How to Mix Vocals Quickly | With Waves CLA Vocals Plugin | Waves Plugins

hey squad welcome back now today's video is specifically geared towards those of you guys who are either new to music production or you might have been involved in production for a while but you're maybe a beat maker or a musician but you don't have that much experience in sound engineering mixing and in particular mixing vocals now the waves cla vocal plug-in could be just the right thing for you as you guys know i'm a big advocate for simplicity and great results and this unit definitely does not disappoint one bit in fact besides the ease of use and the flexibility and the great results sometimes you can pick this up in a flash sale for as little as 29.99 now there's no referral link here i'm not trying to promote you going and spending your money i'm just telling you how cheap this thing is but at the same time the great results you can achieve by using it but i hope you do get some value out of this video and remember to like the video subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment it's always great hearing from you but it's that time so let's get into it okay so right here we've got our waves cla vocals unit this plug-in is great the thing i love about it is its simplicity look at this all you've got is eight faders or sliders and six buttons that's pretty much it down here of course you've got a left and right pan switch but you know you that's pretty self-explanatory you've got a couple of led meters here and an input signal indicator so let's just play back a second so this right here is monitoring your input signal and of course you want it to be a nice healthy green maybe if it peaks and it goes slightly into the yellow but definitely not into the red as well on the output section you don't want it to be clipping into the red so you can use this this slider right here or fader to pull back if you find that things are peaking slightly you can always pull things back using this slider and if the input signal is too strong you use this input signal slider right here so we've just got a little bit of clipping here so i'm going to pull back let's see let's pull that back a little bit all right how about here yep that's cool what i'll do in a second is i'll go through all of the different sliders and what they do i mean they're very very self-explanatory bass treble compress reverb delay pitch you know up here we've got some more labeling but we'll go through all of that in a second so the first thing we'll do is play back the dry vocal as it is and then we'll use this unit to quickly transform it into something that can definitely be used as a main vocal mix in your production small fights conversations all night okay so there you have a gist of what the vocals sounds like both within the overall mix and in isolation and it's very dry the performance is pretty steady there are a few areas where it peaks a little bit but it is pretty steady um all the way through okay so let's dive into this unit and figure out what all of these faders are for so like i said before the first slider or fader is for your input signal so and you can use this to adjust the strength of the signal coming into this unit keep an eye on the meters and make sure it doesn't clip into the red you want a nice healthy signal at the top of the green section maybe just having the yellow section flashing every now and then that will be a nice healthy input signal now i will deal with these first two faders and sliders together we've got bass and we've got treble now for those of you who aren't clear on what bass and treble is now base is to do with the low frequencies or the boomy tones and main body of an audio signal and treble is to do with the higher frequencies the more crisp bright upper frequencies in an audio signal a good representation of this would be on a traditional stereo or hi-fi or car system where you've got bass and treble if you want to feel more of the oomph in your body then you will boost the bass if you want to hear more clarity on your stereo you will boost the treble and if you feel there's too much bass of course you'll reduce the bass and the same with the treble and you can do the exactly the same thing here with these two sliders if you want more bass more body in your vocal you will boost with this one and if you want more high end more crispness more brightness you will boost with this one or you will cut if you feel as though there is too much brightness in the vocal and if there's too much bass in the vocal as well same thing applies now on the bass fader we can use this yellow switch right here to switch between each of these options so we've got sub we've got lower and we've got upper and one more hit of the switch switches this function off or disables it okay by default the very bottom option is illuminated or selected if you click three times you'll then disable this particular fader so one two three and now that's disabled okay let's put those back on so let's deal with sub first now if we look at this eq the base in your vocal will exist down in this sort of zone okay these will this section will be the low mid section the high mid section and then the highs or treble up here if i wanted to boost the sub which would be more down this zone this is what will happen let's play back the vocal we'll switch everything else off so we'll build this up in stages i remember the car ride small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything so this vocal has already had all of the really low frequencies removed prior to it being used in this project so it's probably not the best example but if you've had a vocal recording that you haven't cleaned up yet and removed all of the sub you'll find that the spectrum analyzer will show you a boost in frequencies down here in this section and to be honest a lot of that will be room noise and it's quite useless to you most engineers will filter low frequencies below 80 hertz or so on a vocal because much of it is going to be useless so boosting the sub on a vocal is probably not something you're likely to do anyway if we were to go to lower we'll be dealing with sort of this section now and let's play back and let's see what happens when we do that when we were 15 i remember the car ride small fights conversations all night i never saw you okay so there's a distinct difference there way we're feeling more presence of the body of the vocal by boosting here and you could see a little bit of a boost down here this is i'm just going to the extreme where i'm adding bass to this vocal which i wouldn't really do in a mix because to be honest with you i would want to probably pull back a bit to reduce muddiness in the vocal so but for demonstration purposes this is what the the slider actually does now let's go to upper now upper will be further up in the frequency range let's play back and adjust there when we were 15 i remember the car right small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but once again there's a distinct change in the tone of the vocal um i personally wouldn't add this amount of bass boost to this vocal because it's actually adding mud to the sort of lower mid frequencies around here and reducing the level of clarity let's assume this vocal had just been recorded in my room i would very likely use the the bass slider and pull back on the lower to to reduce the lower frequencies right here and create a bit more clarity and less mud in the vocal okay so for the treble control let's switch that one on and we start off with a bite we'll play back the vocal and we'll increase the fader level and listen to what this does in terms of the increase in treble on the bite selection when we were 15 i remember the car right small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now i okay so we are getting some boost in this zone right here it's definitely