Live Stream - Vocal Settings *Headphones Recommended* | X32/M32 | Video 4

all right welcome back to alum house sound today we continue the series of how my live stream setup is built so we've already done an overview we've done drums we've talked about band the next thing this video is about vocals now for most of us maybe all of us vocals tend to be the most important piece of the mix the band can be great but if you don't hear the vocals they don't really hear the vocals and a lot of us want people to sing along and so we need the vocals to sit on top of the mix and be very present in the mix but also controlled vocals are the most dynamic instrument that we get each word can be big and then soft at the end of the word or or they can grow or they can sing loud or they can be background vocals and be supportive information to the main lead vocal so there's all these different things that we need to attend to and things that we are contending with to to build this mix properly now one of the things that stands out in this new rendition of my scene is the way that i'm treating the reverb on the vocals now we've talked in previous videos about all of the different reverbs that i'm using in my delay and we're going to dive in today to the reverb that's specific to the vocals the delay that's specific to the vocals and how they impact the sound and really what they do in the overall mix so it's kind of a jam-packed video we're only dealing with uh four instruments two of which are the pastor's mic and the handheld mic that we use kind of for announcements or anybody else that comes on stage the other two are vocals singing vocals and so that's where we're gonna really spend the bulk of our time today but i want you to see how they're all laid out how i'm using the different plugins that are in the x32 that are available to you and the different reverbs and how they all mix together so this is going to be a jam-packed video hold on tight and we'll see at the end let's get started [Music] if we look at the screen here again as we've talked about we have some pretty important things here uh in in terms of what we can see and i'm going to actually change the screen in just a minute so we've got our pastor's mic we've got our our wireless handheld mic that we use for announcements or or potentially other other speaking those two are kind of speaking mics then we have three uh wired mic potentials uh typically in this example the male lead and then the female lead are here we do have a third vocal that could be used but um that's usually just going to be kind of a background vocal if you will and then we've got the dcas again similar to what i do with the drums here i've just got a a setup of the dca so you can see what i'm using when i'm mixing and you'll see we have a dca for vocal group and that's just that once i get a mix of these let's say that we have her turn down some i can turn the the vocal group the entire vocal group up or down just with one fader i don't have to mess with the mix over here especially if i've got a third person maybe singing in here somewhere i i don't have to mess with all three of them i can just use the dca we know what dcas are for but that gives me that capability there so i'm not going to talk anymore about that the only last one that we'll we'll show you here is the dca for the delay now i mentioned in the preview video or the overview video video number one of this series i mentioned that this dca is controlling a specific setup on my my delay and chamber effect which is just for vocals and we'll talk more about that when we get there but i do have a dca here that is controlling the volume of that effect so i'm going to take these dcas away and i'm going to bring up a different view on the screen and then we'll dive into our stuff all right so the first input we're going to talk about here is our pastor's over ear microphone there's a countryman microphone going through a shure wireless body pack that goes over into the wireless transmitter or receiver i mean and then comes right into our digital snake and so what we have here if we look at the channel strip first we do have this effect being inserted first so this is our de-esser this is a built-in de-esser into the console and what this is doing is if you're not familiar with the de-esser it's removing certain frequencies it's just a it's a compressor that's built around certain frequencies so that the higher band is removing the s's so if he says jesus with a strong s on it then this is going to pull that down a certain amount and you can see the gain reduction that happens with these little lights that blink at the bottom there's also a lower band which is more in that kind of 200 250 hertz range which is going to be removed with based on that compressor knob as well so it's a one knob compressor and it's just going to be doing compression but we're hitting that first and you can see we have eq and we have compression here it's kind of standard compression and we'll talk about that when we get to that so let's turn all of these things off shall we all right so let's take a listen to this raw pastor's mic here authority and and and pegging our lives to anything other than ourselves and it is not good out there and and honestly the bible is the best thing i could give you as a source of authority for your life and it's the best tool i could put in your hand so that you will not ruin your all right now let's take a look at the eq that we're doing well let's let's listen through the chain here so we'll do de-essing first get into that stuff and we can read that and we can do the podcast and we can geek out about that i like all that stuff too but what i'm telling you is at the end of the day i'm going to reach higher than all of that stuff which is here now and will be forgotten in a generation i'm aiming