Basic Vocal EQ - How to Fix Your Vocals (Body, Nose and Harshness)

hi friends and welcome back to my channel and if you're new here hello my name is george again and i'm a uk music producer in today's video we're going to be discussing eq'ing vocals in a bit more depth we're going to be looking at four things vocal tone different types of eq classic problem areas that singers tend to struggle with and how to eq so stay tuned and make sure you hit that subscribe button and the notification bell for new videos every wednesday [Music] an eq plugin is one of the most commonly used plugins in music production eq'ing a vocal can have the biggest impact on our song and so that's why it's really important that we concentrate on getting it right eq stands for equalization which is pretty much what it does it allows us to manipulate the frequencies of a sound with our main aim being a balanced clear and natural sound the range of an eq is from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz which is the approximate human hearing range [Music] i just quickly wanted to discuss the correlation between frequency and tone vocal tone is a result of the balance of frequencies within someone's voice and tone begins with recording our microphone and our environment can make a huge difference to the tone we get we can try and eq out some problems with our room or with our mic but it's always best to try and record in the best sounding environment with a microphone with a really flat frequency response vocal tone also has to do with our vocal cords for example men have larger vocal cords they're longer and they're thicker and this allows them to produce lower frequencies and therefore they have a lower vocal tone than most women and vocal tone also has to do with the resonance spaces we can create the placement of our larynx and the size of our pharynx and how wide we open our mouth will all contribute to our tone in general the more space the deeper richer tone [Music] when working within a daw there are two main types of eq and that's digital and analog emulations i normally use these analog emulations to do some additive eq work to add high frequencies to my vocals but that's after i've already eq'd out problem areas and compressor vocal so today we're going to just look at mainly subtractive eqs and just talk about the digital eq first let's have a look at how to actually work the eq in logic there are eight frequency bands that we can use that's eight boosts or cuts we can make along the top there are shapes for each band we have a high pass filter shelving filters parametric filters which are normal looking curves and a low pass filter to activate a filter we simply click and we'll see a colored circle appear on the graph below we can then pull these circles up or down from the equilibrium to boost or cut to change the width of these bands we use the vertical lines and drag like so and dragging the circle along the line will change the placement of the filter we can also use the numbers at the bottom of the plugin to alter all these settings too the colors of the numbers correlate with the colors of the filter on the graph and the colours of the shape at the top and that's the basics of operating the eq in logic [Music] so now let's discuss which frequency ranges cause which tonal characteristics in a vocal some can be good and some can be bad so there are three main areas that singers tend to struggle with that we're going to have a look at in this video and these are muddiness nasalness and shrillness and these are all things that we can use eq to help us fix it's unusual for singers to have all three characteristics but more times than not they have one of them there are also then things like glottal and sibilance and these are special cases because we need to use a dynamic eq for these so for a glottal i'd use a multi-presser and for sibilance i'd use a de-esser but that's a whole other subject and we can make another video about those and then finally we're going to be discussing something that we normally consider to be a good thing and that's breathiness so let's have a look at all these different frequencies the best way i think to do this is to sing a song in a normal voice and then sing it again with a slightly altered vocal tone we can then look at the eq analysis of both takes and compare the two obviously this will just be for a female voice because i i am a girl but at the bottom of the screen i'll put annotations about where you'd expect to find these ranges in a male vocal the song i've chosen is toxic by britney spears because it allows me to easily highlight the individual characteristics i'm wanting to show so let's get started and i will start by singing the song in my normal voice with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic comes slipping under with a taste of your poison paradise [Music] and there we go that's our reference point and that's what we'll be comparing the other tracks to the first range we're going to be looking at is the lower end of the vocals and this is where we can have a problem with muddiness but it's also where the fullness of the vocal sits or what we call the body of the vocal as a general rule we don't want our vocals to sound muddy so this is a problem frequency range so i'm going to sing in a bass heavy way and i'm going to do this by lowering my larynx to create more space in my pharynx or essentially my throat and i'm going to open my mouth more these both create more resonant spaces so will produce a deeper richer sound so let's give it a go with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping under with a taste of your poison paradise i'm addicted to you don't you know that you're toxic and now let's have a look at the two eq charts to see what's going on there okay so here you can see we have two graphs and these are the eq analysis of each of the vocal takes that i sang and this is the analysis over the whole song on top is the normal vocal and on the bottom is the vocal song with more body in most female voices you get a lot of