HOW TO MIX RAP VOCALS (With Stock Plugins) - FL Studio Tutorial (how to mix vocals in fl studio 20)

what's good people it's jay cactus welcome to the channel in this video i'm going to show you how to mix wrap vocals in fl studio using only stock plugins before you watch the video please like it and subscribe to the channel and let's jump straight into it all right so the session i'm working on today is from one of my boys emr snx it's an artist i've been working with i engineered this track which is already out it's on apple music spotify all streaming platforms it's called cloud9 thoughts but when i mixed it i did use paid plugins um you don't always have to use paid plugins though so i wanted to show you a tutorial today how to mix rap vocals just using stop plugins so the only thing that we're going to focus on is the main vocal today you can see that there's ad-libs i'm not really going to focus on them right now just for this tutorial but the first thing that i do is just to get organized so we know that we're going to be mixing main vocals and i'll set one up for ad-libs as well but if we're coming to the mixer i'm gonna have track one as instrumental you can give it a color if you want just to separate it insert two i'm gonna have his main vocal give that a different color and then insert three can just be ad-libs cat spell here we go i'm just gonna make that light i think right okay so now we've got three mixer channels set up which is fine um what i like about fl 20 is the fact that you can link these to the mixer channel so if you right click here you can go to track mode audio track and then select instrumental so now anything that you put onto this channel will have all the effects that you've routed to track one so i'm going to do the same for these so track mode audio track this is the main vocal track three ad-libs so now for example if i took one of the ad-libs and put it onto the main vocal channel it would automatically bring it on to this one here so that's pretty good to set up but then once you've got it named and organized the first thing that i do is have a listen and set your levels right so i'm just gonna highlight the section of the verse and just listen and just set the level to where i think it's sounding about right when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time so instantly you need to bring the instrumental down because there's not much head room when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'mma give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things just leaving a bit of headroom for the master as well so that's about right all right so once you've set the level the first thing that i do is take out any unwanted breaths or gaps in the vocals that are just unwanted you don't really need them because even though you can't see the waveform there might be some like hidden frequencies that you don't really need which are just going to cause unwanted mud so you can see that i've already done it i've been through the full main vocal and the ad loops and taking out the breaths just to save some time for the tutorial but when you're doing it all you need to do is use the slice tool so i'll show you what i did here so make sure that this stretch mode is off if it's on and you're dragging these around then it's going to actually stretch out the vocal and you can just solo it just to see nice so hear that breath there so all you're doing is pressing c to activate the slice tool and then what i like to do is hold shift so it's a straight line because look if i wasn't holding shift you can end up cutting diagonally but if you hold shift it's usually going to be a straight line so i'll cut out the breaths then you can press p and then right click to delete it it's good to learn these hotkeys because you can navigate throughout your daw much quicker so the other thing i do is set this to generic bleeding and what that does is create a bit of a fade out to stop those clicks and pops because if you're just cutting things suddenly then sometimes you'll notice that you'll get little pot noises so i like to keep it on generic bleeding so go through the full main vocal on the ad-libs cut out any unwanted breaths sometimes an artist will purposely give a breath and they might like it in there but if it's just like you know just to catch their breath so they can say more words then i'd cut them out because they're not really needed once you've cut the breaths i'd look at first automating the level so when rappers are recording sometimes they're much louder than before they might raise certain words like or shout certain words and then come back to the same level you can see from this take that it's all pretty consistent so i didn't really automate the volume at first you can kind of do it with compressors but if you do it before it gets to the processing stage then you're giving the compressor less work to do so if you wanted to do that i double click in the vocal come to the range tool click volume and then create automation clip so what i'd like to do is copy the value because we've already set the level and then let's say for example this bit was really loud you could put some points in here i'm just going to paste the value so it doesn't change bring it down again i'm going to paste the value here so this top bit is all the same and then if you wanted this to be the same you could copy this value and paste it there right so you do that just for some real loud parts i don't really need it in this section so i'm going to get rid of that so i'd look at the real loud peaks bring them down gently if you can so that the volume is pretty much consistent all the way through then once you've got the volume automation set it's time to start the processing so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to work on this vocal based around home studio recordings because certain techniques that i use might not necessarily be used in nice studios where there's no background