Hey there Geoff Manchester from iZotope. In this video I want to walk you through steps to mixing a lead rap vocal and also how to untangle it and unmask it from a source that might be getting in the way of its intelligibility. In this case our source is an instrumental beat, a backing track. So we're gonna do everything the whole way with Nectar 3. The track we're using is called Profound, it's by Kyle Bent. Check it out. As a mixing engineer, I think it's important to take care of - first and foremost - the housekeeping in a lead vocal. Before you add saturation,
compression, the fun stuff, You want to make sure that you take care of sibilants - strongly stressed consonants - like "chhh" "tssss" that kind of thing you want to make sure that you have good tonal balance across the frequency spectrum of the vocal, so there's no cluster or buildup of energy in the low or the high that might be adding resonant peaks or just sourness or muddiness. And you also want to make sure that you have a nice smooth consistent level throughout the duration of the vocal performance so if your singer gets a bit too energetic, you want to turn them down If they get a bit too quiet at the end of a passage you turn them up. And then you start adding your coloration your compression all that
stuff. The reason for this is if you don't take care of the housekeeping first and you add stuff that brings up the body of the vocal so you add compression, delay, reverb. You're going to be highlighting all of those problems. the tonal balance stuff, the level stuff, the sibilants. Now luckily vocal assistant in Nectar 3 can take care of a lot of this stuff for us. So I'm gonna go there first, to Vocal Assistant. Make sure that the assistant box is check marked, press next, and now I'm being asked to go for a vibe. So what's the sonic flavor I want for this vocal? vintage, modern, maybe I'm doing something for a podcast or YouTube, dialogue would be that choice. dialog would be that choice. I'm gonna go from modern and the intensity here is just how hard we want to push the ballistics and the processing of Nectar to conform to one
of these vibes up here. I'm gonna go for moderate. I'll press next and now when I hit the spacebar, through machine learning and really intelligent DSP, Nectar 3 we'll listen for those problems I talked about Sibilants, level, it's gonna listen for tonal balance and it's also going to get me started with
some stuff that helps get this vocal sounding professional so compression
reverb all that stuff so I'm gonna stop talking and hit the spacebar. So if I like what I hear I'll press accept Before I go through what Vocal Assistant did to get us to a really cool starting point here, let's do a quick before and after. now this vocal had nothing on it before everything that you're gonna hear
in the 'after' is a result of Nectar 3 so here's before Let's go through what Vocal Assistant did to take care of the housekeeping and add coloration coloration and just get us started with
this vocal, The first thing that Vocal Assistant did was listen to the input and set the auto level mode here -ALM. And this is great because what it does is it
rides your gain for you to make sure that you have a smooth consistent level
throughout the entire performance so no hand-drawn automation no fader
writing none of that it's just gonna set it right there and make sure that you
always hit around minus 8 DB rms which is a great area loudness wise if you
want to add stuff down the road like compression or saturation. The other thing that it did was it left the EQ here and set these nodes to areas of sonic
importance that it heard during the listening pass. So this is that tonal balance thing I was talking about. It heard these areas as
being important or interesting maybe there is a little bit of muddiness here at around 182 Hertz. Or maybe it was a little bit sour here at 5,000 Hertz. So it placed those nodes there and from here we can go even further and actually
set these nodes to EQ follow and to do that click on the node go to the heads-up display here and press frequency. And when I do this it's
basically going to attach itself to one of the harmonics and follow it no matter where
it goes, watch. So you can see it's following
that harmonic wherever it goes. And this just gives you really transparent
reduction of harshness or sourness wherever Vocal Assistant found it in the spectrum And this EQ goes up to 24 bands. You could have theoretically 24 bands of EQ follow just tracking harmonics. I'm gonna make the rest of
these nodes EQ follow as well just to make sure that I'm taking care of all
the sourness and harshness in this vocal The next bit of
housekeeping happened in a de-esser so you see that when I click on it here we
have the threshold down and the cutoff here frequency wise is around, right there at 8 K . So to make sure that we're actually de-essing what we want to be de-essing, we can actually press this little ear button and now we can hear just what the module is hearing. And this is a great way to check your work. or in this case check Vocal Assistant's work because it's set this up here for us so it sounds really good it's just
picking up the esses and the strongly stressed consonants. I'll uncheck that. And now the next part after the housekeeping has been taken care of with the auto
level mode with the de-esser and the first subtractive EQ, we go to EQ number
two which is adding a little bit of air and kind of tonal brightness to this
vocal The other thing that Vocal Assistant did was set a compressor down here and we have this beautiful gain trace going across and actually Nectar 3 is totally