higher at the wisdom of the ages the truth of the scripture that is endured all right so not a huge change but it does catch some stuff depending on where the mic is placed uh it's different even as he's moving through the service he typically tends to touch the mic unfortunately sometimes we sound people want to tape it to his face but that's only in theater performances unfortunately all right so then we'll take a look at the eq you can already see that it's a pretty drastic eq curve but let's take a look at that here we go and that truth we've torn down the history of our country we've torn down all the things and then we then we wonder why we don't get along now we're not we're not connected to anything and so um i want to give you this to help us so that's a pretty drastic change we're taking out a lot of the body a lot of those lower mids uh of this vocal and also what it's picking up from the actual room sound as well let's turn those off listen to it and then turn it back on when when the curve balls come we all think we're going to be ready for the moment and rise to the occasion but it's not true the greek poet thousands of years ago arco locus wrote these words and i've thought about them a lot over the last year we don't rise to the level of our expectations we fall to the level of our training all right let's take a look at the compressor greatness view all right i want to talk about compressor settings real quick um on this specifically because i get this question a lot how do you compress your pasture for me i always compress him like he's always in compression but there's a trick that you have to know to make it sound natural so my ratio is a five to one ratio i have a 20 millisecond attack the hold is as far down as it's it's zero then i have a 40 millisecond release now the gain i do have him coming back up some on the makeup gain this right here is the makeup gain and if i go to the other settings the knee the knee is the the biggest thing that i can tell you here the knee right up here is set at five now on the actual console it's on the second page you have to hit the page down or the layer down button but it's the knee is at five and that is the smoothest rolling on and off that we can get that's that's that's the secret right there so let's take a listen to it in compression and not compression so this is offsetted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in christ jesus first of all paul tells timothy hey um remember what you have learned from the scriptures that have made you wise for salvation so you can see he understands that paul says the scriptures of the sacred writings he's not talking about what we call the new testament because they're living that they're in it right then and there he's talking about the jewish scriptures the old testament the torah what we would call the old testament he's talking about that timothy was steeped in that from his mother see that so when he said timothy it compressed almost it almost took out 6 db of him but you can't tell because he's kind of always in compression so it's more just kind of rolling on and off it's just adjusting the fader for us here he's getting into it pretty good all right so that's kind of the big thing that i do with with my pastor and my handheld i keep the knee at five i keep them always on compression they're kind of they're on the compressor when they're just breathing and then when they're talking they're they're more in compression so play with that within your setting i will caution you if you over compress or if your stage is not that deep if you have a shallow stage or if you have a very echoey room or if your pastor is just overall close to the um close to your pa speakers in terms of being in alignment with your pa speakers that mic's going to ring out it's going to feed back and i i tend to not want to remove too many frequencies and wring out that mic i want to sound it i want it to sound natural i want the the vocal microphone to sound like the person the eq that i'm doing is tending to be making the microphone sound like the person as opposed to pulling out a bunch of oddball frequencies just because the room is feeding back so play with it be cautious with compression and overly compressing especially on a speaking microphone but that trick of running a knee at five can really be a godsend for you all right so let's take a look at the handheld microphone the handheld microphone is just running through the other side of the de-esser it's a very similar chain here you can see we've got this effects chain which is the de-esser then we've got eq and compression and these settings are going to be pretty similar uh that we did not use this handheld microphone in the service but if we just look at the eq here this is what the eq looks like on my handheld so you can see my low cuts at 230 hertz this works that i can hand it to a male a female i don't have a lot of boominess i've got a pretty even sound in terms of compression it's pretty similar we're running five to one compression uh 30 millisecond attack and then the knee on this one is at four um it just seemed to work better for me but having that pretty uh knee of four or five seems to really help roll that stuff off but i can hand this microphone to anybody and not really be concerned about what i'm going to get all i have to do is quickly adjust the level and these microphones are typically handed to somebody and they walk out on stage we don't get a sound check with it so that's just something to keep in mind all right let's get on to kind of the star of the show here for this discussion this is going to be our singing vocals so i'm going to reset a couple things and then we will uh get on to our male lead vocal we pause for a quick commercial break please take a second and visit the like button and the subscribe button all