My name is Reid Stefan, realest puppet in the game
and I'm a music producer, songwriter and engineer. And today I'm collaborating with Karra
to record and mix EDM vocals in Ableton. I'm going to be sharing our process from start to finish
using 99% stock Ableton plugins. Karra's in the vocal booth, recording through our Slate ML-1
microphone connected to our Apollo interface. I've got my gain set up at a perfect level
for the song we're about to sing, plus a little UAD compression and reverb
to sauce up the headphone mix. Here's an instrumental I produced and bounced as a high quality 32 bit
WAV file with nothing on the master chain. Let's drop it into a blank Ableton
session and set our project tempo to 150. And let's make sure our settings
are good for recording. Command + comma opens your settings where you can choose your
audio interface where you have your mic connected, And in here you can turn down your
latency settings from 1024 to 128. Or if you're using an Apollo and you have
this third party console app to control your headphone mix, you could just leave it at 1024 and mute
your audio channel like I'm going to be showing you in this tutorial. So let's create a lead vocal channel. I'm going to make my recording
channel red and we're going to rename it Karra. And this is a great shortcut to do first, because everything we record is
going to have the name of what you type in here. And then we're going to record our mic connected to Input 1. Make sure that our input monitoring is off, because like I said,
we're monitoring through our headphone mixing console, and enable it for recording. And we're ready to record our very first vocal take. I like to create a keyboard shortcut using
the lowercase letter R, Command K opens your keyboard shortcut menu and then press it again to save it.
And let's record with the click on it. And that's a great first take. I can do better than that. If you feel like you could do better than that,
like she said, we're going to create take lanes that will allow us to combine
the best parts of takes later. So let's right click on this and Show Take Lanes. And as you can see, our first recording is
already down here in a take lane, meaning we can delete it without actually
deleting it, and we can keep recording the same spot over and over
again and keep every recording. So let's try another take of the first verse. And you could do as many takes as you
think you need to nail the performance. -But Karra, how many more would you like to do?
-I think we got it. Let's create a channel for these
to actually play back on. I'm going to drag this down here
and we can call this our Lead Vocals. I also like to hear our progress through a couple of plugins like tuning,
compression and reverb - things that we would have in the mix anyways,
but just there quickly and tentatively to give us a better idea
of how we're sounding so far. So let's start out with some auto-tune. I'm going to hit Command F to find a plug in and I'm going to type in my
favorite version of Auto-tune, the Realtime UAD Auto-tune. I use the mono version because
these are mono recordings. The key of this song is e-minor, so I'm going to use the Set Minor button
and choose E. And here we can just
adjust our retune speed. And this can be heavy or light.
We're going to go somewhere in the middle. And that'll just help us hear the content
of our takes and the tone and the delivery and the timing without worrying
so much about the pitch. We can fix all that later.
And like I said, comp together the best pieces. Let's add a couple more effects
to this before we keep recording. Just as a nice playback mix. I'm going to pull this down for a little
bit of Threshold reduction. And I like to switch this to the Classic look like this.
I just find this to be a little more visually easy to understand. And we'll dive into attack and release
and better compression settings later. I just want a little bit of squeeze
to even everything out as we go. Let's also add one final effect just
to help everything sound nice, and that's going to be some reverb. Now, I like to use Reverb as a parallel
effect on an aux channel and Ableton has the best shortcut ever for that
and it's called Plugin Groups. And you just hit Command G. Click this button to create a parallel chain
so we can have our dry signal coming through one channel and our reverb signal
coming through another channel. This gives us 100% wet here
with independent volume of each, And that's a perfect vocal chain just
to get our ideas sounding great as we recorded. So back to the lead vocals.
Let's go in to our pre-chorus. We can even mark where we want our pre-chorus
to be here by right clicking... Verse 1. Pre-1. And these are going to come in handy later
as things start to fill in our session. But let's go through all of our takes and pick the best pieces. Ableton makes it really easy to listen
through all of your recordings and picking your favorites. All you have to do is highlight and click
enter and you'll find your comped vocal at the top. So let's drag these takes back into the playlist so we can listen
to everything side by side. I'm going to click this speaker icon
so that I can solo my first take. I'm just going to focus on this first line here. I like the energy of take two.
