Best UAD plugins for your Vocal Chain

hey guys welcome back to the channel i'm steve kinney i'm an engineer and a producer and today we're talking about the five best uhd plugins for vocals now first i want to thank my subscribers and if you're new to the channel please like subscribe and comment let me know below what your favorite plugin is for vocals i want to just say that it's taken me a while to get back to youtube and upload another video because i'm in the middle of making an album i've got 10 songs that i'm producing performing on and mixing and mastering so it's been a ton of work but nonetheless we've got a ton of content this year that we're going to be uploading and i really appreciate your support so thanks so much for watching let's get into the video so when making this video i wanted to make sure that i covered all of the signal chain and included at least one piece from that signal chain in one of the five choices that we're going with today so the first part of the signal chain is going to be your mic pre now this whole video is not going to be about different mic pres and options for that it's just going to be about the best mic pre and then the best compressor the best eq that kind of stuff so we're gonna be breaking all that down so let's talk about mic breeze so my thought process on the mic pre kind of comes down to this i've used neve a whole lot uh on voices and i've found that neve mic pres sound absolutely amazing in a lot of different ways however i don't think it's the most flexible choice for a mic pre or the most interesting choice i've got two that are in mind right now now the first one is an awesome choice we've got this ua 610b the ua 610b is awesome for a couple reasons and i highly recommend this as your primary choice is because one it's low in dsp two it's an absolutely awesome sounding mic pre and three it comes with every apollo so you don't have to go out and buy this plugin it just comes right with it and that's awesome so right out of the box you use this thing you're going to get awesome sounds i haven't had a bad sound come from it yet and i've used dynamic microphones condenser microphones tube condenser microphones so definitely consider this one don't write it off just because it came with the device this is a really nice preamp now that leads me to my number one choice my first pick in the five best uad plugins for vocals is going to be the api vision channel strip now the reason that i would choose this channel strip over everything else that uad makes is for a couple reasons one of course it sounds absolutely awesome it's incredible sounding but two it has pretty much everything that you'd really want in a vocal chain all within this mic pre so jumping into console here you'll see that it has this gain you know your gain section which is pretty cool and it's modeled the gain section of the api really well sounds fantastic and what i like to do is make sure that my signal is kind of hitting it pretty hard that's going to make sure that we're hitting that sweet spot and that we're getting that kind of character from the api then of course you've got your usual suspects you've got your high pass and low pass which is really useful when you're building a vocal chain so that's awesome but then it has this really awesome expander and gating tool now i've used this numerous times and i get absolutely awesome results and what i do is i set the depth lower to somewhere around like 3 or 6 db and basically what this does is that when you stop singing it'll pull the signal down so it's a lot quieter so this is going back to one of the ways that as an engineer you can cleverly manipulate the room into sounding like a quieter room you take advantage of that now i haven't seen that i haven't seen the gate on any other mic pre it's not on the ssl it's not on the neves obviously so this is a really flexible tool super handy and of course you've also got an eq section built in just like all the other channel strips but then you've also got this really fast nice compressor and so something i like to do is i pair this i make this all sound really good right here and then i'll just throw something like an la2a right in front of it now you've got this awesome sounding signal just like that that brings me on to my second pick which is actually the la2a so now the la2a goes back years and years and sounds absolutely incredible and it's pretty iconic i think it's used almost on every vocal out there it's used on tons of different signals like guitars it's used on basses i mean you name it this thing's been on it similarly to the ua 610b when you get your apollo you get the la-2a with it now it is the legacy edition and if you don't know what the legacy additions are or the differences from them between the la2a classic pack that uad puts out all legacy edition plugins from what i understand bypass the transformers that they've modeled so if you get something like the la2 which is like the original one i've got it pulled up here that plug-in also models the transformers in the circuit path whereas the legacy addition does not so that's going to be your biggest differences so if you want to take your signal one step further and make it that next step closer to the real la2as or the la2 pick up the pack you're not gonna you're not gonna be disappointed that you did okay so moving on to number three now we're starting to get into some interesting territory because we could take this a couple different directions we could go another compressor we could go with another eq but i think it's kind of time we start branching out because if we're following our signal chain so far we've went with an api which has that fast compressor so that kind of eliminates the need to go with an 1176 now if you because a classic vocal chain is you use an 1176 and you use an la2a you combine those two and you kind of get this really snappy like pop vocal which sounds really good but you can achieve this similar effect with the api and something like an la2a and you also get that gate that sounds really good if you use it the right way you've got your eq built into that so already we have a really good signal chain built so now we're going to want to start getting into some effects now this third pick is something that i think is very very valuable and it's absolutely so easy to use and it sounds so good it's a no-brainer the third pick is going to be suppressor now if you don't know what this is this is a de-esser basically all the de-esser does is think of it kind of similar to a compressor where it's just focus on a few select frequencies which is typically going to be in that really high range where all the sibilance where the really like sc part comes from when a singer sings this is going to have a huge impact