right so let's dive into this this is going to be fun this is going to be quite a ride so buckle in your seat belts here and i'll show you this is really the the biggest change that i've made since i built this initial scene months ago was changing the effects to get the sound that i wanted on my vocals while they're singing so first off we're just going to do dry vocals all right so all of my effects all of my compressors all of my eqs are turned off let's just listen to these two vocal mics male and female they're on the front of the stage these are just standard hard-wired sm58s that are going actually i take that back these are blue encore 200s now we changed to the blue encore 200s a little bit ago and uh so these are just straight mic uh we do have and i'll i'll tell you we do have a plexiglas shell around our drums keep that in mind when you hear how much drum bleed there is into these microphones all right let's take a listen to these the lord is in this way and not for a minute was i forsaken the lord is in this place the lord is in this place and come holy spirit all right so not too terrible um but we're getting a pretty raw direct sound so let's take these first with the male vocal and we're going to add these things in place in line with what we're doing so the first thing we've got here is our eq i'm always going to eq first before i compress on a vocal all right so this is no eq the lord is in this place all right low-cut and come holy spirit just listen to that change you'll hear kind of low rumble the lord is in this place the lord is in this place all right now the actual eq and not for a minute was [Music] so eq and low cut the eq is mostly taking out kind of that lower the lower mid range the the the rumble of the chest to let the top end be a bit more clear it just gives it a little bit more headroom the low cut though is taking out all of that stage and room noise that's uh that's just kind of cluttering the the sound let's take a look at compressor now uh we'll walk through the settings so compressor inline compressor this is the compressor that is in the chain in the channel strip just after my eq and this compressor i've kind of taken i've adopted this methodology from the mix you guys and what i'm doing is this compressor hits really fast really hard and it just levels out the vocal it takes all of the spikiness of the beginnings of a word or right after they take a breath and it knocks it down anywhere from 6 9 even 10 db sometimes alright but then i'm using the makeup gain to bring the whole microphone up which brings them nice and even in the mix then we use the compressor that you can see on on the screen here the dual ultimo or the 1176 emulation and we're using that to do kind of more of our standard compression all right so let's take a look at these settings three to one ratio zero millisecond attack no hold no release the release is five milliseconds that's the lowest i can go i do have a makeup gain of about five and a half db and then the knee is set to two all right so not a zero knee not a one knee but a two knee all right let's take a listen to it and watch what we're doing here so here's the vocal without compression and not for a minute compression was i forsaken the lord is in this place the lord is in this peace and come holy spirit tribune awaken the lord is in this place all right so what you're gonna notice is the end of his words the lord he he hits lor the l really hard and then he backs off on the ord all right and the compressor is bringing up that makeup gain is bringing up the end of the word but it's softening the beginning of the word and so we get this much more even vocal sound across the board here all right now we've got the 1176 in here and this is where you can see it's acting it's just turned off right now but it is sitting kind of in that minus six minus seven db this one you can run really hard it gives a nice color tonality to it but it um it just does a lot of great work for me so let's take a listen to that get back here where i can turn it on and off for us all right in this place so this is all income holy spirit no it's on the lord is in this place the lord is in this place [Music] and not for a minute was i forsaken the lord is in this place the lord is in this place all right so two things that this one does for me when the combination of these two compressors uh are really making it so that when he speaks into the mic uh just with talking welcoming you know the congregation or whatever he's just talking that i don't have to crank the fader up but so much i i i just move it a little bit up maybe 2 3 db and and it's really fine and manageable and and then when he's singing we have these great dynamics but from a broadcast perspective dynamics are great but they kind of also kill a bunch of things so this gives more of that radio ready sound and really controls the vocal and helps it land better in the mix it helps it sit better in the mix we will listen in a second to what this sounds like in the mix but let's keep going all right so similarly this is the female vocal we have uh this is dry here everything is turned off as you can see [Music] was i forsaken the lord is in this place the lord is in this place all right let's take a look at eq low cut first dry bones awaken the lord is in this place the lord is in this place all right so on this vocal what's the eq is doing for me she's got a lot of of kind of chest vocal uh resonance if you will and so this frequency right in here this this kind of dip right after my low cut that is helping to tame some of that the other things here are just a little bit of kind of nasaliness or or whatever the case was but those frequencies are are kind of taming that harshness a lot in female vocals this one right here you'll see is around a thousand hertz thousand hertz on a female