So I'm going to highlight this guy and click enter. At least I like the ending. So I'm going to click this up. Let me see if I can
get a better beginning. That's a strong beginning. So let's take that. So once you're finished comping, you can close all of your take lanes
and you have your finished lead vocal. I like to keep my red channel for recording. So I'm going to cut and paste this
down here onto my lead channel. We can assign this color to all the clips.
I just want to zoom in and do a little bit of crossfade work to help these just feel a little bit cleaner. There's some space in between the vocals
that could be removed and even some breaths that can be reduced. I like to do this by separating them into their own piece, double-clicking
and turning the volume down. And while we're in here, I also like to disable Warp because we're
not going to be changing the tempo of these. So we really don't need that going at all.
We'll have a slightly higher quality of audio without off. So let's take everything and turn Warp off and let's just go through and do some
little crossfades and breath reductions to help us just feel as
smooth and clean as possible. Nothing sounds better than just going
in here and manually cleaning up what you don't want to hear. And we've got a perfectly cleaned up vocal
ready to stack with doubles, harmonies. Let's create some more channels.
I'm going to duplicate this channel, delete all the layers, and let's just
make it a slightly different color. And let's move our recording
down here onto this channel. And our first doubles don't come into the pre-chorus.
I'm going to start it right here and press R. And we'll do that once more for the left here. Let's shrink these tracks so that they're
not quite as tall as the lead vocal. That will just help it stand out in the pile more. I'm going to make a duplicate of this pair
and everything that we do is going to be recorded in pairs. Let's try yellow. Let's do orange and so these weird browns.
And then we'll make this blue. I don't know, I was getting into this
weird brown palette that I wasn't feeling, so we're just going to... fortunately Ableton
has all the colors you could ever ask for, so let's... Label those "Low" for the low octaves. So we're just going to keep repeating this
pattern of recording things that enhance the lead vocal, like low octaves, high octaves, harmony layers. And again, everything is in pairs. And when you're all finished, you have
a big stack of vocals that looks like this. So there's all of our background vocals, stacks, doubles, harmonies
and everything to support the lead. The last layer that we're going to record are ad libs. And these are like the cherry on top
of the icing on top of the cake. The final ideas that are just improvised call and response,
countermelodies anything that just fills in the vocal, and adds that extra little
bit of personality into the acapella. So let's do that right here below the lead
on a duplicate of the lead channel. Call these 'Ad libs'. And we'll let the first verse
and Pre B on their own. And we'll have some ad libs come
in for the second half to switch it up. So we've gone through and picked
our favorite ad libs. I'm just going to keep this bypassed until later. I'm going to turn these channels down a little bit.
Like ad libs really should be in the background. And I'm also going to give them a little bit of panning because we
duplicated the lead. These need maybe just a little bit off the center, like 20% left and right
so that's everything from lead vocals, adlibs, doubles, low octaves, high octaves, harmonies
and background vocals. Now these recordings are ready to be mixed. I'm just going to go and consolidate this into one clip by using
the keyboard shortcut command J. That just makes this a little bit more manageable, consolidates all those little pieces into one large new piece which will
be a little easier to work with as we go forward and mix this track. We can also delete our recording channel because we no longer
need that or any of the playlist contents. And it's time to go in and really put together this lead vocal chain
and everything else below it. So far we've been listening through tuning, compression and a
reverb, but I just want to add a couple more things that are going to help this sound good.
I'd like to add some EQ just to do some cleanup in the low end to make sure
that no unnecessary bass or stuff under 100 Hz is getting into this vocal recording. Maybe with male voices you would go down
to 80 or 70, but for female voices I like around 100 or 90. 90 feels perfect for this voice because she's
not really singing too many high notes. I'm just going to mute all my doubles for now
and we could close these groups. I'm really just focused on my lead vocal and that's another thing
I love having these Ableton mix groups for. Now, we're not going to do anything surgical with this EQ, but we are going to be automating
the frequency of this low cut. So I'm going to right-click and show automation. And I love using this as an effect going
into the drop, for example, to make the vocal feel a little bit thinner. And then back down to 90, where it was originally. And this just helps the vocal progress
and do the same thing that the build-up is doing, just get thin and no bass right before the big bass drop. And I'm using the Option key to curve this
automation to do more of a scoop instead of a slope, and then it goes right back down to where it belongs. And I'm also going to do the same thing,
but using the reverb volume going up right into the drop. That's just going to help push that reverb tail up.
