How to Edit and Mix Singing Vocals in Adobe Audition (Part 1)

what's up guys and welcome back to another episode of tech zone productions today we are doing a very classic tutorial on how to edit singing vocals so let's get started so this is part 1 of this series that I will be doing to get this song into mix so we're gonna start off by playing a little bit of the sample here so I'm gonna go through all the layers before we start so we have a first layer which if I just solo that right now is the first layer is our elite vocal okay now I'm gonna go to the second layer which is the harmony and our third layer is the instrumental so we're just gonna be focusing on the vocals for this for this video if you wanted to learn about the how to combine the harmony and how to edit the instrumental then we'll do that in the next video so starting off with the lead vocal here we're gonna go ahead and open it up to see the waveforms so the first thing that you notice is some of these volumes are louder than others now this song already is pretty normalized and what I mean by that is the volume stays relatively consistent but there are some part of it that does seem to be boosted I thought does seem a little bit too low like especially this part so it comes from here it gets pretty loud so that's very unpleasant for the audience because they have to constantly be adjusting the volume we don't want that and this is where a compression takes in compression basically you set a threshold of where you want the compression to affect so if I set it to negative 18 decibels than anything louder than negative 18 so anything above this chart over here it will it will apply the compression and it will lower it by Risha so you can adjust the amount that you want to lower by so I'm gonna go ahead and go to effect amplify and single band compressor single band compressor in Adobe Audition I find that to be really nice it's going to basically fix your complacent to satisfy your compressing needs eighty-five percent of the time it's ninety percent uptime basically this is all you need you can go ahead and play with other compressors but I find this to be really nice so we don't really worry about anything here we're just worrying about the threshold and the ratio so the threshold like I said is where it's gonna affect the volume anything louder than whatever the threshold is this one is gonna apply the compression anything below that will be kept the safe so if you look at this you'll realize that most of the volume is around negative eighteen so that's a good threshold because anything below that is a good volume anything above that is too loud and it's gonna compress it it's gonna lower the volume alright so now you can set the ratio here now I like to set around five five sometimes can be too much now in this case five is fine because I'm not compressing that much anything above eighteen decibels negative eighteen decibels is is not peaking that much so five should be fine so I'm gonna press apply and you'll notice you notice that all the louder waveforms gets compressed so now it looks more normalized so I'm gonna go ahead and play the part that was loud before and we're gonna see if you can notice the compression so you can hear it getting louder but it wasn't as bad as before and you don't really hear the compression that's how you know you've done a good good compress in this if you can't hear you shouldn't be able to hear any of the effects that you add when you're editing vocals so I'm gonna go ahead and zoom this in we wanna go to we're gonna go to the beginning here good water we're gonna go to the beginning and you're notice that there's a lot of noise now this isn't noise from the microphone I'm gonna boost this so we can hear it this is noise from shoes from clothing from saliva ASMR that we don't want in our vocal well I don't know some of you guys might want it you know if you know what I mean so we're gonna try and remove all this so you just go to your volume and you just lower it now if you don't want to lower it too much especially with the Brett so I'm going to show you in a bit so you notice how I only load it I stopped here even though this is not the vocals yet I stopped here because this is where the breath is and if I remove that then it's gonna sound very unnatural so I'm gonna go ahead and play this so it's pretty quiet now there's a little bump here I'm gonna just leave that in it's not a big deal hum and then we don't want this sound although you don't want to remove too much because if you get closer to where the voice actually starts if you remove too much and it becomes too obvious and it's gonna be like a very sad noise so I'm gonna give you an example I don't know if this is a good example but here I'm just remove it completely hum hum kind of it's kind of sudden and we don't want that because that's not natural so I'm gonna take the breath is this is the breath I'm gonna leave it in but I'm gonna lower it just a bit here just a bit so you want to go through all this and I'm gonna skip it but I'm just gonna go through all this to show you what it sounds like in the middle so if I take out this part if I take it out completely nothing it's kinda yeah it's kind of sudden so I'm gonna leave it in but I'm just gonna reduce it so it's not that distracting boom lighting up inside your droid oh this one especially so I'm going to go ahead and remove it just a little bit yeah just keep some of it in pushing 40 in the friend zone it this is a pretty easy process although some people might when you're when you're starting off you might compress it too much that it sounds unnatural so it does take some practice to know how much you want to compress it by but it's usually not that hard it's very simple to do wait so here's another breath and we're going to go ahead and lower that zone we talking then you walk away if you have some siblings issues with the recording sibling