Andrew Scheps Parallel Vocal Trick

how's it going guys i'm mike dwyer from the bunker recordings and bettermixes.com and today i want to show you a really cool trick to get super upfront bright in-your-face vocals that cut through a dense mix now this trick has been around for a long time and has been done by a ton of engineers but the reason i'm calling it the andrew sheps trick is because i just recently saw him using it and it sort of reminded me about this trick i haven't used it in quite a while but he inspired me to try it again and it's pretty cool so i want to share it with you so let's take a quick listen to our vocal before we do this trick thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground [Music] so it sounded pretty good but maybe we just need it to cut through a little bit more so you can see i set up a send here called voxbright which goes to our vox bright track which is what i call this trick and for now i'll set this to pre-fader just so we can listen to just the effect without the main vocal and as is with all of our processing off this is just going to be our plane vocal thought you nearly had a heart so now let's get into the actual trick so all you're going to need for this is an eq or really a pair of eqs and a compressor andrew scheps uses poltex for his eqs on this and an la2a for the compressor but you can literally use anything for the eqs you could use a neve or an ssl or an api or your stock eqs whatever eq makes you happy for android sheps that just happens to be a pull tech and for me the eq that puts a smile on my face is pro q3 so that's what i'm using here because i always push this on this channel that it's not about the specific gear being used in most cases it's all about the technique so the first thing we're going to want to do for this trick is take our first eq and we are going to cut out a ton of bottom end and boost a lot of upper mid range and top end and you're going to want to go kind of extreme with this you'll hear it in a second but you wanted to sound pretty thin and super bright thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar faces every untold story that you wrote is buried in the lost stand so something like that will probably work you can see we're just cutting a ton here like over 12 decibels at about 750 hertz with a shelf shape and then we're boosting about six and a half somewhere around 8k so now that we have this super thin super bright honestly kind of hard to listen to vocal we are going to throw our compressor on and in this case i'm using moosie from clanghelm and in mode 1 here it is an emulation of a fair child so let's turn that on and dial it in thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar faces every untold story that you wrote is buried so something like that will work we are just absolutely pinning the needle on this compressor we're just totally smashing this vocal and again you can use any compressor if you're going for a more aggressive sound maybe an 1176 would be cool or a distressor but seriously try whatever so next up now that we have this super super compressed super super bright vocal we're going to take our second eq and we're gonna kind of do the opposite of what we did with the first eq so the first eq we were cutting a ton of low end and boosting the upper mid-range and top so now we're gonna boost some low end to bring some fullness back to the vocal and dip out some top end where there might be some harshness thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar faces every untold story that your road is buried in the light so that's sounding pretty good now you might be thinking why on earth we would do this we're boosting the low end and cutting the top end when just a minute ago we cut the low end and boosted the top end and wouldn't they just kind of cancel each other out and yeah they kind of do not exactly because i'm using different shapes here using a bell instead of a shelf on the low end and i'm boosting less low end than i cut in the first one and same thing but opposite for the top end but even if i used these exact same moves but opposite so for instance my second eq looked something like that it would still more or less accomplish what we're going for because we stuck that compressor in between so ultimately what that's doing for us is this first eq is really controlling what the compressor is listening to and what it's reacting to so another way to think about this is a lot of compressors will have a side chain high pass filter control on them and what that does is it cuts out the low end from the detection circuit of the compressor it's not cutting the low end out of what we're listening to and it's still compressing the low end but it's just making it so that the low end isn't triggering the compression so for instance on a drum set if you use the side chain high pass filter you'd make it so the kick drum wasn't triggering the compressor as much and it was primarily the snare drum or the cymbals or whatever that was actually causing the compression we're basically doing something very similar to that with these two eqs so by reducing all of this low end and low mids and then boosting all of these higher frequencies it's really going to cause the compressor to react to the upper mid range and top end of this vocal but then by eq'ing the low end back in with our second eq we're still getting the full