And we can even do the same thing with the decay tail. Give it a nice long reverb right in this spot where it needs it the most. And to help it cut off when the snare hits,
I'm going to do some automation on this. So let's have it be on. And then right here, I want it
to cut off when that snare hits. Without adding too many more plugins to the chain,
we've added a lot of variation and cool effects just by automating very simple things.
And let's get back to our next plugin. I really like compressing the vocal in a few different ways
beyond just simple serial compression. I might actually pull this down 50/50 because I'm going to be splitting the compression work between three
different types of compression. Next is going to be multiband compression.
And I love this OTT preset, but it's really extreme. So I like to push it up from zero
instead of down from 100. So let's go listen to it on loop. So as you can see, you go from really pinched and compressed
sounding back to dynamic and natural. So we're going to be using
this at a very low amount. Now, what I love about this compressor is
the ability to combine expansion, which are these three blue bars. You can add expansion in the mids
and expansion in the highs. And this is like
the opposite of compression. This is like bringing up the quiet stuff.
And these orange bars on the right are compression. These are controlling the level of the loud stuff. And these little dash lines in here act as a ratio. For example, these are set at a very
high ratio and this is a low ratio. So we have almost limiting going here
on the top and some light expansion going here on the bottom. So that's a little breakdown of what
you're looking at when you have OTT open. And then of course, you have your input and output levels
and attack faster or attack slower. I like leaving the time at the default value. I'm using this to really dial in the tone of my voice. Let's pull the level Output down... and bring the Amount up. I feel like the mids were getting a little out of control, so I used the
compression and pulled it back so it wasn't getting so overpowered. But we're expanding the highs and lows quite a bit. I can even bring down some compression here in the lows, too. Really low amounts with OTT are the trick when using it on vocals. I might even just do 10% instead of 15.
We're just trying to do a tiny, tiny little amount. But if you wanted a squeeze or compression knob,
that would definitely be it. Now, the one thing that I am going to be
using aggressively is some parallel compression. And we could set that up here inside our Audio Effect Rack. And I'm going to use the Glue Compressor
and drop it in click Command R to rename this Glue, and we'll sign a color to our glue. Slow attack, fast release, high ratio. Pull the threshold down and up
with the makeup a little bit. We're going to pull the output gain down
on this channel to match what the reverb is. And we're going to be slamming this compressor. So what this is doing is parallel compression. We have our dry vocal coming in at full volume
and at a very quiet volume, we have this over compressed version of the vocal. I ended up slamming this all the way.
We're looking for an extreme compression effect, but at a very low volume where you almost don't hear it.
It just fills in a little bit when you turn it on and off. Now, with the attack and release, you could choose if you want to bring
more attention to the beginning of the words, do a slow attack. If you want to bring more attention to the
tails of the words, do a fast release. And I'm doing a little combination of both here. Let's turn our whole chain off. Already sounding much, much better. Next thing I want to add
is some saturation. A lot of people are recording a mic directly into an interface like we are
and it's missing all that good harmonic grit and goodness that you get from analog gear. And you can emulate that very
easily with some saturation. And I like to drop that here before
the compression and the OTT after the EQ and just boost it a little bit and then
reduce the output gain the same amount. And again, this is something
that you can blend in. You don't have to leave it at 100%. A lot of these effects,
I like putting it 50/50 and just using a little bit of. Finally, I want to add some delays to these vocals to really give them those rhythmic
fillers in between the lyrics. There's some nice spaces where the beats just rocking and it would be
great to have the vocal echoing out some of those lyrics. Let's switch these from dotted to regular notes. And I'm going to switch these to a very slow half-note delay to start out. And we're probably going to be creating a couple of delays.
So I'm going to start by naming this 'Half.' And we could color these.
I like picking a color that matches the plugin for the rack. Just helps me remember what's what.