body and muddy areas around 300 to 500 hertz and we can see on the graph below that that's where the altered vocals peaked so this is quite typical and now let's have a look at how we can make these vocals with more body sound a bit more pleasant okay so this is how i decided to eq this track as you can see i have a high pass filter and it's up really really high i've put it up to 445 hertz and this is cutting out the majority of the body of the vocals it's that frequency range where most of that muddiness lies i then made a dip at 970 hertz just because there was a bit of a nasal quality creeping in there and we're going to talk about that quality next i've then added a tiny bit above 10 kilohertz to add a bit of breathiness to my vocals as the way that i sang with body meant that i didn't have quite enough high frequencies in my vocals i would normally never make cuts this big but as they are extreme vocal examples they need extreme processing here's the body take without the eq with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping under with it and here's the vocal take with eq with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping so you can hear the processing's taken out a lot of that body and giving the vocals a lot more presence so let's move on and talk about that nasal tone the next frequency range we're going to look at can cause one of the biggest problem tones that singers struggle with and this is the nasal tone this happens when there's basically not enough airflow through our nose this can be caused by the soft palate in our mouth being lifted up too high restricting airflow through the nose or simply not breathing through our nose which is why pinching your nose can also give you this tone so for this vocal take i'm going to make sure that my soft palate is up really really high to help me achieve this nasal quality so let's give it a go with the taste of your lips up on a ride your toxic comes slipping under with the taste of your poison paradise i'm addicted to you don't you know that your taxi [Music] i think we can all agree that was pretty horrible but let's go and have a look at the comparisons okay so here are the charts for the normal and the nasal vocal take the peaks in my nasal take are ranging from about 1.2 to 1.4 kilohertz i'd say and again this is fairly average for a female vocal the majority of nasal problems have a center of around 1200 hertz but can range from 900 to 1600 hertz so again let's look at fixing this okay so this is how i decided to eq the nasal vocal take as you can see the deepest peak is where the majority of the nasal tones were but i've done two smaller peaks either side because there was a huge range of nasal frequencies around this area so i wanted to take all that out to clear it up here's the vocal without the eq with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping under with it and here it is with the eq with the taste [Music] so as you can hear there are still some nasal qualities that we could take out of the vocal but this eq has made a huge positive difference so the next thing we're going to look at is shrillness this is the piercingly bright quality that female singers and some younger singers have and this isn't always a bad thing because it can really help our vocals cut through the mix but generally we want to reduce this as it can get tiring to listen to shrillness is caused by tension in the muscles in our throat and in our tongue this means that our vocal cords don't have room to stretch fully or resonate properly and so we get a shriller tone it can be really really dangerous this tension and can cause long-term vocal damage so if you are struggling with this please go and speak to a professional and get some advice or take some singing lessons or at least do some research about the topic please please please look after your voice so i'm going to sing with a big smile on my face because that helps increase the tension in your face and hopefully that will give us a shrill sound with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic i'm slipping under with the taste of your poison paradise i'm addie to you don't you know that you're tuxed [Music] so let's go and have a look at what's happening with the eqs looking at these two different charts we can see that there's a huge range that's increased from two to five kilohertz and this real quality can go up to about 6.5 kilohertz of female vocals i tend to find that male vocals never really have a short quality to them in the same way that females do but that's probably because their voices are typically deeper so let's go and sort out this problem this is the eq that i've used to sort out the shrill sound as you can see the high pass filter isn't up as high and that's to preserve some of the body of the vocals you can see that i've made a dip between two and five kilohertz which is where the graph showed that there was that shrill quality and that increase in frequencies and i've also made another dip around 1.26 kilohertz just because there was a nasal frequency creeping in again so here is the vocal without processing with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic i'm slipping and and here it is with the processing with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic i'm slipping under with as you can hear it's just taken the edge off the vocal and gotten rid of some of that harsh sound and finally we're going to look at those breathy airy floaty sounds that some singers get and this is caused by vocal cords not closing completely and allowing air to escape we generally tend to boost this range as a stylistic choice as it helps our vocals sit above a mix and make sure that they don't get lost so i'm going to try and sing with a breathy tone and it's also going to help if i sing a bit quieter as well so i'm going to do that too let's give it a go with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic comes slipping under with the taste of your poison paradise i'm addicted to you don't you know that you're toxic [Music] and so