How to Make Clean Vocals

welcome to sage audio today we're talking about how to make clean vocals but first if you have a mix that you need mastered send it to us at sageaudio.com to receive a free mastered sample of it easy clean vocals the easiest way to clean up your vocal track is to attenuate your low frequencies with a high pass filter up to around 150 hertz but lower can work well too this will quickly attenuate a good amount of background noise mic rumble unwanted plosives and more i'd recommend using a low latency linear phase setting to avoid phase changes to the low end let's take a listen i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been searching for thrills say it ain't true when i'm looking at you not with somebody new multi-band gate although unorthodox you can use a multi-band downward expander to attenuate the signal whenever the vocal isn't loud enough in turn reducing background noise and increasing the vocals dynamic range a few db of attenuation between passages can make your vocals sound cleaner and more distinct use a multi-band compressor or dynamics plug-in for this job let's take a listen i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been [Music] in time reverb out of time reverb can make your vocals sound cacophonous as the reflections will clash with the end time instrumentation and original vocal avoid this by making your reverb in time with the bpm of your track sixty 000 divided by the bpm results in one quarter note in milliseconds use this number or a multitude of this number as your reverb's rt60 let's take a listen [Music] and in time delay like out of time reverb out of time delay can make your vocal indiscernible and create discord in your mix what's worse is that out of time delay might cause unrelated notes to overlap again use 60 000 divided by your bpm to find the quarter note in milliseconds for shorter delays just divide this number by 2 to get an eighth note 4 for a 16th note and so on let's take a listen 20 millisecond release time when compressing a vocal if you set your release time too quick you'll cause distortion to your low frequencies to avoid this you need to make your release time longer than one full cycle of the recording's lowest frequency for example 50 hertz takes about 20 milliseconds to complete one full cycle let's take a listen i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been searching for thrills saying it ain't true when i'm looking [Music] gate then upward compress low level compression is great for adding detail while controlling dynamics but it can also raise the noise floor of a recording making for a less clean vocal to avoid this use a broadband gate on your vocal to reduce noise and then use upward compression alternatively or in combination with the gate you can cut out sections of blank space in your vocal let's take a listen i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been searching for thrills [Music] attenuate reverb's low frequencies low frequencies and reverb can come in handy when you're adding reverb to a bass or kick however they can quickly make your vocal sound muddy if they're not dialed in right if the reverb has a control for it reduce the low frequency level to what sounds right alternatively if the reverb was created with ascend you can introduce an eq with a high pass filter let's take a listen [Music] gains sibilance sibilance can make a vocal sound harsh and shouldn't be overbearing when trying to achieve a clean vocal unfortunately many de-essers have a distinct sound to their compression which might not be wanted for a cleaner sounding alternative find each s and use clip gain to reduce its amplitude if this is too time consuming the weiss ds1 mark iii makes for an incredibly transparent de-esser let's take a listen i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been searching for thrills saying it ain't true when i'm looking at you you're real with me quick vocal eq curve one good starting point for a vocal eq curve is to use a high pass filter up to 80 hertz attenuate 200 hertz slightly boost 500 hertz slightly to amplify valves then attenuate 700 hertz to remove nasal tones next boost 2.5 kilohertz to 3.5 kilohertz for detail and then add a little air although these numbers aren't exact for every performance they work as a good preset let's take a listen to it i've been waiting scared and lonely all night i've been searching for thrills [Music] if you have a mix that you need mastered send it to us at sageaudio.com to receive a free mastered sample of it also subscribe to stay up to date on all of our latest videos thank you so much for watching

Channel: Sage Audio

Views: 712,955

Keywords: Audio Engineering

Id: Dg4QTydfjnE

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021