How To Mix Vocals Using Ableton Plugins

the following tutorial is brought to you by whole loops calm it's production time I'm Reid Stefan realist puppet in the game today we are gonna construct our golden vocal production template using auto-tune and plugins available in Ableton 10 now what this session is going to be is your go to plug-in structure for when you're recording a vocalist whether it's a rapper or a singer this is going to be an amazing starting point using it no third party plugins other than auto-tune and amazing amazing results so let's start out by checking out the demo now there's no plugins on this yet I figured you guys wanted to put this together together so we've got mr. boombox by bad royale and Henry Fong featuring Cara pulled up here and the vocals you could hear is dry as a bone aside from our auto-tune so we'll actually just start with that because that is always going to be your first plugin now nothing too fancy is going on in here you basically pick how affected you want your vocal to sound here and since this is really more hip-hop leaning I actually pushed it closer to 20 20 and up I'd say it's like hip-hop territory and then pop music would probably be like maybe 20 to 50 and then a major for the key because there's and then this is an alto tenor part so I picked that that's really all that's going on in auto-tune and once you have all that locked in just go ahead and copy it down on to all your other channels just like I did you may want to bump up your background vocals a little bit more tuna than your lead vocal you can kind of get away for you can kind of get away with that and it'll help tighten them together a whole lot more so now the first thing we're going to want to do is set up some compression we're actually just going to drop our first compressor straight onto our lead and that's going to be able Tain's glue compressor and we're just going to apply some modest compression here [Music] little make up gain to bring a back up and now this is way too much compression for a vocal but it is the perfect amount of compression if you're using it in conjunction with the uncompressed vocal and the way I'm going to set this up as a parallel chain instead of just an insert is by hitting command G on the plug-in and it turns it into this audio effect rack and then you just right click and create another chain below it you can call this compression one we're actually gonna be doing a couple let's call this our dry signal and boom box you give me something right and you miss on there right now [Music] boombox ooh my buddy my buddy right now that's not any more like it now I like to do a lot of compression and combine different types of compressors and since Ableton only has two compressors we're just gonna head over to the other one and let's set up compressor to these both are gonna start to get a little bit loud so we're just gonna run these it may be like minus 10 we're gonna want to achieve the same effect with both compressors but since they sound slightly different it's gonna give us just something extra so let's go [Music] actually like the slow attack boom box [Music] boom box if you will my buddy right here my buddy once here are two channels of distort of compression [Music] that's actually maybe turn them up closer to zero since they're pretty quiet and now to combine these hey I'll miss that boombox we're actually going to spread these out of the center just a little bit so this one's going to go to to the right and this one can go to to the left as you can see when they're centered they really kind of start to cause a lot of traffic in the center of your mix really really subtle but when you're mixing vocals everything is going to be really subtle so these are our two compressors and we've got them basically slamming I mean the meter goes to 20 for a reason so why not send it all the way there the next thing that we're going to want to add is some subtle effect and my favorite subtle effects are the ones that just create a little bit more stereo spread and not so much our a reverb that you could hear or a delay that you can hear and Ableton has the most amazing flanger I use it all the time and we're going to be using that as our subtle effect so let's pull up our Ableton a flanger here down on our dry chain hey all mr. bone box can you give me this on there right give me something right now the lay time really thickens it up a lot you just got to pull back feedback hey I miss that boom box can you give me something right give me something now boombox my buddy my buddy I got you on my bike so you can see it's really filling in the outside not really so much the center and because the center is already pretty much full with our dry take do your AOH sound like floppy trash are you constantly struggling to fix weak snares that just never cut it here at whole loops we can solve your struggle introducing urban beats volume 2 the sequel to our blazing hip hop and R&B drum kit this time we doubled the sauce and created the perfect selection of special snares puppet percussions and 808 so disrespectful you'll be getting moist complaints in 60 minutes or less guaranteed urban beats 2 is available only in whole luscom so let's continue to add a little bit more effect I think the next thing I'm going to do is I think as we add effects they're going to become less and less subtle the compression is really something that you don't even hear you kind of forget it's there it's just kind of a necessity the flanger is the first fancy thing and as we go it just kind of gets more and more fancy so let's get fancy let's create another chain let's do a filter delay because this is going to give us separate options of the left and right ear we're not going to use the center we're really just looking at left and right I'm not going to sync them I'm actually going to pick a millisecond time and this is kind of going to make us a little slap delay [Music] you miss on there right now hey let's call this one slap - now the reason I don't set these up as oxes or returns is because Ableton even Ableton 10 still limits you to 12 returned channels and also when you flatten stuff those return channels and all your delays and things won't end up in the stems or in the flattened part they'll be their own kind of stem and I would like to be able to send my vocals with effects as stems and this audio effect rack is absolutely fantastic for that anyways back to the