Audio Recording

This is another Waves plugin related tutorial on vocal effects processing tips. In this tutorial, you will learn how to apply effects to a female vocal that is suitable for modern rock and pop music. As you have observed, modern female rock and pop vocals emphasize on lyrical clarity, dryness and up-front vocals.

The effects that you will use are combination of EQ and compression. In fact, this tutorial attempts to mix a vocal without any reverb at all so that the vocal should sound up-front in the mix. The lesser the effects, the better the vocal would sound as if it was rendered as a live performance.

Perform Perfect Vocal Take and Some Initial Processing

First, you should pay attention to the vocal recording quality. In this tutorial, the vocals are recorded using the following setup:

Rode NT1A condenser microphone == >Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 audio interface == > Reaper DAW recording at 24-bits/48KHz mono

Remember that you cannot have great vocals in your mix if the sound source is not good, so make sure that the vocalist sounds great and that he/she is using the correct microphones and proper analog to digital converters.

You should also pay attention to the peaks of the recording and some initial vocal editing after recording. For example in the screenshot below, the vocal has some leakage background noise before the formal start of the vocal take. You should remove that. Then the peak of the vocals should fall somewhere -16dBFS to maximum -6dBFS. In the vocal recording below, it lies around -9dBFS so its good vocal recording signal.

Vocal EQ using Waves Q3 Paragraphic EQ

Now its time to load the finalized vocal takes in the previous section and put them on the mix; the first thing you would do is to EQ the vocal to taste. No general rules here but below is my favorite female vocal EQ for pop and rock (using Waves Q3 Paragraphic EQ):

The main objective of the EQ setting is to remove the deep bass voice of the female vocals which it is not desirable (depends on the song). Then I boost mid-tones at 2000Hz to improve the clarity of the lyrics even at low volume.

Finally I put a little boost on the 15,000Hz to put some “airness” effect on the vocals.

Things to watch out for:

1.) Check for clipping in the EQ output.
2.) If it hits “red”, this means that the output is clipped because the input is too strong.
3.) To resolve the clipping issue, kindly lower down the input levels from 0dB to some target level where it does not safely clip anymore. For example in the above screenshot, the input level is set to -5dB.

Drill a hole in other tracks spectrum for vocals to sit in the mix

If you have other instruments that are occupying the same frequency spectrum as the vocals, then you need to cut them in the mix. This is very simple and can be done also with Waves Paragraphic EQ:

Cut -6dB (to -12dB) for guitars, violins, etc at 2000Hz Q=1.0

Of course, not a general rule and use your ears to assess whether cutting -6dB is enough for the vocals to sit properly. If not, cut more but not more than -12dB.

Waves C4 “Pop Vocal” Preset and DeEsser

Next is to compress the vocals. I use Waves C4 effects plugin with the POP Vocal preset such as shown below:

The primary reason why I use this plugin is that the resulting vocal sounds up-front in the mix with clarity common in modern pop and rock.

Then finally, the DeEsser plugin will be used reduce the female vocals “SHH” and “ESS” particularly affecting sibilance. Luckily Waves has this plug-in to reduce these occurrences. I am using two DeEsser plugin in series with presets set to female SSH on the first and female ESS on the second.

The final effects rack for the vocal effects processing are as follows:

Leveling the vocals on the mix

After adjusting the plug-in, the vocals should now sound great in the mix. Although it has one problem; probably the vocals are too strong with respect to other instruments or too soft. So adjust the volume fader of the vocal channel to match with the rest of the musical instruments in the mix.

One rule of thumb is to listen at moderate to low volume then play the mix. If you are able to distinguish the guitars from one another as well as being able to understand the lyrics, then the level of the mix is now good.

This is a sample raw mix down example with the vocals mixed using the above guidelines:

Title & Performance credits: “This is our night”; Jeanine Maningo
Copyright: Emerson R. Maningo, 2011