for the final time let's go and compare the two eq charts and again here's the comparison of the two and as you can see the frequencies above 10 kilohertz have been dramatically increased in the altered vocal we have to be really careful in this frequency range though because actually sometimes there can be sibilance that occurs above 10 kilohertz so if you're wanting to boost these frequencies i would advise that you apply a de-esser to your vocals before you boost this range okay so just to show you how increasing the breathiness of a sound can transform a vocal i've put a high shelf above 10 kilohertz on my normal vocal take so this is the take without the eq on with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic and this is with the eq with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping underway so we can hear how that's given our vocals a lot more presence [Music] i would always recommend that you add a high pass filter to your vocal track this just gets rid of any low information in the track that we don't need in the vocals as they don't contribute to the vocal tone it may just even be things like mic noise down there we normally cut to around 100 hertz but there's something i learned about female pop vocals that completely changed this with female pop vocals engineers cut up to around 200 hertz and this may get rid of some of the low end of the vocal but really gives the vocals the presence and forwardness that we hear in a lot of modern music so this is the female vocal with a hundred hertz or a standard low cut with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping and now i'm going to move it up to 200 hertz and let's have a listen with the taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic comes slipping under with it and you can just hear how that's transformed the vocals and given us that forwardness so those are the main problem frequency areas that stingers tend to struggle with and it's really helpful to know these when we're eq'ing because it gives us a rough idea of where we need to look to get rid of these tones as a general rule of thumb it's always better to cut than to boost an eq and that's because when you're boosting you're adding artificial information that wasn't in your vocals to begin with and this is much more likely to result in an unnatural sounding vocal than taking away tiny bits of frequency information like you do when you're cutting and you don't really want to be making huge cuts or huge boosts it's all about making tiny differences that are going to culminate into making a huge overall difference so you don't want to be looking at making any changes really any bigger than six decibels so now we have the guidelines for where problems may be but how do we actually pinpoint these frequencies don't worry if you can't this is something that comes with practice and with experience and there are some online ear training courses that help you recognize these frequencies and i'll leave links to them down in the description but for the time being we need a technique that we know is going to work so i'm going to show you this highly recommended method called sweeping the basis of this method is boosting a frequency band and sweeping it across the frequency spectrum until we find an unpleasant sound we then stay in that position and bring the peak down so if i use the vocal take with a lot of body as an example i'm going to look for a frequency range that i don't like with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride your toxic okay so i don't like this sound here and i'm going to bring it down so this is the vocal with that frequency in with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride toxic and this is without with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride you're toxic and that's already so much better as i said this is a highly recommended and widely accepted method of eq'ing it's really great for people who can hear a certain frequency in their vocals that they don't like but just can't locate it it's brilliant for that i have a slight problem with it when it's people who don't know what frequency they want to take out and so we're just using this method as a starting point and this is because i think if you boost any frequency up high enough it's going to sound bad and that's why i think it's really really important to learn our frequencies and improve our ability to be able to locate these [Music] where we put our eq in the vocal chain matters effects such as reverb saturation and compression will all change the sound of our vocal so we may need to go back and tweak the eq accordingly it's also important to listen to how we've eq'd the vocal in relation to the mix it's more important for our vocal to sound good in the mix than in isolation and we can solo a vocal if we're finding it difficult to pinpoint a certain frequency or to hear a small detail as long as we make sure that we reference it back to the mix i cannot stress how important that is so that's the basics and as always these are guidelines and rather than seeing these as written rules you need to do what's best for the music in front of you i hope you found this video useful please let me know what you thought in the comments and if there are any other videos you'd like to see thank you so much for watching make sure you hit the subscribe button and notification bell for new videos every wednesday and i will see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: Third Fret

Views: 49,865

Keywords: Basic Vocal EQ, How to EQ Vocals Easy, How to Fix Your Vocals, Vocal EQ Basics, Vocal EQ Tutorial, Best EQ Setting for Vocals, Best Vocal Frequencies to EQ, how to eq vocals, eq techniques, how to fix muddy vocals, how to fix nasal vocals, how to fix harsh vocals, eq vocals, harsh vocals eq, harsh vocals tutorial, logic pro x, vocal eq, how to mix vocals in logic pro x, music production, music production tutorials, female music producer, george agombar, Third fret

Id: qYdj_Ngb9gg

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020