vocal sound it doesn't sound super super filtered like it originally did but it's just that all of this low end isn't contributing to the compression and the result of that is when we listen to just this vox bright channel that upper mid-range presence is just super super consistent and just nailed into place but like i said we're actually not boosting as much as we cut on the low end and we're not cutting as much as we boosted on the top end and that's because we still want this track to sound pretty bright hence i named this track vocal bright but we just didn't want it to sound as ridiculously filtered as it did after that first eq and just so you can hear the difference let me turn off our compressor and i'm just going to bypass both of these eqs together so you can hear the tonal difference we're making with the two eq's combined thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar so yeah just a little bit thinner and a little bit brighter but not like super crazy like it was with just this first eq [Music] and this technique can actually be really helpful for a lot of different situations not just for this vocal thing especially if you make the second eq an exact mirror image of your first eq because then you can use that on a lot of stuff like maybe on drums you can use this trick by cutting a lot of low end and boosting a lot of mid-range on the first eq and then compressing the snot out of that and then doing the exact opposite on your second eq you would end up with the same tonal balance that you started with but the compressor would just really be reacting to that mid-range which might give you a cool sound and it doesn't even have to be a compressor in between the eqs another cool thing is putting a saturation or distortion plug-in in between that way you can really shape the tone of your saturation anyway i might make a whole other video on that let's get back to what we're talking about here let's put our compressor back i thought you nearly had a heart attack when oh and then the last thing i like to do on my voxbike track is put a de-esser on this isn't something andrew scheps does but i think it really helps because this track is so hyper focused in the upper mid-range the s's can get a little bit intense so i'm just using pro ds here from fabfilter to knock the s's down a little bit i thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground so that's just helping to tame that a little bit so that's all the processing we're gonna do on our vox bright track and on its own it still sounds pretty intense but we're gonna mix that in with our main vocal track so i'm gonna put that back in and i'm just gonna bring our vox bright channel down to nothing and i'm gonna slowly bring this fader up and mix it to taste thought you nearly had a heart attack when all your heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar faces every untold story that you wrote is buried in the lost and found and there's no one to reclaim them now so you can hear with it in that upper mid-range is just super super present and consistent like it almost feels like we're using like a parallel multiband compressor in a sense it's really just helping to bring the vocal forward a bit so let's turn our effects back on and put this into the mix and hear how it sounds in [Music] all context heroes hit the ground with their unfamiliar faces every untold story that you wrote is buried in the lost and found [Applause] [Music] so yeah you can hear how that really helps the vocals to cut through everything else that's going on and as a little bonus trick here how i would typically use this is i would have this muted for most of the song and then i would automate it to just turn on in the choruses and that will do a couple things for you first just right off the bat having your vocal get a little brighter and a little more in your face in the chorus is just going to help to lift the chorus a little bit which is typically a good thing but also typically all of the instruments in the chorus are just getting bigger and more intense and brighter and more exciting so by turning this on there it's just going to help the vocal to push through a little bit so that you can really understand every single word that the singer is saying without having to just push the volume of the vocals up to the point where it can get a little bit muddy and cloudy and feel like the vocals are more sitting on top of the mix instead of in it and typically just a tiny bit of this is enough like i would probably use even a little bit less than what i was using in this example right here i just want to make it a little bit louder for this example to make the effect a little bit more obvious but if you go too far with it the vocal can definitely feel a little bit abrasive so just a little bit is usually enough but anyway i hope you found this video helpful and if you did be sure to leave a thumbs up and subscribe and also be sure to head on over to bettermixes.com to grab a free copy of my ultimate eq cheat sheet

Channel: Better Mixes

Views: 47,424

Rating: 4.9273505 out of 5

Keywords: andrew scheps mixing trick, andrew scheps mixing technique, andrew scheps mixing, how to mix vocals, mixing vocals in pro tools, mixing rock vocals, parallel compression, how to use parallel compression, mixing in the box

Id: xo8YnILjAxs

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020