quite quiet with my style of writing and gradually builds up. They start with the loudest part. What I like to do is set the level of my vocal first and then bring the other instruments up underneath it. Now, a lot of people struggle with saying that they find it difficult to get their vocal to be present. And I found that that was a struggle for me before when I used to start off with the instruments first and then bring up the vocals. I guess it's sort of you'd think it would be the same difference, but I guess it's because, you know, you're prioritising those vocals and you're making sure they stay on top. Whereas before you're sort of prioritising everything else and then trying to squeeze the vocals in there or trying to shove them on top of everything else. Anyway, it's a philosophical difference in approach, but it works for me if I start off with vocals first. Let me know about that. Give this a try once and see if it doesn't revolutionise the way that your vocals fit into your mix. Now, as I say, I start off with the loudest part first. That's usually the chorus. Now, often when I when I've set the levels right and it's sounding great, I'll then go to the verses and it will sound out. It won't sound good in terms of balance. That's when you need to use automation. If you're just trying to use a fader and setting a level for your vocals for the whole song all the way through, even though your song is dynamic and it starts off low and gets louder in other parts, then obviously the balance is going to be out in other parts of the song. I've got other videos on automation. I'll put a link for those in the description down below. But do make sure you use automation. Otherwise, you will never get your whole song sounding like it's in. Balance. So what do you find most difficult about recording vocals? Was there any sort of light bulb moments in this video? Something you thought, ah, I must try that. Let me know in the comments down below. If you're really struggling with something in particular that everyone know in the comments down below, maybe we can help each other out. Thank you so much for joining me in this video. Check the link in the description down below for my Patreon page where for as little as one dollar per month, you can help me help you by making more videos like this. And I'll see you in the next video.