How to EQ a Vocal - Behringer X32

hey there my name is drew brashler and i want to help you feel more confident in your production gear no matter where you're starting from today i'm going to be starting a brand new series on vocals and specifically vocals in a live setting either on a stage with a big rock band or on your stage at church but we're going to be diving in on the behringer x32 and i'm going to be splitting this over a couple videos one is going to be on eq and that is today so let's go ahead and dive in so i have some multi-tracks pulled up here on my behringer x32 on the sd card with x live and i am going to go ahead and let you take a listen to this so i don't have any processing on the vocalist's mic so there's no dynamics there's no eq there's no low cut which all of those three things i would be using with this vocal and i have this turned up all the way on the fader to get enough gain to sit in a good spot in this mix so let's go ahead and give this a listen real quick [Music] okay let's go ahead and give that a listen but without the band so i'm gonna go ahead and mute the band and let's give this one more listening i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave me what i needed stolen my secrets how could i deserve your love for me even in my weakness you are always there so right off the bat i hear a couple things that i want to fix on this so i'm really excited to dive in now i just want to mention that vocals are the most important part of your music it's what everyone is singing to it's what everyone is humming and if you can't hear the vocalist i mean it's not a great show or a great church service so we really want to make sure that our vocals are loud clear defined and right up in your face in your mix now granted there are a couple musical choices that you can make to have those maybe sitting back farther in your mix but for me and most church settings you will want that vocal to be forward in your mix and very clear just right in your face so let's go ahead and dive in and see specifically how we can clean up this vocal now the first thing that i notice is uh the kick drum is coming through this vocal mic let's give it a listen and i'm actually going to take my high band and do a high cut and roll it down so we can just hear what's coming through in the low section of this microphone so here we go that's the kick drum that's the bass guitar that's all of it that i can hear in that section in fact if i go to a later portion of the chorus you can really hear it coming through so i'm going to go back to the verse here and i wanted to show you how to use the low cut to get this cleared up so i'm going to go ahead and clear out this eq first so the first thing that you're going to want to do is select your channel and hit the view button in the eq section now we can see that there's a low cut right here but i'm actually going to use the knob on the upper left-hand section of this board to do this so we're just going to hit low-cut and now we can actually take this up or down anywhere between 400 hertz and 20 hertz so that's our low cut function and what this is going to do is this is just going to cut out the low end it's also called a high pass filter which means that it's going to let any high frequency through this filter depending on what frequency you select and that frequency that so we select is right here so let's go ahead and listen to this vocal and try it i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave me what i needed stole low in my seat i struggled through this okay so this is where i would choose to place this on this vocalist and i'm going to go ahead and take it too far and you're going to hear the vocalist start getting thin so let's go ahead and listen to that [Music] likewise if we go too low we're still going to get all that kick drum and all that bass guitar coming through but i struggled through the garden following so what you want to do with this low cut is you want to get it high enough where you are removing all of the low end rumble but not too high to affect the vocalist's tone so if we bring this up too high it's going to make this vocalist sound thin and we don't want to do that so we're going to just find a happy medium in there usually anywhere between 100 to 190 hertz is where i'm going to be placing this low cut on a female vocalist i might be going all the way up to maybe 250 hertz there are some people that go higher than that that's just not me i'm going to go ahead and select 149 hertz for him right now so the next thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to lower a little bit of the low end to get this vocal to be a little less muddy we can hear right here i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted but i struggled through the garden so that through that [Music] is just a little bit on the muddy side especially if you can consider multiple vocalists all singing that same note that section of the vocal happens to be also where a whole bunch of banned instruments are going to be playing your bass guitar your keys maybe tracks electric guitar acoustic guitar all of those instruments are going to have that same fundamental note that he just sang on that through the and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just try and get that down a little bit because i want that frequency energy coming from the band and not the vocal it's not a great note uh in the vocal range but it's a great note in all of the rest of those instruments that i just mentioned so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and grab the low band and i'm going to set this to a shelf now you can use that by pressing the low and then you can change through the type of function this eq is so there's p eq v eq low cut and low shelf now p eq and v eq as you saw in a previous video i kind of dived into this but peq is going to be a smaller bandwidth of adjustment and veq is going to be a larger bandwidth of adjustment that you can make in this eq curve so but right now we're just going to go ahead and select low shelf and i'm going to bring this up to about 300 to 400 hertz and so let's go ahead and give this a listen and i'm going to go ahead and boost it i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave me one so this vocalist doesn't have a super thin voice he also doesn't have a super bassy voice so with me deciding to cut a little bit of this out is going to be an okay thing if you do happen to have a vocalist that is sounding very thin you might want to boost this area but in this case i'm wanting to go ahead and bring that down a little bit so i'm going to go ahead and do that now i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave me what i needed stole in my secrets so let's go ahead and listen to what that was before and what that is after and i'm going to go ahead and turn off the low cut and the eq at the same time for this first pass i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted [Music] okay the next thing that i'm hearing and it's actually right where my frequency band 2 is at i'm going to go ahead and boost that and let you hear this spot that i'm hearing and i'm going to get rid of it so i struggled through the garden following a [Music] so a lot of vocalists will have this build up in the mid frequency especially if you're using like a an sm58 or a dynamic microphone and the vocalist has that microphone really close or if they're maybe doing a cupping on their microphone that that 400 to 500 sometimes up in the 600 range that is just going to sound uh very hollow sounding so i'm going to uh boost that up again so you can hear that one more time so this is a that's a hollow sound so i'm going to go ahead and take care of that by just bringing that down by about 5 db here so let's go ahead and listen to this again before and after so