5 Easy Vocal Production Tips You MUST Try | Make Pop Music

what's up make pop music it's austin here from make pop music and austin hall audio and today i'm going to show you five vocal production techniques to get your songs from sounding like this [Music] to something like this [Music] what's up everybody it's austin here from make pop music and austin hall audio and we are back with another tutorial and for this week i wanted to do something that you guys asked a lot in the comments or on our group and that is different vocal production techniques to really get your vocals kind of highlighted in a song so we're not going to be focusing on how to get a good vocal mix today we've done that in videos in the past and i'm sure we'll do more videos on that in the future but today we're going to focus on if you already have one vocal and it's mixed pretty well but it's still just not having the emphasis that you need in the song i'm going to show you five of my favorite different tips and techniques to kind of improve your vocal production improve your vocal arrangement and really get those vocals sitting big and huge on a nice pop record that you probably have kind of going on in your mind if you have any questions about any of the techniques or the tips that we do in this video let us know in the comments down below and i will try to answer as many of those as possible and if you want to listen to this song the song that we're using for the demo today is actually out it's called break lights by jaden luke so there will be a link in the description below where you can just go listen to that in its entirety if you want i did produce a song mix it mastered it in everything it's been out for a little while so if you want to check it out definitely go support the artist i'm sure they would appreciate it other than that let's go ahead and hop in and see five of these techniques but before you do that if you do like this video make sure you like comment and subscribe because that will help out our channel a ton and if you want to see more of our content head over to makepopmusic.com where you can check out all of our other free and paid content over there and then other than that let us know what videos you want to see in the description below but without too much talking let's actually hop in and take a look at these five techniques all right let's dive into the song i'm going to show you what it sounds like with just the one lead vocal because that's kind of the starting point for any song so we'll start with one lead vocal and then i'll kind of show you the different five tips that we're going to talk about so here's the section that we're going to kind of focus on today [Music] so as you can hear production sounds great vocal mix actually sounds really really good vocal performance was solid but it's just lacking a little bit of energy so let's go ahead and talk about the first thing i like to focus on when i am really trying to dial in vocal production and a vocal arrangement and that is getting the right kind of actual arrangement at hand so a lot of the tips we'll talk about you can do with whatever vocal you have whether that's one vocal a couple vocals but for this tip right here this is actually going to happen in the tracking and engineering phase so let's go ahead and talk about what we can do to thicken these up so we have the one lead vocal right here it's got its vocal chain great lights watch the body up in the la so the first thing that i want to do is i want to go ahead and get a lower vocal so he's saying this just one octave lower so we've got something like this and it's basically just the same vocal chain copied i just drug down the volume just a little bit break lights wants to party up in l.a i'm never keeping up with this place so adding an extra take of the unison but one octave down can really help thicken that out i'll kind of show you what that sounds like in the mix so now we have these two vocals going [Music] so feel free to add something like that and then what we're also going to do is we've talked about this on the channel before we're going to add extra takes of that lead melody but we're going to add it for the left and for the right side so what i do is i have the vocalists sing the same exact thing but it's a totally different recording so you can see right here this is comp 1 comp 2 comp 3. comp 3 is spread all the way to the right comp 2 is spread all the way to the left basically just the same vocal chain i just adjust some of the sims to make sure it doesn't wash out but let's go ahead and take a listen to what these sound like without the lead lights [Music] and now when we throw that into the mix you'll hear a pretty big difference especially in terms of just overall volume and width [Music] so adding things like that we're going to call those unison so unison is basically the same melody either the same octave an octave lower or an octave higher they're not really adding any extra harmonic content what they're doing is they're just adding a little bit of width and depth and then you do the same thing for harmonies so if you guys want a video to kind of show you how i go through and highlight keywords and phrases to show the artist where we need to stack these things let me know because i can do a full video on that but for all intents and purposes of this video i just want to show you what a difference kind of adding some of these different vocal arrangement layers would sound like so we have two takes of a harmony pretty much the same exact chain as well we're just only panning these 79 percent left and right instead of a hundred um so now we've got those layered on [Music] the body up in l.a i'm never keeping up and then we've got a second harmony right here so we've got harmony 2a and 2b so these are going to be 90 left and right [Music] then we have a couple extra that come in on keywords and phrases we've got this right here and that layered up with all of these sounds like this and then we've got even more and then when we add that with the extra kind of unison vocals it's going to sound a little bit something like this let's show you in the mix so you can actually really hear how big of a difference this makes [Music] and then you can even go a step further and you can start adding