noise for example so if you're recording at home the chances are you're going to get background noises like i don't know it could be cars outside or it could be the fan from your computer so to get rid of them we're going to use the fruity limiter and if you look at this section here the noise gate this is what we're going to play with so the threshold it's going to change the line here so you know at what point you want to capture it so it's going to be real low because if you had it up high it's going to capture all of the signal and we're bringing the gain all the way down as well because that just means it's acting as a barrier for certain noises so this is the extreme it's cutting everything out but if we bring the threshold real low when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides and then the release is the amount of time it's going to take for the signal to go back to normal so you can play around with the release and the threshold until you're just getting rid of any background noises there's not too many in this recording so i only said it real low like the moonlight every time we talk about there's fine and then the next thing i'm going to move on to is the eq so with eq i like to add two separate ones i do one subtractive and one additive so for the subtractive ones i like to cut out any unwanted frequencies so i'm just gonna have a listen like the moonlight every time so in the instrumental there's some nice bass and kicks going which are taking up the sub frequencies and i don't really need them in the main vocals so i'm gonna bring point one down when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight i'm gonna adjust the steepness with this curve when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i don't need to take out too much and then when you're recording in home studios the chances are you're going to get a lot of unwanted frequencies especially like a boxy tone so if you're going to go from numbers i always suggest like not to go from numbers but they can be good starting points so look around 300 hertz and 500 hertz and see if you can find any unwanted frequencies and we can take those out and the way to do that is to use a sweet method so i'm gonna use point number three i'm gonna bring it up and then i'm gonna tighten it up with the bandwidth here i'm just gonna bring that down and then i'm gonna listen through i'll turn the instrumental off like usually i recommend eq in with the instrumental on but just for this tutorial i want to show you the frequencies that you can have so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'm gonna give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind so there's a bit of a boxy frequency there which i'm just going to take out you don't want to do it too much maybe by about 3 db and then i know with my mic because i recorded this in in my home studio i know there's usually something around 500 hertz which i need to get rid of when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'm gonna give you a little insects show you how i'm thinking or there we go it's quite a harsh boxy noise and you can have a listen to some of the other frequencies and see if there's any other rubbish that you don't need with this you really need to train your ears as well because if i just start pulling up points and going around everywhere when i look into your eyes there's always going to be frequencies that don't sound too good because i've brought it up so drastically high so kind of train your ears on what frequencies usually have problems especially if you're recording in home studios so i'm just going to go through because i know there's usually some harsh frequencies that i get like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'm gonna give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know what i'm saying one there then i usually get a little bit in the house i'm just going to grab myself like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'ma give you a little insects show you how i'm thinking right there so it's just quite harsh so right here i'm just making a few cuts just to clean up the vocals so you should be able to hear a bit of a difference i'll turn it on my eyes are so lit like that and then on it every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'm gonna give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind so that just removes some of the rubbish that we don't need and then the next thing i'm gonna do is open another eq but this is to boost the parts that i want so if you're gonna go with numbers for additive eq i'd say that around two to three kilohertz is where you get general loudness five kilohertz is where you get vocal presence and eight kilohertz is where you get a bit of a sizzle so it obviously depends on each track so i'm just going to listen with the instrumental and see what i want to boost for this looking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know why i'm saying every time i'm with you i just wanna flow away in it take it to your climax so you can hear that that's just making the vocal a bit louder when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'mma give you little insights show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know why i'm saying every time it's just adding a bit of clarity that look into your eyes is so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing imma give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying then i'm just giving a bit of a boost there just add a bit of sizzle and some high end when i look into your eyes it's so lit so without that every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides oh you think i'm playing imma give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing so the next thing that i'm gonna add is a fruity compressor and what compressors do is reduce the dynamic range so just to show you what that means if you're looking at a signal the dynamic range is the kind