vocal usually gets a little out of hand and i don't care which female vocal it is i'm going to take some of it out you can see in this case four and a half db but if you're looking for what's that oddball frequency that's pegging my ear from your female vocal doesn't matter how beautiful she sounds just by herself in the room uh when when you put a microphone in front of her put her through a pa put her through a mix put her through compression thousand hertz watch out for it all right so let's take a listen again with no eq and then eq and listen for the low end rumble as well that gets removed no the eq is in this place let me turn it on the lord is in this place come holy spirit now when she says spirit you'll see that it moves up here in this top end a little bit i don't have the de-esser to use because i'm using this uh this other compressor instead so kind of some limitations that i wish i could work past but with just using the console i just decided to do a little bit of a you know a dip here on the eq that's at about what is this 11 and a half k um just to help tame the s's a smidge all right let's listen to the compressor here let's take a look at it turn it on the lord is in this place the lord is in this place not for a minute [Music] the lord is in this place the lord is in this place all right so again uh you can see it working here this is a even lighter compression this is a ratio of two to one but i do still have the fast attack the no hold and the fast release i've got the makeup gain set at plus four and my knee again is at two so that's my first compressor now we can see the 1176 here and we'll go back and turn that on for us so let's take a listen without it the lord is in this place come holy spirit dry bones awake again the lord is in this place the lord is in this place [Music] all right so the 1176 again is really evening out the um the the sound of the vocal in the mix so if i turn on drums with with no reverbs on or anything i'm going to turn on just everything and let you hear where this sits uh with and without this ultimo compressor so let's turn it off i'm going to have to do a little dance here all right here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] all right so that's a big difference you can hear how they pop up into the mix um and again i'm already using the compressor my gain is set properly the the compressor is taking out some frequencies but i or some some volume but i'm raising it back up with the makeup gain so using the secondary compressor really helps me dial the vocal into the mix and really helps me place it on top of the mix without it having these drastic spikes up and down uh when they breathe in and then they peg the first letter of the you know of a word or something so now i want to set things up and we're going to talk about the effects the best thing you can do is hit the like button because that always makes your singers sing in tune all right so we are now got a considerably different display here these are the three effects that are being used on my vocals and they're from top to bottom least impactful to most impactful so the first one is the vintage reverb if you haven't checked out when i talked about that with the band you can go back to that video at the end of this and you can watch the settings on that vintage reverb i'm not going to dive into the specific settings of what i've got right now because i do go into those in depth but this reverb first is giving a general room it's more of a a mid-rangey reverb and we can hear it here so if i have vocals running amen for sake the lord is in this place the lord is in this place and come holy spirit [Music] so you can hear that kind of off to the left and right right when i mute it you'll hear the the reverb sound on is in this way and [Applause] hear that kind of that reverb off to the sides the lord is in this way all right so that's what that reverb is doing it's not a lot but it's just enough to get them into the room and not be overpowering of the raw more dry sound of the vocal if you go to reverby too much reverb um in that mid-range it's gonna swallow the vocal push them back in your mix and they're gonna sound like they're in a big wash washroom or like in a it's gonna sound more like a cathedral which could be nice but that's not what i want i want i want the vocals to be up front very present in the mix but still have enough uh outside space that they they don't sound super dry all right so that's effect number one i'm going to remove that one now and let's talk about the delay and chamber the delay in chamber is my delay the delay in chamber has a reverb quality to it when i mix in a daw i always tend to run a delay and then i put a reverb after it to soften that delay up and give it a little bit more breadth and quality so that's what i found here delay in chamber so you can see that my time now my time is set up with a tap tempo i talk about this in the the overview video but i've got my assignable keys for me i'm using assignable key number eight as my tap tempo so if i tap it like this you'll see the time is adjusted this is 900 if i tap it really fast you see the time goes down 500 so if we put it with the song it seems to be about 800 milliseconds is the time now the pattern uh the pattern right here is one to two then i have my feed high cut which is thousand hertz then my feedback is thirty percent cross feed is fifty percent all right now on the console the next fader is the balance which is top left up here balance determines you could go way to the right and go more reverb less delay or to the left you could go more delay and less reverb for me i'm right in the middle it's delay and reverb okay now those are all of the delay settings now we talk about the reverb settings which are here on the right the reverb settings i've got a pre-delay set