resizable so I can resize it, so you can really see the gain trace you know pushing down and just controlling the dynamic range of this vocal and really keeping up with Kyle as he spits bars over this beat. Here's what's happening. The uncompressed input signal waveform is displayed here in dark gray. This is the signal before compression, but when the signal is being compressed, we see gain reduction applied to the output signal displayed here in light gray. This is the signal after compression. And this yellow trace line indicates the gain reduction being applied by the compressor. You can use this trace meter to monitor the response times, attack and release phases, and gain reduction applied over time. The last thing that Vocal Assistant did was set up a reverb for us and we have this really nice post EQ which protects some of the input signal from reverb so that things don't get too
drowned out. So we can actually open up the rest of the spectrum to reverb or close it. I like it to be pretty closed, as this just adds a little bit more intelligibility we don't get too drowned out in the reverb, and we can also dip over here into the mid-range where the intelligibility of Kyle's verses might want to kind of poke through So we might want to turn the
down and protect it from reverb as well and a pro tip one thing you can do is
hit the solo button on any module in Nectar 3, to bypass all the other ones just so you can hone in and get a very specific
sound in that module. So when I hit the "S" button, you're only going to hear the
reverb here and not the effect of the compressor, de-esser, the other EQ, any of that stuff. We also have these mix parameters here that allow you to blend in the amount of wet against the dry signal so you can go parallel with any of the modules. And this goes for all the modules in Nectar 3, so if we want to add a little bit more reverb, very easy to do that. Have a listen I'm gonna keep this solo so you can just hear the reverb So now the Vocal Assistant has gotten us started it's time to make the vocal your own. And one thing I like to do is add saturation I'm gonna hit the plus sign here
under the saturation module and bring this before the reverb and I can blend this in. One of the settings I really like is retro I can blend this in via
the amount slider, like this. And the orange here in the spectrum represents where the concentration of saturation is happening in the spectrum One of the things you can do is crank it up on the amount side and then just blend it in with the mix slider. So this point let's to zoom out a little
bit and have a listen to where this vocal is sitting in the context of the beat One thing I might do is just add a little bit on the output. I'm gonna bring up the body the totality of everything that we've done here on
this vocal via this slider and to be extra careful I might add a limiter here
just to place a ceiling above which we're not allowing body of the audio to go. Let's do one more before and after before we move to the other part which is unmasking this vocal from the stereo beat. So here's before Now that my vocal is in a really good spot
I want to unmask it and help it pop even further in the context of this mix. And to do that I'm going to use some brand new technology that we have at iZotope
called Inter Plugin Communication to create a pocket, a space for the vocal, so that it can be more intelligible. When something is masking something else in a mix it means they're sharing space in the frequency spectrum. And that collision might result in one element being less intelligible or less audible than it would be if they weren't masking each other. so to do that I'm going to go
to my instrumental beat and I'm gonna put an instance of relay on this beat here. I should mention that you can do the same thing with another instance of
Nectar 3 or Neutron 2. And I'm going to go over here, and you can see that relay is basically a channel ops plugin. we have gain, panning, width, we have even more stuff down here, channel swap, phase, mono, but what this really is is a way
for my instrumental beat to talk Talk to Nectar 3 to get that unmasking done I'm going to close this. go back to my lead vocal,, open Nectar 3, and go back to Vocal Assistant. I don't want to do another passive assist, so I'll uncheck this but I do want to Unmask, and look what it says. unmask is gonna carve space for the vocal by comparing it to another audio track in correcting frequency masking. So
I press next. now it's asking me what is the source of
the masking, what's causing the problem in our case it's the stereo beat and
because we have a relay on the beat it shows up right here thanks to inter plugin-communication. these two plugins are talking to each other so I'll press this
and now I'm going to press next and when I play audio it's going to listen to the
two tracks and put a behind-the-scenes EQ on the beat to carve a pocket so that
the vocal is more intelligible and audible Have a listen And now it's done. So I'll press accept and you'll see that if we go back to our beats and our beats relay, we have this little icon here this blue icon it's saying it's unmasking the lead
vocal from the beat. What this icon represents is a behind-the-scenes EQ, a static EQ that just pushes down and suppresses energy on the beat where the
vocal is coming through so the two aren't clashing and masking each other Let's do a big before and after. Before Unmasking and before Vocal Assistant got us started getting a super professional polished sound for this lead vocal. And there we go. If there's any other genres that you
want to see mixed or workflows you want to see addressed let us know in the
comments we really appreciate it Thanks for watching
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