sis all that's s towns and if that sounds very obvious every time when you hear the simplest you can also lower that but in this case I don't really have that problem and it really depends on the vocalist so all this little popping are all the mouth mouth sounds and then the breath we take that a little bit so I'm not gonna go through all this but you get the basic idea you can take out all these little popping sounds and if you're using a dynamic microphone to record your vocals is probably not gonna be that bad as a condenser this is unlike a condenser with a pretty sensitive capsule and I was recording in a very quiet room so all these small little sounds get kind of exaggerated alright so that should be it ticks it's a pretty time-consuming process depending on how long your song is so what we've done so far is we got rid of the noise and then we also got we also compressed it so it's a little bit more even so I'm gonna listen to it now solo [Music] pushing 40 and that's good now I'm gonna get to the fun stuff uh sorry starting with the EQ the parametric equalizer the EQ on the dopey audition is very nice I'm going to default this so you get a clean slate it's a very very nice tool so let's start off by understanding what the EQ actually shows us it shows us a graph of the frequencies so if I want to make any frequencies louder I can boost it or I can lower it now our hearing range is from 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz this for some crazy reasons Adobe Audition goes to 90 killer so we want to ignore everything behind here basically I'm pretty sure you can change if I'm not sure to do that so we're gonna keep this as it is cuz this is probably what it's gonna look like so we're gonna ignore anything above 20 kilohertz and just work with theory so when I'm talking about the low ranges I'm really referring to between 0 and 100 and maybe 150 to 200 and that is the low frequency the mid I'm referring to 200 to 1 kilohertz and then above that is 2 kilo Hertz to 20 kilohertz and that's the high so that's what I mean so you can kind of visualize this kind of Adobe kind of splits it for you so this is the low and this is basically written Tomatoes and this is basically with a high it's a little bit off but it's good enough so we're gonna start off with a low now one of the things that you have to understand about one things about vocals is that the vocals is not really in any of the low frequencies the really pleasant sound that you hear is from the mid or the high so we want to remove any of the low frequencies especially below 100 Hertz so we'll press the HTP which means high-pass filter and that's gonna get rid of all the low frequencies now what's in a low frequencies our snare drums drum some channels are usually in the low frequencies so if you're for instrument is different but for vocals especially all the low frequencies just noise on water noise breath noise other sounds and you know things like that so we want to go ahead and apply the high-pass filter you can apply a lot or a little now what you can do is you can listen to this you can kind of hear the effect of the high-pass filter and you want to you want to sweep it and when you when when you can hear it you want to back off a little bit so that you can't really hear the high-pass filter so I want to play this bit so I can still hear it now so here's good I'm new sorry here's good I'm gonna go ahead and lower back a little bit there you go and that is the high-pass filter that's gonna get rid of again a lot of unwanted noise alright the other part the mid frequencies of the EQ is a little bit challenging what you really have to understand is what each frequency sounds like so I'm gonna go ahead and show you how I would do how I would it is again every single vocal reset every single vocal recording session is going to be different here what you like here use your ears all right don't use this graph as like okay and must boost this even though it doesn't sound that good you have to use your ears if it sounds good and that's right so we're gonna go ahead and play this you'll notice it's a little bit of warmth to it it has a little bit lack of clarity a lot of people I mean this will happen a lot of times in your recording where it just doesn't sound like it fits in the mixture I'm gonna go ahead and bring the I'm gonna meet the harmony but I'm gonna bring the instrument to it [Music] it sounds good but it doesn't sound like it's fitting into the mix it kind of sounds like it is sitting on top of the track and part of the reason why is because there's not much clarity to this so it sounds kind of boxy sounds kind of like you're recording inside of it small box it sounds a little bit not necessary to reverb but just the feel for it so I'm gonna go ahead and remove some of the lower frequencies because that stick typically the warmness that we're gonna get rid of and when you remove frequencies you don't want to remove below negative five okay like if you remove more than that then that's gonna be too obvious [Music] I'm gonna remove like that much about it some turn off it's a little bit more Cleary you get a little milder the top-end the higher frequencies and that's also another note that you should know is when you remove a lower frequencies you're basically boosting all the other frequencies so it's a fun fact now I'm gonna go ahead and turn in the turn on the instrumental so we can really hear how it sounds alright so now we're to the mid frequencies now now the middle frequencies have some really nice sounding to it and also some have some unpleasant sound so I like to do what a technique called sweeping where I boost one of the frequencies now by the way this this allows you to adjust the way with of how much you want to boost so I'm gonna go ahead and adjust it's a pretty decent size so I'm going to boost it pretty significantly and what I'm trying to hear is between four