slap echo let's uh maybe right now see it's all about creating something ever so slightly different in the left and right ear to create that stereo spread and now to help these compete even less with the dry signal since this is really only going through a filter to make the delay we're gonna have to go through another effect another subtle effect [Music] boombots can you give me this on there I give miss on there I'll miss that boombox maybe a little grit - why not since we're adding this to the slap channel we're really just making the slaps grittier we're not making our dry signal courier and this is the beauty whoops we're not making our dry signal grittier and this is the beauty of doing your chains like this you can really manage your effects by applying the majority of them to in effect itself instead of directly on to the channel so let's add some starting to sound really cool and as you could see our dry vocals is still dry can you give me some they're still right there in the center for you and now we get to really use this as our effects mixer boombox can you give me something right give me something now L miss the boombox it could be my buddy my buddy right now we can even spread our effects a little bit we can put the flanger a little bit in the left ear proportionally put the slapping right ear boombox can you give me something right give me something right now so you could see taking things out of the center is the key here and effects really help you do that so let's add another effect we're gonna start with a tight reverb and pull up at Ableton reverb right here let's see what we could do let's shorten this a little bit I have my reverb so loud right now I actually want it to be kind of bright [Music] a little bit more priests [Music] just to kind of give it some space and also keep your effects at a hundred percent forgot to say that before and now that it's at a hundred this is our let's start to turn it down just blend it back in cool so we have got our short let's actually pump up our stereos got a really short space here not so much a big kind of reverb tail but just something to make it sound like more like the vocals in a room and not just in a empty chamber inside your head boom box you give me something right give me something right now I own a boombox take my buddy my buddy now we have a short reverb let's try it out a long one now let's create another chain and create another reverb now for this long reverb I know I want to load of pre delay because I want this to almost act like a delay itself boombox can you give me something right give me something right now it's kind of nice and just in the mid-range and we can even low cut it to help it be even more nice and mid-range II can you give me something right give me something right now you can even spread our to reverbs a little bit I always like to do it symmetrically I'll miss that boom box can you give me something right give me something right now boom boxer can you move my body right move my body right now it's add a little phaser to our reverb [Music] boombox give me right now a little overdrive to man something special about running a reverb through a little bit of distortion instead of overdrive actually let's use saturator because i don't want to really pick a band I kind of want to distort the whole thing let's do some saturator can you give me something right give me something right now hey my buddy it almost compresses the tails without actually applying compression to it I don't really like compressing my reverb tails I like leaving them kind of dynamic because the vocals already so compressed so this is kind of a great way to trick the ear into thinking that the reverb tail is compressed really it's just being a harmonically excited [Music] boombox you give me something right give me something right now I'll miss the boombox if you my buddy right my buddy right now cool so I'm actually going to turn that reverb down a little bit more kind of a trade-off more reverb is kind of like more vibe but less easy to understand the lyrics so you kind of get to pick your own balance and automate this as the song goes I oftentimes use less during the verses more during the hooks really with all these effects so now that we have our reverbs locked in we're gonna go ahead and start doing some delays and there's two really important ones that you're gonna want in your template and that's gonna be a ping pong delay now I always have an eighth-note ping pong delay I just works for me let's call this one 8 and try wait up at 100 you give me something right give me something right now my buddy my buddy I know it's really important to separate your delays from your dry signaling right now the delays are sounding really dry and delays are my favorite place to put my crazy effects on so we're actually going to put some flanger on these delays maybe even some chorus I don't know we're just gonna go home and see what happens I don't know about you but that sounds like the sauce to me now we have our ping pongs locked in you can even pick the thinness or thickness of them right here but ping pong delay default setting is really in a great spot for vocals next thing that we're gonna want to add is a half note delay and for our half note delay we're just going to use the old filter delay the one right in the center and half notes are eight [Music] so see they're being filtered kind of low that's actually really good for a vocal since the most of its up here have the delays kind of take place down here feels a different spot of your mix up [Music] cool so now that these half note delays are rocking we're just going to turn them down a little bit and add a nice effect to these and putting some reverb on your half note delays really gives a lush sense of space and since these delays are getting reverb we don't need to put this at a hundred percent you hear how they don't compete with the vocal now but they're still there filling it up giving you that wonderful sense of Awesome there's some delays going on right now but the lyrics are just as easy to understand and that's very important to be cognizant of as you mix because it is so easy to get really stoked on effects and completely muffle your lyrics I've done it plenty of times but the beauty is of parallel processing you just back off the volume of the effects a little bit maybe push up the volume of the compression a little bit and you're really mixed in like