Saturday, January 26, 2019

How to mix a song with free plugins part 4/5: Vocals!



Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Now that with the previous articles of this serie we have built the walls of our mix, it's time to work on the focal point of our mix: the vocals (click here for an article abou the focus of our mix).

Most of the times the vocals are in facts the staple around which the whole song revolves, therefore is important to carve in the eq of the other instruments enough space for it to be heard properly; 
it's not easy to tell exactly where to carve since vocals are very different from singer to singer and from style to style, so the best thing to do is to locate the frequency area where the bulk of the sound is and to cut a couple of db in that area especially in the guitars and bass tracks, in order to prepare the stage for our vocal part (click here for an article that explains how to do it).

The first thing to do is to prepare an FX Track with the right effects (e.g. Delay and Reverb), and insert there an eq that makes them effective only from a certain frequency range up (we don't want to soak completely our vocal track also in the low end area making it sound like in a cavern), the process is described HERE, then we can proceed with the real mixing phase: 


Now that we have our vocal tracks mixed, it's worth mentioning the fact that there might be chances that our track is not yet sitting perfectly in the mix, for example there could be some part that is still too loud, or some part that gets covered by the other instruments. 
We might still need some additional step, which can be found here:


Once we are satisfied with the result we can move to the last step: keyboards and extra arrangements.

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