of difference between the loud points and the quieter points so if you had a signal that's just going up and down all the time the compressor will help to bring things closer together so that it's a bit more consistent so it's quite consistent as it is but i'm going to show you how a compressor works so the threshold is the amount of signal that you want to capture a good standard point to go to is around about minus 21. so the ratio is basically how much attenuation you want to apply so what that means is let's say for example it's set to 2 1 which is pretty standard any signal that goes above the threshold by 2 db will be brought down to 1 db above the threshold and then because you're bringing the signal down you need to make that back up with the gain knob the attack is how fast you want it to capture the signal so if you've got a fast attack it's going to pretty much attack everything of the vocal if you increased it it's going to take a little bit longer for the compression to kick in and then the release knob is how long you want the compression to hold for before the signal goes back to its original state so what i like to do is apply quite a lot of compression for rack vocals just to make sure that it's quite consistent all the way through so i'm going to bring the threshold to around 21. i'm gonna put the ratio up maybe around four to one when i look into your eyes it's so lit so fruit compressor doesn't show you how much attenuation is happening in the plug-in but you can see it from the levels here so if i just play this when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight you can see that it's hitting around negative 15 and when i turn it on when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight it's hitting around negative 20 negative 22 so we want to bring the gain up by about five just to make up for it when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my instinction so i'll show you before and take it to your after then i just want to lay in it if i had free time then i would spend the day in it i know when you hear this you gonna be shocked so that just makes the volume more consistent throughout his vocals the next thing that i'm gonna add is saturation and to be honest with fl there's not a lot of saturation tools you can use you could use soundgoodizer i just use it gently though i'll show you how this works when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides oh you think but i think it does quite a lot to the vocal when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight but a good trick is to apply the soundgoodizer and then reduce the level of the soundgoodizer so this is the mix level so if you've got it on full then 100 of soundgoodizer is applied but if you bring this back you can see up here the percentage reduces when i look into your iso so it blends in with the original signal when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing imma give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing i'll show you before when every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides it gives it a nice bit of sizzle if you want to use a free plugin there's one called saturation knob which is free to download it's the same kind of thing you can just bring this up it's just one knob when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'mma give you little insights if you want crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know why i'm saying every time i'm with you and you can see it makes the vocal a bit louder so you might want to bring it down a lot of plugins will have an output knob and usually if you're making things louder it's best to bring the level back down in the plug-in so you don't have to adjust it in the mixer when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight but our flies hit my insides oh you think i'm plastic i'm gonna give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things sound good either girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know what i'm saying i think i like the saturation of you i just wanna float away take it to your climax then i just wanna lay in it and then because we've added saturation and a lot of high end we're also gonna use a de-esser and fl doesn't have a direct de-esser but you can do it with multi-band compression so it's the same kind of principle which i showed you with the compressor but now we're only targeting the high band because that's where the harsh esses are going to be so i'm going to take the instrument along so you can listen to this when i look into your eyes so i'm going to mute the low band and the mid band and just focus on the high band this is basically letting you capture what you determine as the high band so you can capture more of it same with these other bands as well so let's listen to where those harsh s's are so we're getting them there so same again with the threshold i'm going to bring this down ratio let's bring this up a bit the attack i want that pretty quick so you can see a bit of attenuation is happening i played before and after we'll spend the day in let me take these bands or mute them when i look into your eyes are so lit they're like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides or your feet so it's just doing a subtle amount but it does the job so let me play you what we've got so far i'm gonna take the ad-libs off when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight that's with no effects oh you think i'm playing all effects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know why i'm saying every time i'm with you i just all right so what i like to do next is give the vocals some space with reverb and delay and usually i have them set up in auxiliary sends which you can see here but i'm gonna base this tutorial around beginners so i'm going to show you how to set these up you can set them up in any insert so i'm going to come to insert 10 i'm going to rename this box reverb auxiliary