3 Vocal EQ Rules

hey this is joe from home studio corner let's talk about mixing vocal specifically using eq as i thought about how i've evolved my vocal mixing process over the years kind of honed in on three things that have really helped me and that's what i want to share with you today these three rules for how to eq vocals so let's just dive into the first one shall we rule number one listen to what everyone else is doing i know i know i'm a musician and i march to the beat of my own drum i don't need to listen to nobody well yes i want you to do you but if you would agree that there are some standards that we all kind of expect to hear when we listen to music then it makes sense that you would pay attention to what is happening out there in your itunes and spotify libraries what do the vocals sound like of your favorite albums from your favorite artists mixers and producers chances are we're a little bit ear blind to what we do and a lot of times what we're doing doesn't really sound a lot like what they're doing and it's generally just a matter of waking up and realizing it so for me i love the sound of a big full warm beefy vocal i love you know when i get to sing into a big expensive tube microphone into a tube preamp and it makes me sound all big and beefy i love it beef for example here is a vocal that i recorded at a friend's studio through i believe it's a five thousand dollar microphone through i think another fifteen hundred dollar tube channel strip it sounds pretty great by itself nice and beefy here we go look how far we've come our mothers would be proud that's a cool sound in vocal but in a mix with everything playing the whole band that vocal's got a lot of low end it's got a lot of muddiness down there that kind of sort of frequency that's gonna cause problems and when i go listen to my favorite albums whether it's more chill acoustic stuff straight up rock pop or anything in between even country i'm not hearing a vocal that sounds this warm and this muddy yeah this is great for a raw track but i need to use eq and maybe a high pass filter and an eq to tame this down to something more reasonable specifically i remember listening to a playlist of kind of the most popular pop songs at the time and every one of those vocals the thing i noticed was they were bright there wasn't a ton of warmth they weren't harsh they sounded great and they weren't overly sibilant meaning they weren't so bright that when the singer sang an s or a t it chopped your face off it didn't sound like there was a big boost in the upper upper frequencies it just sounded like the vocal didn't have excessive warmth and muddiness which allows it to sit right on top of that mix which is what we're all trying to do that leads us to our second rule rule number two hold off on boosting especially in the highs so like i said before i was listening to major label releases and then listening to my vocal mix and my vocal mix sounded a lot warmer i would go so far as to say i kind of preferred my sound over there so i had to have a little bit of a come to jesus moment of hmm if every vocal across different genres doesn't sound as thick as mine mine's probably the problem mine's probably too thick i'm too close to it i need some perspective hence these references and i'm not even talking about sitting down and listening to the reference then listening to my mix then listening to the reference then listening to my mix i'm talking about i go i go to the grocery store to grab a six-pack and i'm just listening to music on the way and i'm just making note of how the vocals sound i'm just paying specific attention to the vocals then when i come back to my studio and listen to mine and i say huh mine's a lot thicker that tells me something and i can get to work so the big thing that i realize is for the most part my job with the vocal to take this vocal is to make it sound more like that vocal and generally that's going to happen by doing more cutting of frequencies than boosting for example this vocal right here if i slap an eq on here and i boost the top end here's what we get look how far we've come it sounds a lot brighter and cooler and of course brighter is generally better to our ears but that low end that was there that i just played for you before the muddiness that's still there it hasn't gone anywhere we've just added some highs on top of those lows and it's still a problem so rather than doing that i would do something like this look how far we've come our mothers would be fraught still has some warmth it's not it's not this right it's not completely lacking any life at all look how far it's not that but it's also not this sort of a sound either it's a happy medium there's a there's a balance there's this one spot in there where you've taken away enough of that want wall but you've left enough warmth to keep the vocal sounding cool right and remember depending on the mix if it's a big dense mix with lots of guitars and other stuff that vocal can be even thinner than this and it's probably going to work out just fine but in my experience time and time again mixing hundreds and hundreds of vocals i found when i just go in and start boosting stuff i generally make more problems for myself than when i first kind of find those frequencies that are misbehaving and tame them down a little bit then i can still maybe go boost the top end a lot of times i might still need to do that but after i've kind of tamed what's happening in the lows and the low mids and the mids make sense rule number three know your zones when i think about eq'ing a vocal my mind typically divides that up into four sections of tone that are fairly different from one another so back in rule number one we talked about listening to other vocals to help us identify the problems in our vocal well now we need to divide that vocal up into zones and figure out where the problem lies so we can go