A Beginner's Guide To Mixing Vocals In GarageBand [GarageBand Tutorial]

hey songwriters welcome to the studio my name is Dean and in this video we're looking at how to mix high quality vocals in GarageBand over the past several years I've gotten to mix tons of songs for paying clients students and my own originals all in GarageBand so in this video I want to show you my process behind mixing a high-quality vocal in GarageBand so let's dive in so before we get into all the fancy mixing stuff like EQ and compression and reverb we actually need to back up a couple steps and talk about recording and editing so we'll start with two recording quick tips number one don't record into a wall whatever size room you're in just get into the middle of the room back away from the walls because it'll help eliminate reflections a reflection is where your voice hits a wall and comes back and is captured by the microphone another time and it makes the recording just sound a bit cheap and like it's in a tin can the second recording tip is record at a healthy signal volume here I have three different takes recorded at three different volumes the first recording is what I would call a healthy signal it's between fifty and sixty percent of the way up the meter the second vocal here is too quiet and what happens when you try and boost a low signal like this is that you'll boost a lot of the ambient sounds in the room to eye comes or buzzes or clicks or pops and the last recording is too loud or what we call too hot you can see right here it's beginning to clip which is where it's so loud you go into the red and it distorts your voice it never sounds good the last thing you want to do before you go into mixing and processing your vocal is a little bit of editing and all we're trying to do here in the editing phase is eliminate some of those sounds at the front or tail end of your recording that we don't want to hear let me solo a part in this lead vocal and let you hear what I'm talking about so did you hear that big lipsmack before I started singing and then how I clicked the mouse after I finished the take so the first technique for eliminating these sounds would simply be using the shave tool hold your mouse over the end or the beginning of a take and you can actually shave off those sounds on either side and not do it so much much cleaner right then the second option would be using what's called the noise gate so hit B on your typing keyboard and we're gonna click the noise gate on and drag it up and what this is going to do is eliminate any extra sounds outside of the singing vocal so what's the big difference between the two well when you edit it manually you can keep your breaths when you do a noise gate it's gonna eliminate all of the noises so it's really an artistic choice for you so now that we've got a quality clean recording we're ready to start processing the vocal and first on the list is EQ which is basically how we sonically clean up your vocal because within a vocal there are parts that we're gonna want to highlight but then there's also parts that we're gonna want to minimize because they just sound muddy or wolfy and what we're gonna do is hit beyond our typing keyboard to bring up the smart controls or the mix window here in GarageBand then next we're going to go over to the plugins drop down menu where we can see all of our effects so to start EQ aware going to simply go over to the EQ tab and I'm going to show you two really important foundational mousse that you can make on your vocal first is what's called a high-pass filter and this is going to clean up a lot of the muddiness on the low end of your vocal and what I usually do is hit play on this vocal and turn up the high-pass filter until I can really hear it working and then I simply back it down until I can barely tell it's working cuz I know it did and I know it did it the second foundational move is the high shelf boost this is going to give brightness and presents to your vocal I typically start it right at the dot and then I never do it more than about five DBS and the next are to more advanced moves again we're going to have one boost and one cut so first we'll do the cut and all we're gonna do is turn on any bands and we're going to be looking between 500 Hertz and 1k and what I like to do is put it up really high and basically what you're doing is scanning around for the most offensive or ugliest frequency you can find and dr. Ivan said you hear that ouch that hurts my ears so we're simply going to go the other direction and subtract or do what's called a scoop down to about 4 or 5 DBS and what that's doing is it's cleaning up the vocal and now for our addition we're gonna grab another band and be looking in the range between about 2k and 5k here but before I do that I want to thin out this ban a little bit by going down to Q double clicking and doing about a 3 and somewhere in this region lives a part of my voice and a part of your voice that sounds really nice and we want to highlight that and know to even say it so now we've done four moves to basic and to more advanced so let's turn the EQ off and back on and see if we can hear the difference and not to even say it and not to even say it now the difference is very subtle and that's why EQ can be tricky but if you'll just follow these four steps I've shown you you'll end up with a clean vocal every time next on the list is compression the compressor is a tool that evens out your vocal performance by taking some of the louder parts of your vocal and turning them down and some of the quieter parts of your performance and turning them up and the result makes your vocal sound more present and more full in the mix so I'll turn the compressor on I'll click here in the middle to bring up its window and now let's translate some of these knobs so the threshold is what's going to bring down some of those louder parts of the song then on the other end is the gain knob which is going to bring up some of the quieter parts of your performance then here in the middle is the ratio knob which controls how much the vocal is being compressed how