reverb i'm just going to give it a color like blue and i'll do one for delay as well right and what an auxiliary sender is basically a duplicate of the signal so you've got the main vocal which is the dry signal and then the reverb which i'm going to apply here which is the wet signal and you're blending the two together so if i apply reverb directly on the vocal and i'm not adjusting the dry and wet right i'm going to wash out the vocal a bit because if you're bringing the dry down and the wet up then you're kind of pushing the vocal to the background which can be good in some instances like you might want to do it for ad-libs or background vocals but in this case we're going to use the main vocal as the dry level so in the reverb i'm going to bring this down and then set the wet level to 100 so now when i'm applying effects this is a 100 reverb so what i usually like to do for rap vocals is cut the lows a bit like to increase the size of the room just a bit of decay and then the separation knob will make the reverb wider so i'm going to bring that to the left if you bring it to the right it's going to make things more central but i like to widen it out so i'm going to widen it a little bit and then to link these two together i'm just coming to the main vocal and then clicking down here and you can see that it automatically sets it to 100 but i don't want the full thing i'll show you the extreme when i look into your eyes that's way too much but if i bring this down it's just blending the signal in so maybe around when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them but our flies hit my insides or you think i'm playing on my kids so you're just adjusting this to taste really like this track to me is is quite mellow it's quite ambient in a way so i want a bit reaper but i want so much that it's overpowering but i just want people to feel it when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing imma give you a little around and then the same for delay so i'm just going to come to fruity delay 2 i'm gonna bring the dry down to zero i'm gonna set it to ping pong mode because i wanna give it a bit more space so it's gonna bounce between the left and right ear i'm gonna increase the pattern just a little bit because i mainly want the ad libs to be filling up the side space but i just want to widen the main vocals just a little bit and then for the time i think i want it set to two i can bring the volume with the feedback down a little bit and let's just see how this sounds so same again click on the main vocal click on the auxiliary delay and then just bring the level down i only want a little bit here when i look into your eyes are so lit turn the reverb off every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing i'mma give you a little what that sounds like show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind girl you got me praying i'm playing don't know what i'm saying every time so let me show you the extreme when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time we touch them butterflies hit my insides or you think i'm playing imma give you little insects show you how i'm thinking all the crazy things that's on my mind all right so let me show you everything without effects so i'm gonna turn the reverb delay [Music] oh you think i'm playing i'm gonna give you little insects much clearer he's got his own space bring it out oh you got me positive sides of his vocal don't know what i'm saying every time i'm with you i just wanna fly fitting in the beat nice if you wanted to sit in the instrumental just a bit more and the instrumental hasn't been mixed well this instrumental has been mixed pretty well so the main vocal what you can have a look at is where is vocals sitting in the eq when i look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight every time you can see this area that we boosted so we boosted this area around just over two kilohertz so in the beat we could actually bring that down just a tiny bit look into your eyes it's so lit like the moonlight just this time we touched them but our flies hit my inside around about 2 db reduction your eyes are so lit like the moonlight every time we touch it it's just a subtle amount but it's just going to allow the vocal to take that space so yeah that's it for this video i just wanted to show you that you can still get a good sound with your vocals using stock and fill plug-ins it's more of a beginner's tutorial which is why i didn't go too in-depth and to listen to the full track which i mixed previously then there's a link in the description to emrsnx's tune cloud9 thoughts and if you want any other tutorials then leave a suggestion in the comments and if you've got any questions then shout me on instagram i'll see you next time i just hope you know that you my number one that's like my favorite thing giving you my soul inside this song i hope you take it in need you like the air i need to breathe and i'm just trying to live give you little pieces of my sauce to catch me if i slip come here let me be your h2o then help you take a drink girl i got some things on my mind and i'm just trying to let you know every time i close my eyes me and you we in our own little show floating through the sky when i'm with you on cloud nines where i'm trying to go you were a sweet female with attitude and confidence girl i bring you flowers if you wanted them

Channel: Jay Cactus TV

Views: 250,734

Rating: 4.9701619 out of 5

Keywords: how to mix rap vocals, how to mix rap vocals in fl studio, rap vocal mixing tutorial, how to mix rap vocals fl studio, mixing rap vocals, how to mix vocals, how to mix rap, fl studio vocal mixing tutorial, how to mix hip hop vocals, how to mix vocals with stock plugins, how to mix rap vocals with free plugins, jay cactus, EMRSNX, Vocal Mixing Tutorial FL Studio 20, mixing rap vocals in fl studio 20, how to mix vocals in fl studio 20

Id: jp-Nhaw2HLE

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020