hundred and two kilohertz and there should be this very annoying nasally sound that we'll need to get rid of and that is that sounds unpleasant so I'm gonna go ahead and show you how this is done [Music] so around one killer Harish a little bit after that we're gonna go and cut this off again this depends on your vocals so you do have to do this three per method and hear what it is so I'm gonna remove this I'm making this a little bit wider and just cut it off a little bit it's a little bit unpleasant frequency and that should smooth things out and they mix [Music] without alright so now we're moving on to the higher frequencies and here's when the fun begins so you realize it still sounds a little bit muffled it still sounds a little bit boxy not much clarity so we're gonna go ahead and take the H which stands for high I think and you can change this setting if you want if you want a very sudden boost or if you want to graduate Bruce I'm gonna go with a gradual boost and I'm just gonna boost the high frequencies quite a bit now again depends on your vocals at most microphones most condenser microphones will already boost this for you so you don't have to boost it anymore but my microphone tends to be a bit flat so I'm gonna boost this and see what it and hear what it sounds like that's without [Music] that sounds much better it brings a lot more of the clarity so it's fitting it fits in more with the mix so I want to go ahead and turn off when we turn off ask that warm as a boxy sound when we turn on it really brings out the voice [Music] and there you go now you do want to be careful though because we are boosting the frequencies we are boosting the frequencies that have the siblings inside and the siblings are they as sounds that is pretty unpleasant so you do want to be careful when you're boosting the high frequencies [Music] alright I'm gonna keep that as it is it's pretty good you can do a little bit more adjusting to it depending on your situation I could probably do a little bit more but it's pretty good for now now the second effect that we're going to do is like I've seen before they're siblings this is the de-esser and it gets rid of all that sounds now there are several presets here that you could use I just use the presets you can use the de-esser which gets rid of a lot of the siblings but sometimes this is too much so you can what you can do is you're gonna play it through and any time that it's the texture blends it's nice you know reduce it so I'm going to play the part that has more of the siblings that sounds good now sometimes this setting is too much so you can go ahead and do the talking but de-esser in this situation works pretty nicely so let's hear it [Music] to meet you underneath um so this is pretty good now the last effect the probably the most exciting effects this effect is called reverb and I'm sure you guys already heard of that term and I'm just gonna explain it real quick it brings out right now this vocal is pretty dry it's recording in a studio where it's a very quiet environment and oh it's recorded in home studio but you get the idea it's it's a very quiet environment it doesn't have much room or ambient to it it sounds kind of trapped like it sounds kind of custard phobic in a way so reverb really opens then we even also in Adobe Audition I'm not sure about all the software it also helps with stereo image and it makes it so that the microphone recording it turns into stereo so it makes it sound like it's inside a room so I'm gonna go ahead and go to studio reverb and I have a preset here called text little singing reverb how convenient and you can just copy the settings for the characteristics here and make the try hundred so I'm just gonna take just gonna you can just pause this to copy it down and wait all you really need to adjust here is the wet level and this is just how much percentage the effect is being applied so I want to try a hundred right now you never do 100 but I'm just gonna keep you guys an example if you like that you can keep it but for my taste I usually like it so that you can't really hear the reverb but it's still there so I'm gonna try 20 [Music] all right so I can my bad I can cure it bit so I'm gonna remove it to about 17 that should be good all right so that's about it and Simon is usually go you don't want to do too much because then it becomes distracting you want to do enough that is there but then you don't really notice the the reverberation effect so we're going to do a comparison of before the effect so I'm going to turn all these effects off all right now when doing after all right so that's about it in this tutorial we've learned how to do compression we learn how to equalize vocals again it really depends hear it alright make sure that you hear it if it sounds good is usually fine and we learn how to use depressor and studio reverb and we made this vocal that otherwise sounds dry into a very intim moral in into that it fits into the instrumental so thank you so much for watching this tutorial and this is a bit longer than I expected and stay tuned for part two when I'm gonna go over how to edit the instruments on how to EQ that and then maybe another part three I'm not quite sure for how to just combine everything together and make it sound like a final product so that's about it be sure to check out the link in the description for if you want to hear this recording and be sure to check my friend now and subscribe to him he has some really nice videos that's really nice like upcoming video so you guys I think you guys will really like so thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time with another episode of textile productions

Channel: Slideo Studios

Views: 118,716

Rating: 4.9509201 out of 5

Keywords: Editing, Singing Vocals, Mixing, Mastering, Adobe Audition, Singing, Recordings, Vocals, Tutorial

Id: ImKnNDjpwBs

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019