at zero milliseconds so again the delayed effect automatically goes into reverb is what it's saying the reverb on here has a decay of 1.5 seconds and then a size of 34. the damping is 5 at uh 5k and then the low cut which is up here the low cut is 200 hertz so i'm cutting out the low end and i'm i'm using this to get this this delay sound so let's hear what this sounds like in context all right here we go vocals and come holy spirit try bones away again so it bounces a little bit from left to right when they're singing uh but you'll hear when i hit the end when i mute the vocals you'll that's when you hear it here we go again [Music] all right so that's the delay that's the effect that i'm using and that's typically always on um it's just always running unless they're speaking we'll talk about that in a minute but when they're singing that effect is always on i've got tap tempo uh to be with the the meter of the song and off we run so again [Applause] and it's not actually obnoxious right now uh compared to what i typically hear however when you put it in the context of the band it fits perfectly it actually a lot of times lines up with the delays of my guitarist which is kind of nice all right let's go to the next one which is going to sound very effective until we turn the band on this is the biggest change that i've made and i love it i love it because it adds top end sonic quality to my vocals so let's bring this guy up all right so what we have right now i kind of just want to play it and let you hear it but um i'm not going to i'm going to talk through it first okay this one here is an ambience effect now we used the ambience as well as our drum on our drum reverb but this one has different settings on it and let's talk through those here my pre-delay is at 10 milliseconds um the decay here is at 3.82 seconds so it's a little bit longer this is the longest reverb i've got but the size the size is 38 the size kind of determines the room that you're in so this is a much smaller room uh but it's got a longer decay which is kind of not it's backwards of what you would normally think then i've got damping damping set at 7k the diffuse this is right in the middle here at 16. and then the level uh the levels at zero now we flip the page two low cut is all the way up 500 hertz i'm cutting out as much low end as i can then the high cut is at 20 so i'm leaving that means it's really not cut at all i'm leaving all the top end in there modulate is at zero and then my tail gain is 26 which just means that it kind of does a little boost on the tail um i guess built in built-in trickery similar to a compression with makeup gain so let's listen to this now this is going to sound very affected because it's not in context of everything else but here we go lord is in this place the lord is in this place [Music] alum what are you doing that sounds ridiculous yeah i know i know but it sounds great in the mix let's listen to it again so when i stop it do you hear that up at the top end that's what i'm looking for let's listen to it again oh that three second delay 3.8 second delay that just kind of rings out this top shimmer makes such a huge difference in the mix so i'm going to turn off all of the effects uh first let's listen to the vocals with the effects on and then i'm going to add all the band in so here we go this is dry [Music] [Applause] dry effects [Applause] no effects effects all right so for me that brings the presence of the vocal we've got a nice even sound because of the compression that we've done we have a little bit of a room and kind of that mid-range reverb with the reverb the first one the vintage verb we have a little bit of this delay which is helping to to join the two reverbs together and then we have that bright reverb that just makes it sing on top of the mix and to me i love it so this has been something i've been trying to figure out a lot of times i evaluate other churches that are big name churches that have a huge studio and a lot of equipment and i listen to their vocal and their vocal has this top end shimmer on it that just sits in the mix and trying to figure out how i can do that now this may be too much for your taste luckily i've got an encoder knob that i can adjust the level of so maybe if i go like this and i turn it down 3 db just on that one effect let's hear what it sounds like now this is no effects [Applause] all right so that is that is something that you could mess with you can play with it to me it makes a huge difference in my mix and i've really loved adopting it because in the room i don't have that turned on but maybe just a little bit but in my live stream it makes such a huge difference okay so that's pretty cool isn't it how we can add that reverb that's just kind of a top end shimmer and we can really help that vocal stand out in the mix and really gain that top-end presence without just cranking the vocal up more so maybe you found this video helpful hit the thumbs up button because that helps us get this video out more also hit the subscribe button that way you'll find out when the next video comes out which is going to be more about the routing and my live stream routing and then also if you want to you can share this so feel free to share this video hit the thumbs up hit the subscribe button do all the things that youtube likes for you to do while you're learning about your live stream setup so anyway if you've got questions feel free to put those in the comments section below i'm always down there checking out the comments and answering those to help you out and build your mix better we'll catch you guys the next one peace you

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 2,562

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Id: E5xyJXaliMg

Length: 36min 56sec (2216 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021