into that zone to fix it if that makes sense to demonstrate those four zones i've pulled up the multi-band dynamics plug-in in studio one this is a multi-band compressor but for this i'm just using it so i can isolate the different zones we can listen to them and hear what they sound like so the four zones are the bottom zone is from zero to 250 to 300 hertz this is where on the good side a lot of your warmth comes from but on the bad side is where a lot of the mud comes from okay and that zone sounds like this [Music] there's a lot of deep low end there but there's a whole lot of like that kind of pokes through that was what we were trying to fix earlier when we apply that eq now without those frequencies the vocal can sound pretty empty look how far so we need some of them there but when there's too much of them it can sound muddy zone number two goes from 300 to 1k this is a very mid-range sort of zone and in my brand i think of that as a place where you get some resonance of the vocal a lot of kind of the fundamental frequencies of that vocal not the muddy stuff but kind of the notes that are being sung typically are residing in this range and it's a it's an important range if you get rid of it the vocal can sound super wonky look how far we've it's got that kind of smiley face eq sound all lows and all highs and no mids we need the mids but we need to be careful with how much are there if we get rid of them too much it sounds like that and sounds weird almost like a you know jacked up hi-fi stereo system but if we have too much of them things can sound kind of muffled here's what those frequencies sound like by themselves look how far we've come very similar to it used to be really popular to do like a a telephone effect on a piece of a vocal basically means removing a lot of the lows and the highs and just leaving that mid-range don't do that it's overdone but that's those frequencies while they don't sound great by themselves they're important to the mix and to the vocal to kind of give it a little bit of of resonance and so it sounds like a natural voice if we get rid of those it's bad if we have too much of that the vocal can sound kind of kind of hollow and just kind of muffled sounding okay zone number three for me is kind of between one and six k and that's kind of the clarity zone a lot of the sibilance of the vocal a lot of kind of the timbre of the voice the grit of the voice uh the clarity to understand what the person is singing a lot of that happens in one to six k so there's clarity on the good side on the bad side it can make things sound harsh or nasally nasally is kind of the main thing that i think of when i think of this range here's what that range sounds like by itself it's only prominent on some of the louder vowel sounds if we get over here to the chorus where i'm singing louder you'll notice there's more information happening in this upper mid-range zone i know i can hear you and as you can see that sounds kind of nasally uh and if you're not careful that can make the whole vocal all you hear in the mix is that frequency which we don't want of course if we remove all the high mids the vocal sounds weird too i know i can hear you there's a lot of information in the high mids that we need to be there if we remove it something's wrong okay zone four is up above that so 6k and up this is where when things are going great this is where that air is that nice crisp top end silky top end that we dream about that happens up here obviously if there's too much of it it can sound really harsh and strident there's not tons of information here just in a general raw vocal but once we've eq'd and then compressed that tends to have some prominence in our vocal sound here's what those highs sound like by themselves so it's a lot of that crispiness you saw when i boosted the vocal earlier with the eq it was those frequencies i was boosting the whole vocal maintained its general character and sound but those highs those sparkly top ends came out quite a bit that's where a lot of the sibilance can happen as well here's what happens if we don't have enough of those highs i know i can hear you sounds like an old recording through bagged mics and bad cables through a really long cable run onto a tape machine and then just a lot of signal loss we lost a lot of top end we need the top end there but as i said earlier if you go boosting this top end too quickly too early you're just going to add on to the problems you have rather than going in and handling some of the stuff that's happening in the mid range which is generally where a lot of the problems are all right this is the kind of video that annoys some people because i don't give them a specific formula of cut this frequency boost this frequency and you'll have a great vocal every time because that doesn't exist but in general the things that i've shared in this video that's the way i approach every vocal whether it's me whether it's a spoken word vocal whether it's a female vocal whether it's a loud vocal or a quiet vocal i'm thinking in terms of the things we talked about in this video if you'd like to learn more about mixing specifically my five-step mixing process which gives you kind of a road map for here's where i'm starting my mix and here's how i know when my mix is finished you'll love it check it out at fivestepmix.com otherwise i'll see in the next video

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 83,367

Rating: 4.9539051 out of 5

Keywords: mixing, gear, home recording, equipment, joe gilder, presonus, studio one, home studio, eq, vocals, boost, highs, lows, mids, low-mids, high-mids, zones, bright, muddy, sibilant, cut

Id: qghmv70X21w

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021

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[u/pasads82]

Thanks for sharing this gem...I am going to go ahead and watch all his videos....Thank you again!!!