on the voice and it's incredibly easy to use all you do is you set your threshold and you move it to whichever frequency band that you want and just like that you can get an incredible result now you can dive in even further and you can get even more technical with this particular plug-in but even just right there is going to have such a profound impact that your vocals are going to sound that much better okay so i feel like this is a good jumping off point we've got a complete signal path built right now just for a dry vocal this alone would sound really really good of course you'd want to tailor the settings if you've been following the on-screen guide i'm not using a signal to set this just you know at this moment but set them to your standards find where they're working for you and you're going to have an incredible sound just off these but we're kind of missing some next steps here what about some effects so one of the things that i like to do with effects is have a delay and also have like a reverb and i'll use those kind of throughout the mix to get the effect that i want get the depth and dimension that i want with the voice within the context of the mix and we've got a lot of options here for reverbs got a lot of options here for delays so this is going to be a difficult choice first i think it should be mentioned also that whenever i use an effect if i'm doing it in console i'm usually putting one of those effects on an aux bus and if i'm doing it after the fact and i'm setting those effects up within logic or within luna i'm also creating a secondary bus i very very rarely will i ever put anything like that on the actual channel that i'm working with we're gonna jump over here into the aux channel so what would i use for a delay now in in my library you can see that i have the galaxy tape echo i've mentioned this on other videos i love it it's a strong strong choice then we've also got the korg 3000 i think this sounds absolutely awesome for an actual delay but it is only mono so that kind of complicates things but there's a way around that i'm going to show you how to use this in stereo basically all you would do is you'd add an instance on one insert you then you'd go back and add another instance on another insert and so now you've got two but you've you've got to send it twice now you've got to send it to aux 1. you've got to send the vocal to aux2 and then you have to make sure that you pan them left bring up the other one pan it paint it right now you've just set up a stereo delay and the cool part is you can have them ping-pong at different times that's pretty fun to do or you can just set them at the same the same rate there now i think because of that reason to not run it in stereo that way i think for me that kind of eliminates it i know if you're just starting out and you're just building your plug-in library the plugins are expensive and you want the most bang for your buck if you're just starting out so if i was to pick a delay one really key thing to remember is that the precision delays that come with your apollo sound awesome as well they've got great modulation you can do ping pong it's stereo it sounds awesome low overhead for dsp always a good choice but if you're looking to take that next step into something that has a lot more character and sound my fourth pick said it before i'll say it again galaxy tape echo amazing uh if you don't know what this sounds like listen to rolling in the deep by adele this is this is what was on that now you you do have a tape delay and what i like to do is pan that delay a little bit to one side or the other and then you've got a reverb in the center so now you're going to have this really cool spring reverb kind of thing which is kind of that old-school sound but it's got a ton of character to it it sounds amazing so while this plug-in has kind of accomplished two things it's gotten our delay sound it's gotten our reverb sound it is pretty tied really tightly to one kind of tonal character so what do i do if i don't want a spring reverb sound we got to choose a reverb plugin so there's a few ways that i look at reverbs again though our parameters are going to be what is the most flexible plugin to use yet being still simple to use as well so we've got something like pure plate uh plate reverb sounds amazing highly recommend this plugin regardless but this one is another one trick pony it's only going to do this kind of sound so we'll have to look at another one of course the tape echo still comes up as a choice here but i think really ultimately we're going to end up back with one of my favorites it always comes up i always mention it it's the lexicon 224. lexicon 224 is fantastic it's got hall sounds it's got plate sounds it's got room sounds it is in stereo and there is a secret weapon inside of this chain right here it's this little depth knob now one thing that i've used this depth knob for it's really subtle and the best way to hear it is if you have really nice headphones on but what it does is it basically kind of creates a three-dimensional forward and back effect so you pull it forward and it starts to appear like your sound is closer to you you push it back it kind of starts to go like it's further back so awesome tool to use for a reverb and it really creates depth especially if you're using it on like a room effect um i think that this plug-in rules absolutely rules so these are my picks again you've got api vision the la2a oppressor de-esser galaxy tape echo and lexicon 224. if you've made it this far you might like what i'm talking about on this video and on this channel so all i'd ask is that you please subscribe hit the bell leave a comment interact with the channel somehow it really helps me out and if you want to support the channel further check out my console classic sessions pack it's available now if you're new to tracking it's the quickest way to get production-ready sounds and learn how pros make their signal paths thanks again for watching guys stay tuned i'm gonna have a lot more content coming out as soon as i finish this album this is gonna the youtube channel is gonna have a ton of content coming so thanks again for watching guys we'll see you soon

Channel: Steve Kinney

Views: 40,173

Keywords: uad plugins, best uad plugins, universal audio, apollo solo, apollo twin x, how to use uad plugins, apollo solo thunderbolt 3 setup, apollo solo usb, top 3 uad plugins, top 5 uad plugins, ua apollo, apollo twin, uad plugins crack, universal audio plugins, galaxy tape echo, lexicon 224, lexicon reverb plugin, neve 1084, steve kinney, best uad plugins for mastering, best uad plugins to buy, uad vocal chain, Vocal plugins, vocal chain, uad plugins free download

Id: D3C-f6mwIXI

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021