things like ad-libs this is all gonna fall into the typical kind of vocal arrangement that you're gonna sit down and talk about with your artist or you're gonna write out yourself but these are things that need to be decided before it gets to the mixing phase [Music] and you can instantly hear with all of those extra kind of stacks those harmonies and those ad-libs doing a full vocal arrangement rather than just having the artist sing the vocal one time can be absolutely detrimental to getting the vocal sound that you're going for because if you're looking for that big polished pop sound it's just not going to normally happen with one vocal especially in a pretty dense chorus like this let's go ahead and let's talk about tip number two and that is actually adding artificial harmonies so this is something that i like doing especially in songs that lean a little bit more towards kind of hip-hop instrumentation so like this has the 808s this has the kind of hip-hop driven drums and what we're going to do is we basically just duplicate that lead vocal and it's going to sound a little bit something like this and you can even see this is a high comp one this is the same exact vocal so literally all i did was duplicate it and then the first thing that i like to do is throw on something like doubler because we're going to want to spread this sound out and i'm just using the four voices i am going to leave the direct sound in there because we're going to tune it down but if you weren't you could easily just take that out and then i'm going to go ahead and let's go to auto tune which is what i have first in my chain and i'm just going to drag it down an octave you could do this with pretty much any pitch correction software you can even drag it down in cubase i like using auto tune because it'll only it'll always kind of adjust the format as well which is just going to give me a little bit smoother like less artifact driven uh tone so here's what we have with that [Music] and one thing to keep in mind is since you're tuning it down an octave um you're gonna have to probably eq this a little bit differently and you're gonna have to de-esses differently than you did that original lead because all of those s's are now falling in a completely different range so i found typically on a vocal i start to see issues with s's around like five to seven k and like 10 to 12 k so what we're going to do is we're going to basically compensate for that going down an octave so we're going to look for sibilance errors kind of in the like two to three k area and then in the like five to 7k areas so i'm just going to ds that pretty hard so we're not getting any of those because i really don't need them from this and then the last thing i'll do is i'll hit it with some eq i'm just going to use the cubase stock eq for this you could easily use something like pro-q and filter it out but this ended up actually just doing exactly what i needed [Music] and once that's what set is uh going to do is could just kind of get it out of the way of those lead vocals so it's not so bright because this is really just a textural thing so when i add this with all of these other vocals you can hear that it's tucked in really really low but especially in areas where all of this vocal production won't happen like some of these verses back here it can be a really really cool piece of like vocal ear candy that if the artist doesn't send you that many stems you can do something like this and easily kind of supplement the production [Applause] and then let's go look at it somewhere like like back here for instance break lights she drives double the limit but she don't mind cajun it's just a really cool thing that you can do and it's one of those things that's easy to do no matter what stage of the production process you're in you could also do the same thing where you pitch it up an octave but again just kind of look out for some of those eq and ds issues when you start changing the actual kind of harmonic content by pitching it up or down all right let's go ahead and let's talk about tip number three that you could do to kind of improve your vocal production and that is getting a little bit more creative with delays and reverbs i typically find that people will just kind of set up their delay in their reverb sends and just kind of automate those throughout the song so i guess the first part of this tip would be using different reverb and delay sends so i've talked about it on the channel before but here's kind of what i do typically i like something like a really really short reverb that's just going to be like a room or a really short plate and what that's going to do is that's just going to give a little bit of width to that vocal so we're not going to be really looking for that tail or like that signature kind of vocal reverb that you're thinking of but it just helps put this in a little bit better space i'm nothing like you but it's true what you do is what i like about you yeah just kind of gives it a little bit more um space in the mix and then what i'll do too is i'll add something like a long reverb so it depends on what i'm doing for the song but sometimes i'll use pro r sometimes i'll use verb sweet sometimes i'll use vintage verb for this i literally just put on pro r with the stock settings and it did exactly what i wanted [Applause] so that's going to give it a little bit of its space and then what i do is i kind of do the same thing with delays where i'll have a stereo vox delay which is going to be the longer delay so this is going to use repeater and i'm using a quarter note and i actually have it spread stereo so it's not ping-ponging it is hitting both sides at the same time but it's not coming down the middle which i find kind of creates a tighter vocal coming right down the middle of the mix so here's what that sounds like lights watch the body up in l.a i'm never keeping up with this paint [Music] and it just puts it in a nice little uh nice little area and then what i'll do is i'll have something like a slapback delay again giving me just a little bit of whip and just honestly like smooshing the vocal into the mix a little bit without going nuts with compression and i just used this uh vocal slap delay preset that was in uh h delay and here's what that