Andrew Scheps Vocal Mixing Trick | Get Your Vocals To Cut Through The Mix

everybody's Joe from greenlight sound calm and today we've got a look at a specific mixing technique that's employed by Andrew Shep's and for those of you who don't know Andrew Shep's relies on a lot of parallel processing in his mixing and this specific technique is a vocal mixing trick that helps you get a vocal to cut through a very dense mix I want to do two things today first use the tools that Andrew Shep's use to get this done at least in the box and then show you how you can achieve the same exact effect using stock plugins that you may have inside your DAW it relies on three plugins in a row the first one being a vintage pull tech EQ driving a signal into an la-2a and back into a pultec again so pultec la-2a pultec if you don't have these exact plugins that's okay I'm using the I came ulti media pull tech emulation and the waves CLA to a la-2a emulation Andrew chefs when he does this actually uses the UA pull tech which I also have him just using i kaze in this case and he does use the CLA to a to do this again if you don't have this exact ones it's okay so the basic process works like this with the first instance of the pull tech we cut low end out I put it on 100 Hertz and 3.8 attenuation or cut that's not DB on a full Tech it's actually less than that that's a really wide shelf cut I've got my bandwidth set all the way up at 10 so very very wide on the top-end we select 8k boost 3.6 so cut the low-end boost the top-end that's all driving into an la-2a and you can use any la-2a emulation you have as long as it has this knob right here the knob when you turn it fully counterclockwise and you set it on high frequency here only compresses the top-end above 1k sort of like a multiband compressor where the any information below 1k is not being compressed but the top-end is when you normally instantiate an la-2a with this knob and it's all the way on flat the full signal is being compressed we're going to just compress the top-end so he rates it rotate it all the way to the left this one by waves obviously has this knob the universal audio LA two ways have this knob some emulations don't so you want to make sure you have that if we're using an la-2a to do this trick so after we drove that top-end heavy signal into the la-2a compressing the top-end only we go back into another pultec which brings the little Owen back in settled on 100 Hertz we boost now 2.8 instead of cutting full bandwidth again up to 10 the attenuation selector here is different than the higher frequency boost you want to kind of view these together the boost and the high frequency go together the cut and this little knob go together so we're boosting sorry cutting 10 because we boosted 8 and there's not an 8 on the selector but again we're cutting at 1.8 I mean it's not dB but cutting that top-end so the whole process can works like this cut low-end boost top-end drive it into a compressor where that compressor only compresses the top-end and then bring some of that low-end back in and cut some that harshness you have from cutting that or from compressing that top-end so much and what the effect of this is that you get a signal that cuts through a really dense mix so I'm gonna play a bit of this mix for you and it's gonna be kind of loud so there's a warning so here's the mix without parallel processing [Music] so you can hear I mean I can press the Volk will have the vocal a pretty healthy level I could boost it a little bit more but it's not cutting through it all it's kind of buried in the in the density of the instruments in the mix so I'm gonna do now is take this fader right here I'm gonna ride that fader up a little bit and as I ride that fader up we'll hear the clarity the VOC will start to come through as I start to bring up this parallel process [Music] [Music] is a shadow so you can see I'm getting about 3 DB of gain reduction max and that's fine it helps that vocal cut through I kind of pushed a little bit farther than I normally would that's exactly how you can do it with these plugins now if you don't want to use these plugins you can do something similar with stock plugins so I have three more plugins on the same vocal channel here these are the stock Studio 1 plugins I've got the pro EQ the studio one compressor and back to another EQ instance so this does the same exact thing is the pull tech into the la-2a into the pull tech again and the way I kind of match these curves in the pull tech it's by going into plug-in doctor bring it up the pull tech putting it on the settings and you can see the EQ curve that results so that cut we did in the first instance of the pultec was a huge shelf that went all the way up to 2k cuz the bandwidth was so wide and there's that top and boost right there for the compressor I did internal sidechain so it's only compressing the information above 1k so you have to have a compressor a stock and pressure that can do that I set the ratio to 4 to 1 because in la-2a is about a four to one ratio there's a fixed attack of 10 milliseconds on an la-2a put that in there the release is tricky to dial in because in la-2a kinda has a variable release depending upon the program material so I fiddled with it I got about 120 milliseconds soft knee compression - not a hard knee compression I had to set the threshold pretty low to get any gain reduction out of that and that goes into the second EQ which is that low shelf boosting now bringing back that signal we cut out here and cutting a bit of that top and you can take a look at the settings I have for the EQ modules if you want to get really detailed about how I match this that's how you can achieve the same effect the stock plug-in so again I'll do the same thing I'll play the mix without any parallel processing and I'll Drive this one up with the fader and you can hear the stock plugins achieving the same cut through vocal Andrew Shep's effect [Music] the settings I had here made me have to boost us a little bit more to achieve the same effect but it kind of gets you in the same ballpark so there's how you can achieve the same Andrew Shep's parallel process without having to use expensive third-party plugins if you have any questions about this technique or anything else let me know in the comment section down below don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already and I'll see you the next one

Channel: Green Light Sound

Views: 183,950

Keywords: Music, Mixing, Andrew Scheps, EQ, Compression, Parallel Processing, DAW, Presonus, Music Production, Mixing Vocals, Waves, IK Multimedia, Universal Audio, LA-2A, CLA-2A, Pultec

Id: ysN5w7pD9nA

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019