much you're bringing that high down in that low up the attack is how fast the compressor turns on but we're not going to touch that in this video don't worry about it so first I'm gonna bring down the threshold until my vocal starts hitting about halfway down this meter and now to even say it and no to it and next I'm gonna go to the bottom end and turn up my gain or my quieter parts to about three DBS it's just a good starting point but where you're going to start to hear a big difference is when I turn up the ratio right now we have a very gentle ratio so we're gonna push that up a bit and squeeze the vocal so I'll take it up to three and we'll give it a go and now you can hear it start to compress it down now I could be more aggressive with it I'll take it up to eight to one now now that really sounds like a pop vocal so as a general rule of thumb with ratios if you've got a more singer-songwriter style song you'll probably be about 3 to 1 or maybe even 4 to 1 and your ratio but if you're going for a pop sound that's more highly produced you're probably looking at about an 8 to 1 ratio so that's all for the compressor now let's move on to so in GarageBand you have a lot of great stock reverbs that are really easy to work and the first one I want to show you is right down here the master reverb all we have to do is turn that up to about halfway and give it a try and not do it so for this song that's probably too much reverb but for your song that might be just right for me I'm gonna back it down just a bit but here's a little reverb trick that I want to share with you you can actually combine two different reverbs together to get a more full lush sound and when you're combining reverbs you'll typically combine a longer reverb with a short reverb in our case here the master reverb is a long reverb it has a very long tail but this reverb here on the panel is actually a short reverb so if I turn it way up you can hear it now that's way too much but I just wanted you to hear it so if I back that down now we have a combination of both reverbs which is really quite a nice sound so my closing tip on reverb is be careful how much reverb you use newer mixers tend to use too much reverb so put it in a spot where you can hear the reverb but it's not just overtaking the mix and way overdone so next on the list is adding a bit of delay to the vocal and again GarageBand makes that really easy all we have to do is come down here to the master echo we'll turn it up to halfway and give it a try and do it so obviously for this song that's way too strong so I'm gonna back it down again so you can hear just a little bit of that echo tail at the end of each phrase which makes the vocal sound bigger and fuller and just better the fifth and final thing on our mix list is tuning the vocal so we'll start by hitting e on our typing keyboard going over to the track tab and here you'll see the pitch correction window so we'll start of course by pushing up the pitch correction slider and as a general rule of thumb if I'm doing something singer-songwriter it's usually between 65 and 70 but if I'm doing something more pop it's usually between 80 and 85 and if you want the auto-tune effect then you're gonna push the slider all the way up to 100 so I'm gonna go on up to 80 and then second I'm gonna hit the limit to key button which is gonna push every note that I sing towards the key of my song all right so now let's try it before and after now after today so here's one last tip with pitch correction to get the best result you really need to know the key of your song and put that up here but if you don't know the key of your song then simply turn off the limit to key button and it will simply push any note you're singing to the closest note you're singing as opposed to the closest note within the key up here alright so now let's enjoy the work that we've done I'm gonna turn off all of the processing and do a comparison of the before and after very very nice so the last quick thing I want to show you is how to process your background vocals and this is really really easy to save yourself time you're simply gonna hit command D on your typing keyboard which creates an exact duplicate of that track including all of the processing that you've already done so next I'll just rename the track and then I'm gonna do three things number one I'm gonna add a bit more reverb to the background vocal because I want to give it more space and more depth than the lead vocal number two we're simply gonna pan that background vocal a little to the right and then number three we're gonna bring back its volume and all of these moves give your background vocal its own place in the mix without competing with the lead vocal so now let's have a listen to our lead and background vocals together [Music] now this is a process that yes it's gonna take you some time to learn and master but once you do it you could probably do all of this in ten or twenty minutes so as we close up this video I just want to share a little bit about what the songwriting studio is now you might think this is a channel all about GarageBand and that's kind of true but not really you see my goal is to train and equip skilled artists to write to record and produce and then to release their own music from home so if you're interested in growing in your craft as a songwriter learning to produce your songs in a high-quality way and then being able to publish and release your songs and stick around and I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: The Songwriting Studio

Views: 585,318

Keywords: mixing vocals, garageband, garageband tutorial, garageband guide, songwriting studio, mixing vocals for beginners, how to eq, vocal compression technique, vocal reverb, garageband skills, garageband songs, garageband training, recording vocals, basic tutorial, beginner's guide, vocal mixing bootcamp, clean vocals, autotune in garageband, autotune, how to record vocals in garageband, how to mix vocals in garageband, eq vocals in garageband, garageband compressor

Id: e4C5DxOepsM

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020