sounds like eliza wants to party up in l.a so doing things like that like stacking different delays and reverbs can give you a cool space but i find sometimes that's still not what we need in the mix so like let's take a look at an area where i do some of these extra little vocal delay and reverb little tricks so here's the first area where we're going to do a delay throw tomorrow [Music] so what i did is there's a couple ways that you can do this i'm just duplicating the lead vocal right now and you can either put on a delay at like 100 wet so it will not happen at the same time what i did for this is i literally just physically dragged it back so you'll see right here let me get these vocals going then cuz she lives like no but i can still process that as a delay throw so what i'll do is i'll just go ahead and put on something like repeater but since i'm dragging it back i don't need it to be 100 wet so i just have another little quarter note delay then what i'm going to do is basically drown this in reverb [Music] and then what i wanted to do for this one was i wanted to give it a little bit of extra sauce that wasn't happening in a lot of those delay sins so i ended up bit crushing it and then i just mix that bit crusher down a little bit and you get something like this [Music] and then i just filtered it out so we make sure that we don't have too much of that uh top end and low end that's going to happen especially when we bit crush it we kind of just ban pass everything that sound like this like no tomorrow comes [Music] and doing this little trick where you're not doing it on a send you're actually just manually placing these delays where you want can be a really good way for you to add extra effects it can be a really good way for you to really control the timing of how they come in and how they exit and it's just a really nice way to make sure that you have these extra little pops everywhere because other than that like the main quarter note delay the main long reverb those kind of continue through the whole song so if you have areas where you can do these extra special little ones we've got something right here that's just kind of like a supplemental delay on the end of phrases [Music] and then when we put on the repeater and the pro r we get something like this lights never works a day just late nights waking up and those are pretty simple but that's just enough that's a kind of example on how you can do it on 100 wet and then it just gives you a little bit more flexibility over like automating something like the actual sense that you already have set up and then you can even do the same thing with reverb so i'm going to continue consider this like the same tip but what i did was i literally just duplicated that lead vocal one more time [Music] what i'm going to do is i'm going to throw on a little bit of h delay i used a different delay just so it would kind of give me a little bit different texture for this and we're going to have that pretty aggressive because what we're going to do with this reverb is we're going to have it 100 wet and the key is if you're going to basically layer something that you've duplicated over itself you're going to want some kind of effect on 100 wet to change it enough so you're not going to have phase issues because if we only have this reverb at 50 percent wet and that delay at 50 wet we're still going to get some of that dry signal that is literally just duplicated and it's going to start to cause some wonky issues but what we can do is we can throw on a reverb like this and we can really kind of spread the sound out waking up i always fall for this amusement shoot so it's the same vocal and the same vocal chain all the way up to this delay in this reverb but since we have a bit of delay and then that reverb is 100 wet we can tuck that in without there being phase issues but it kind of gives us a nice little bit of space so here's what that sounds like with the artificial low vocal and then all of the vocal stacks never works a day just late nights waking up so it just adds a little bit i almost just use this as like a pad that i can pop under everything for width and for texture and just to kind of uh get the mix not feeling so dry and not feeling so um kind of disconnected so you can use it however you want a lot of the time what i'll do is i'll just end up using a layer like that in a chorus just to give me a little bit more depth and space let's go ahead and talk about tip number four and that is using a vocoder to kind of add some of your own different textural elements and some of your own harmonic elements so what we're going to do is again i've just duplicated that vocal so we can see how many different tips we can do by using that vocal just by using effects at 100 wet to add a little bit of sauce so we have the vocoder right here cause she got no brake lights never works so it's that vocal duplicated but there is no vocal chain anywhere on this and i'm gonna use auto-tune vocodist it's what i've been using recently at the moment i was actually using a different vocoder on this for the actual mix and the release but since i've been using this one a lot lately and people wanted to see how to actually set this up i figured why not uh you know kill two birds with one stone so that's what we're gonna do so i have vocodus right here it sounds like nothing right now because what i've done is i've selected the pics track to be midi so the first thing that you want to do with the vocoder is set up some midi so right now i'm just literally taking these big extended cords that we have it's not doing any you know like specific things it's just these big kind of pad elements and then what you need to do especially in cubase is you're just going to go to the midi out and you're going to send that to the vocoder midi in so now we've got this midi triggering this vocal [Music] and then once you do that i'll kind of show you how i like to kind of set my sounds so vocoders is really cool because it's got auto-tune built in so i can save a little bit of cpu and not have to tune the vocal going into vocoder to make sure we don't get any wobble but we've got it on a minor which is the key that i have we're compressing the sound a little bit going into vocoder which is going to give me just a