a pro so this piece right here is really your vocals chain not so much the whole template technically this would just be the chain the beauty of the template is you now have all of these kind of laid out ready for you to record right into and instead of copying and pasting this onto all the other channels since they're background vocals we're just going to process them together by highlighting everything below the lead hitting command shift G to group it and we are going to copy this chain right up onto here and do the very same thing to our background vocals hey I got you on my mind call this group background vocals I even like to change the color of these effects channels kind of helps me differentiate between which ones to click on for the individual plugins and which ones to click on more for like the group effects really useful in Ableton 10 can't get enough of this [Music] [Music] generally turn down the backgrounds just about 8 - or so less than your leads tends to be the amount that I pick and throughout your backgrounds it's also really important to pan them right now they don't sound very big when they come in because everything is right down the center and remember mixing is really like so much or just a process of cleaning out the center especially if you make hip-hop and especially if you make pop music the center needs to be there for your vocal and when I say Center on me in the center of the EQ range really left to right panning wise I mean Center so let's listen to these let's just go through I know these are going to be doubles because I labeled them it's very convenient when you do a template just to know that it's gonna be on the right volume and all that stuff [Music] so these are just straight-up doubles of the lead I'm gonna just throw one in the left ear one in the right ear already much bigger let's listen to our next note let's bring this one since this is a higher harmony I like to bring it closer to 50 but maybe just back it off a little bit to like 40 for this pair we're gonna create a nice even spread between centered and hard left and hard right using the rest of these channels they maybe put this one like about 25 now our vocal template is just about finished the only thing that I want to do is separate our background vocals just even more from the lead so that when they come in they just feel like melodic and power support and not so much literal just extra stacks of singing and the way that we're going to do that is with some filtering and we're just going to use the basic EQ 8 to do this filtering and this is going to be some low cutting since we don't really need the full range of voice from our doubles it's more just there for moral support can actually clean up a lot of junk out of our mix down just by taking what doesn't absolutely need to be in there like this is going to be a too thin for a lead vocal but for a background vocal just a simple EQ job is going to do some massive massive clean up to your vocal so we're gonna just paste this all around and I kind of pick I kind of pick where to low-cut it based off of how high the note is sounds a little bit higher of a note so pick a little bit higher of an EQ spot paste it down to the duplicate and let's just continue on down the pile let's give this one a listen this is a really high note yeah right around 500 is good you can even cut out some of the high end out of this one too it's really just looking for the note out of this we're not looking for any of the consonants we really just want the vowels out of these harmonies and the EQ is can help us really isolate just the vowels out of that vocal performance let's check it out now boombox and you get miss on there I he give me something right now l missed a boom box a and B move my body right in with my body right now for a long long time long time [Applause] [Music] now I know the vocals been a little bit louder than it should be for the beat but during this stage in the game you're gonna want to turn your beat down a little bit just you could hear what's going on your vocals a little bit better [Music] but honestly you don't want to mix Unbounce your final version of this song with the beat in the acapella session you really want to do all your work with your automation mute the beat bounce out the acapella and bring it back into your beat session to create your final version but there you have it this is going to be your new golden vocal template to start every project with especially if you don't want to go cluttering stuff up with third-party plugins you could literally just record it through the auto-tune if you're using UAD you could put the auto-tune on and then flatten it and then do all your plugins so that you don't to worry about the latency and also you don't need auto-tune for this I know there's a bunch of companies who make something that do exactly the same thing for much less I know the waves one is amazing and that only costs like sixty years so dollars on the wave store so you don't need to buy the expensive Antares one the expensive UAD one there's a lot of advantages to doing so that I've talked about in my other videos but this one was really just helping you guys set up your golden template because I swear your vocal production can only be as strong as your template templates are everything put a lot of time into finding your favorite effects lock it in save these things I mean you could save these things for a reason gold and I call it reads golden Volks chain boom pull this up next time you record a vocal in another session just drop it on there you know you don't have to pull up this session and record vocals into it I highly recommend doing that though but anyways thank you so much for watching I hope this helps you step up your vocals game I'll be seeing you guys next time with another tutorial peace out

Channel: Reid Stefan

Views: 282,548

Keywords: vocal mixing, tutorial, how to, mix, vocals, processing, ableton, ableton live 10, template, vocal chain, vocal plugins, best vocal plugins, ableton vocal mixing, ableton vocal plugins, mixing, mastering, puppet, ableton 10, compression, EQ, reverb, delay, autotune, plugins, pensado, andrew huang, chris lord alge, jack joseph puig, waves, universal audio, antares, logic pro x, fl studio 12, pro tools 12, reason 9.5, melodyne, music production, vocal production, hip hop, pop, rock, r&B

Id: mLCFMh9Wrzo

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018