here it is before i struggled through the garden following a serpent i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after this is exactly what i'm wanting to do with a vocal mic i'm wanting to do a low end cut and get rid of all of that low frequency information i'm wanting to reduce the amount of muddy lows in the vocal and i'm wanting to get rid of that mid kind of honky sound of that vocal now one thing that you can do with a vocal and you have to be very careful about this is you can bring in some airiness to a vocal and when i say careful i really mean it because sometimes if you boost the very very high end of a vocal you can get into one of two things you can one get into the s's which i my voice has a lot of s's so i use a de-esser on my recorded vocal of my mic because my s's bring in this really loud s sound and so if we boost like say this airiness which happens to be the 10 kilohertz and above if we boost that section and the vocalist has a lot of s's then those will be more pronounced in a bad way additionally if your vocalist is right in the path of the pa and you boost that you might be able to get into some feedback which is bad but this vocalist actually will sound pretty good with this little boost so i'm going to go ahead and boost this here and i'm going to grab my high band i'm going to do a high shelf which again you can just hit this mode button until we get to the high shelf and i'm going to raise this all the way up into the 10 kilohertz and above range and i'm going to go ahead and boost this and give you a listen i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave me what i needed stole away my secrets how could i deserve your love for me okay so i normally wouldn't boost this much but if you do want to have this airiness and some people really want it this is how you get it is you put a high shelf and you turn it all the way up to 10 10k and above and then you can boost it up and this is an 8 db boost which i honestly would never do live on a board but in this case in this example it works so let's go ahead and give a listen before and after i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted okay so that is a little bit much there on that boosted here i'm going to go ahead and bring this eq down give you a listen on this first i struggled through the garden [Music] i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted perfect so the next thing that i'm going to do is i'm just going to boost in this the two to three kilohertz range and that is right here so i'm just going to do a wide bandwidth boost here and this is going to be where a lot of the syllables and a lot of the good portion of the vocal to make it clear and defined is going to be sitting so typically i will end up not boosting the high end like i am here but i will do a little bit of a boost in this two to three k range and it's going to be really wide so let's go ahead and just way over define this and give it a listen i struggled through the garden so this is way too much time but that's the frequencies that i'm looking for so let's go ahead and play this again i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran what's up and let's go ahead and listen to this without everything i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me and again i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me i struggled through the garden following a serpent [Music] [Music] okay so let's go ahead and add in the band and give this a listen through the garden [Music] after me gave me what i needed and let's listen to it without all of the processing i struggled through the garden following a serpent tempted bunch of love ran after me you gave [Music] [Music] there's a big difference between these two [Music] [Music] okay so i'm wanting to go to a different portion of the song and show you where this airiness is not going to work so i have my vocalist 2 here and this is going to be the next section of the song that i really want to dive into this is a female vocal and she is singing back up uh to this song and this is uh much further later in the song this is the chorus so i'm gonna just go ahead and play it for you [Music] all right and let's go ahead and mute the band here i can see your light chasing after me okay so let's go ahead and do a couple of the same things that we did on that first vocal and so i'm going to bring up our uh low cut here i can see your light chasing after me so that would obviously be too much i can see your light chasing after but down here it doesn't even affect you you'll see your light chasing after me so i'm gonna be sitting right about there next thing that i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go to the low chasing after me and i am going to do a low shelf and bring this down again i [Music] and again there's gonna be this frequency here i can see your light chasing after me i can see your light chasing after me so this is the part that i want to talk to you about with this airiness and this is where you have to be careful because vocal one the airiness sounded great vocal two i'm going to boost it and we'll going to hear some of these s's that i was talking about that you have to be very careful about so i'm going to take my high band and i have it on my high shelf and i have it up at the about 12 kilohertz range and i'm going to boost this by 8 db like we did on uh vocal one and let's go ahead and listen i can see your light chasing after me all right so i can see you the scene chasing after me all of this can see your light chasing after me and so you can you can hear what i'm getting at that that s that you're hearing right when she says c is very abrupt when we do a high boost of this 12k and up so you have to be very careful on this airiness boost that people talk about so on this vocalist i'm definitely not going to be doing that i am however going to be boosting this uh 3 to 4k again just to get a little bit more clearness out of this vocal so let's go ahead and play with the band here without any of our processing [Music] okay here's with the processing [Music] all right so let's go ahead and bring both the vocals in at this point with this section of the song [Music] all right and let's go ahead and turn off our processing on these two vocalists and let's play this again [Music] and again with the processing on [Music] so that's a quick and dirty example of how i eq my vocals on the behringer x32 is i do a low cut i take a low shelf around the two to 400 depending on where i need to lower that low end i do a mid-range cut which is usually about the 400 to 500 hertz range and then i do a slight boost in the two to three to four k range which is going to be a wider bandwidth so we want to make this a wide q and then i sometimes do an air boost but typically i do not so one thing that i was noticing on this last section is how pointed some of these words were that light [Music] those are going to be a little bit hurtful if you're pushing this pa really loud so my next video is going to be on compression and compression is going to allow us to take those really loud words and bring those dynamics down so we can bring up the whole vocal and then we won't have to be sitting with this vocal at positive 10 and positive you know eight on the board so please subscribe to my channel and that way you will know right when i release that next video on compression with vocals also if you do happen to have any other questions on the behringer x32 make sure you post below i'm always browsing through those comments to get my next idea for another video that's gonna be helpful for you but again my name is drew brashler and thanks so much for watching you

Channel: Drew Brashler

Views: 102,646

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Id: r6Sy7u3pCEo

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2022