little bit tighter signal and it's going to make sure that we can just really compress that i don't want a lot of dynamics in this whatsoever and then what i also do is i put a little bit of chorus on this and then spread this out so when you turn on vocodes it's going to sound a little bit something like this [Music] and doing something like that can get out of the way where it's not going to kind of cause issues with my main vocal but it's going to give me a cool little bit of texture then you can always just flip through these there's a bunch of different kind of filters every vocoder will operate differently you can even side chain your own sounds in however for this i just needed something pretty typical and then i just adjusted the two oscillators that they have set up it's really easy right here with this xy control [Music] so they basically have it operating as it goes from like a saw all the way to a square and then somewhere in the middle is like a couple different pulse with modulation squares um so i'm just going to set it right here in the middle it sounded cool in the mix when i was working on it and then you can really just go through and adjust this however you want for your song there's going to be a million different ways to do that but the cool thing about this is is no matter what we do i can change any of these notes let's pitch it up a little bit [Music] i could even go in and i could write melodies on the keys so if i wanted to play it more like a talk box all i would have to do is just play a little melody route it through that and then i could even route a sound but adding something like a vocoder is a really nice way for me to add width and texture especially if the artist doesn't supply these so jaden was was good enough to kind of follow the vocal sheet that i sent over but when we took that vocoder in it gives us even a little bit more width and texture [Music] so let's go to this area that we showed you first and i'll kind of show you what everything's sounding like now that we have all these different elements before we get to our last tip tips [Music] all right so tip four add that vocoder let's move on to tip five and that's gonna do add some wide kind of crushed vocals especially if you need a little bit more saturation so we're pretty good right here for all of these but when we get to these nods it's still kind of getting lost in this dense mix a little bit [Music] so what we're going to do is once again duplicate that first vocal and i've got the vocal chain right here [Music] what i'm going to do though is i'm going to filter out a little bit of highs and lows because as we start saturating it and stuff like that i want to make sure that we're not going to be saturating too much top end or too much bottom end and then let's go ahead and let's just use avox punch by antares this is going to be some pretty aggressive compression [Music] cause she got no brake lights and it's gonna add those cool little punchy transients which ends up sounding really cool when we add all of this extra kind of compression with the saturation because as you saturate things they'll just naturally compress themselves and we'll start to lose a little bit of that and it might get smushed so we'll add something like that to kind of counteract that let's go ahead and add duo so we can spread this vocal out this is what's going to help us not have phase issues [Music] [Music] and then let's go ahead and add that saturation let's go ahead and add a little bit of uh de-esser just to make sure that we're not killing ourselves [Applause] i'm going to filter out that low end because as you add saturation low intensity get pretty gnarly and then what we're going to do is we're going to add repeater so we have a quarter note this is actually doing a ping pong to give us a little bit of different spatial awareness than we've currently had in this mix and then we're going to add something like pro r with a totally different reverb setting to give this its own space so now we've got this vocal which is the same exact vocal as the lead just processed with all of those extra things basically from here down [Music] cuz she got no brake lights and it's pretty aggressive you can kind of use that in the mix as you want but doing something like that like saturating the vocals spreading them out and then just kind of filtering them and tucking them in can give you a really really nice bit of punch and width without you having to go in and add a million different vocal layers so now that we have that let's take a listen to this kind of post hook kind of drop that we have in the song [Music] and that pretty much does it for the five tips that we're gonna talk about so one more time i'll show you a preview of what it sounded like before we had any of that so here's what it sounds like with just the lead vocals [Music] and if you follow along to all the steps in this video you can take something like that and turn it into something like this [Music] [Music] hopefully this helped and there we have it there are five different vocal techniques and vocal production tips that you can use to help take your vocals from being a little bit boring and a little bit stale to being the huge wide thick kind of all-encompassing vocals that you'll hear on top of a pop arrangement so hopefully this video will give you some ideas of things that you can do to kind of spice up your vocal production and your vocal mixes but if you have any questions please let us know in the comments down below again if you do like the song and want to hear it there will be a link in the description and if you want to check out more of our stuff to help support the channel you can head over to makepopmusic.com and check out all of our free and paid content over there but if you like this video make sure you like comment and subscribe that helps us out a ton helps us reach more people so we can help more people and then let us know what videos you want to see in the comments down below but that's going to do it for this video we will be back next week with another one much love everybody stay safe peace [Music] you

Channel: Make Pop Music

Views: 15,441

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Id: 9H-qxu77blk

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021