The Truth About Mixing Vocals Part 1

Hello and welcome to my first instalment of "The Truth About Mixing Vocals" I feel this is one of the most confusing and misunderstood areas in music engineering so I feel it is important that it be one of the first things I write about in this blog, I won't cover all aspects in this first post, but i will go through the main points as i feel there is a lot of bad information floating around Internet about this subject.

When I talk about mixing I'm mostly talking about Vocal EQ and compression but the first point I want to talk about is EQ.

It took me years to finally get this right and mainly due to bad advise that I took from forums, and people I used to think knew what they were talking about. The truth is mixing vocals is a lot easier then alot of people might tell you, I used the word confusing before because the concept of how simple it is can be quite hard to grasp when you first hear it.

I have used the image above to depict what alot of audio engineers on the web will tell you to do in regards to EQ, by cutting of all the frequencies below 100, boosting the mid range and cutting or adding air above 4khz amongst other things. From everybody I read I got a slightly different answer and I could never find one that actually worked the way i wanted it to, I listened for hours per day back and forth between my vocals and those on my favourite records trying to figure out what i was doing wrong.

And the simple truth of it is...

Leave your vocals the F#@k alone!! I realised that professional vocals sounded professional because they sounded natural, they hadn't been EQ'd to death, they had taken the natural sound of the vocal and used it. The only EQ I ever use on vocals is to cut a small amount off below the 100hz mark if there is any sub harmonic rumble caused by background noise. And even then in most cases it's not always nessacary.

There is also a lot of talk about de-essing vocals, a plug-in tool uses for removing an "ess" sound from a vocal (If you don't know what an ess sound is, it's the high 7khz+ spike caused by a vocalist when they sing a word with the letter S in it. it's usually more pronounced when the word ends with an S) again most of the time this is a completely usless thing to do, unless you have a serious problem with a vocal line causing an overpowering "ess" sound but usually if it's causing that much of a problem the better thing to do is get the vocalist to rerecord the vocal line without the mistake in the first place. I understand this is not always possible, but it is by far the best option.

After all that your still getting a bad EQ on the vocals, it's most likely you don't have a good microphone, recording vocals should be done with a large diaphram condenser microphone in most cases, unless you are going for a certain type of effect. You can pick up a new Rode NT-1A for around £100 and it's more then suitable to get a high quality vocal recording from. and even if you can afford better microphones it's one to have for the collection due to it's extremely low level to noise ratio.