adding clarity of course i'm not likely to boost it all the way to the top if i'm using this control on this particular vocal let's see what we get with top now top would be probably around this sort of zone when we were 15 i remember the car ride small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now again the trouble is being boosted all the way from down here all the way along to the top incidentally both of these controls will be considered shelf eq controls let's try roof which would be the ultra high end if you wanted to add some sort of air to your vocal when we were 15 i remember the car right small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend okay so you can hear the distinct difference between all three once again you won't be you don't really want to be boosting these all the way to the top just giving it enough to bring out the clarity where needed but not overdoing it and as you can see right here we're clipping as well when we boost these all the way to the top so you'd want to be keeping an eye on the on the output meter remember as well that you may well need to use a de-esser to tame some of the harsh s's and t's that might result in you using the treble boost control right here and i did a video recently on dss and that will show you how you can actually make good use of the ss to reduce sibilance okay so for the compress fader once again you've got three options push spank and wall and here's a compressor right here and it's got quite a few different controls on it but this unit all you've got to do is select an option and either boost or cut on the slider and you'll get a result so in terms of the intensity or amount of compression being applied the higher up you go the more compression is being applied and at the top here the wall option would represent a brick wall or limiter so let's play back the vocal and quickly go through the three options and hear the results when we were 15 i remember the car right small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now i see you in a new light we're getting older there's a sparkle in your eyes there wasn't okay so i'm using extreme settings right here but you could actually hear the amount of compression was changing as i flicked through the different switches again push might be a good option here for you but use your ears if you find you need a bit more squash on the vocal go to spank and play with the slider and but use your ears and figure out which option actually gives you the best results right here now the reverb control is very self-explanatory and most daws will come with pretty decent reverb units built in but you can opt to use just the controls within this unit for your vocals now the three options you've got here are tight large and chamber tight would represent a small space or small room large might be a large room or a hall and chamber would be a huge space like an auditorium a stadium or something like that and of course the amount of reverb you apply will be controlled by the fader or slider so let's just quickly go through this as well starting with tight when we were 15 i remember the car ride small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now i see you in a new light we're getting older there's a sparkle in your eyes that wasn't there before okay so you can hear the change in in reverb size length and intensity as we flip through the different switches and we increase the slider so on this particular control when the slider is down here there's no reverb but as soon as you start increasing the reverb effect is applied and just like any other control reverb is something that can definitely mess up your mix if you overdo it if you apply too much reverb to your vocals it will definitely mess things up so be very conservative with the application okay so just like the reverb effect the slider for the delay effect starts from right down at the bottom here we've got three options we've got slap we've got eighth and we've got quarter now slap represents a classic slap delay which is sort of a doubling of the vocal eighth of course is an eighth note delay and quarter is a quarter note delay so all you need to do is select which type of delay you want to use and increase the slider to give you the volume of the delayed signal so let's try that out when we were 15 i remember the car rides small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now i see you in a new line we're getting older there's a sparkle in your eyes that wasn't there before you give me butterflies it makes me wonder if really simple to use figure out which effect works best for your vocal and adjust with the slider now another very important factor you need to take into account particularly with the delay is that the timing of the delay is synchronized to the tempo of your project so make sure if you're going to be using this tool that the tempo setting of the door is actually synchronized to the timing of the music hopefully that makes sense to you okay so the final control we're going to look at is the pitch control and although it's titled pitch it's actually a modulation control similar to a chorus and can be even used as a stereo imager or spreader similar to the fantastic spreader plug-in that's built into logic so what we're going to do is we're going to kick things off with stereo and we'll increase the fader as we've done before and just flip through the different options and check out the different sound when we were 15 i remember the car right small fights conversations all night i never saw you as anything more than a friend but now i see you with a new light we're getting older now these are very usable options and can be applied in different circumstances depending on the sort of sound you're going for you don't need to be pushing it all the way to the top here on your vocal channel just give it enough where needed and you'll achieve some nice stereo width on the vocal that you're treating now i've left the very best thing till last and that is the fantastic range of presets that come with this plug-in suite you've got very clearly titled presets for lead vocals as well as for backgrounds and and my suggestion to you is select one and just work your way through the different presets until you achieve the sound that works for you on the vocal that you're mixing once you've gotten close to the sound you want you can then go in and tweak based on the information i've just given you you've got an idea now of what all of these things do and you can increase or decrease intensity or change setting based on the results you're looking for it's as simple as that believe me this plug-in is really good at getting you a really nice sounding vocal in a very quick time by simply going through the presets so let's try that out i'm gonna go to full reset and then we'll just work our way through [Music] see you in a new light we're getting older there's a sparkle in your eyes that wasn't there before you give me butterflies okay i think for now i'm gonna go with face to face let's run with that when we were 15 i remember [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm sure you'd be able to come up with some really sweet vocal mixes by using this really simple but very effective and powerful tool anyway until next time peace

Channel: Music Tech Training Centre

Views: 24,858

Keywords: shure PGA27, vocals, vocal recording, recording vocals, studio vocals, recording vocals at home, home recording, vocal mixing, how to mix vocals, how to mix, mixing singers, how to mix singers, how to mix singing, vocal compression, vocal effects, how to comp vocals, waves plugins, waves plugins for vocals, waves plugins tutorial, waves cla vocals, waves cla plugins, waves cla vocals plug-in, waves cla vocals review, mixing with waves plugins, logic pro x tutorial, waves

Id: xejd3CxIj6A

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021