Pull this down again. And you could hear it kind of competing with
the dry vocal a little bit too much. And a great built-in feature in this plugin is Ducking. That allows you to reduce the volume
of the echoes while the singing is going. And we're not going to leave this on the whole time.
When the lyrics pick up pace right here where I paused it, I'm going to keep it off. And those are some super saucy delays,
but they're a little slow feeling and that's not appropriate for the entire song -
just those spots that we automated them on and off. Let's try duplicating this, deleting the automation and let's
change this to say, 1/4 note. And change this to say a quarter note. And let's switch off the vibe on this.
We'll do a little bit of PingPong, but not completely PingPong, just like a little bit.
I love that option. A lot of plugins just force you to do 100%, but Echo gives you an option. It's also turned the ducking down just a little bit. And I'm also going to sauce these delays up with some saturation by
turning up the input and clicking this Drive button. Then we can turn the output down about
that same amount so it doesn't get too much louder. And let's use these faster pace parts
as where we want our quarter notes. So let's hit the letter A. Turn it on. So these lead vocals are now sounding huge. We're going to use this chain as the foundation to mix a lot of our other
channels starting with our doubles. Even though our ad libs are here,
I'm actually going to save these for last. So let's drag these down
and let's go down to our doubles. I'm going to use this chain
to process all of our doubles. I'm just going to make sure that I don't take the autotune with it. We're just taking all of the stock Ableton plugins. Command C. Click here. I'm going to delete this chain because
we just sauced it up big time, and paste. So now we have our lead vocal chain
processing all of these doubles. I just want to make a few adjustments to it and delete some of this
automation that we don't need. A lot of it's actually going to be perfect because
our doubles line up perfectly with our lead. And let's get rid of some of the bass in these doubles.
And I want to get rid of some of the treble too, but I don't want to
completely get rid of it like a filter. I just want to duck it a little bit. That's a great chain for our doubles. Let's once again copy this down as
a new chain onto our background vocals. And we're going to overwrite our
background vocals chain with this. And we're going to start out with some
high filtering to completely take away all the high frequencies in these because
remember, our background vocals are our countermelodies, something that's supposed
to sound like it's in the background. And filtering is just the easiest
way to achieve that effect. But we're also going to do a few
more things in addition to that. I'll show you what vocals I'm talking about. In the second verse. And you can hear how that filter just tucks them away so nice. I'm gonna delete all these automations that we've done
that got copied down just so we have full control. Let's just do a whole bunch of half-note
because these are all so slow. Whole bunch of reverb. Some longer reverb too.
The longest reverb in this whole mix. Let's pull the volume down a little bit more. And let's hear it with the music. I can take some of these and pan them about halfway. So those are great collection of effects
to send these into the background. Finally, the last group of vocals
that we need to mix are the ad libs. I have them split between two different chains
and panned a little bit left and a little bit right. This creates an auto panning effect, but
with a little bit less constant movement - it stays to the right and then it stays to the left. Left, right, left, right.
And you get it throughout the whole song. So let's hit Command G as we always did in the beginning and let's paste our chain from our background vocals because this is
actually really similar to what we're going to be doing to the ad libs. I might just do even more filtering because I think these are going to be
the most tucked away vocals in the whole mix. And also the most processed
vocals in the whole mix. So I'm going to hit these with a Flanger,
drop it right here before our effect rack 50%, just to give it some of that extra sauce. That phaser is saucin'. And during this drop, I want to add a little Pitch effect on here. And there's a brand new Shifter plugin
in Ableton that does that really well. I'm going to throw that here in the mix as its own chain. And we're going to keep the dry/wet at 100%. And let's just shift this down twelve semitones. And we're also going to have this just
come on right at the very end, too, Just giving us that extra sauce. And we can even
distort this some more with some Overdrive. And that's just that final sauce that are
going to make these feel like part of the production in the drop. We can have our ad libs nice and quiet until the end. And since these are super processed,
I'm going to hit the OTT extra hard, too, just so they cut through, especially at the end. So these ad libs are sauced up and ready to go. Let's wrap up this entire vocal mix with a master chain. We still have our master pulled down
a little bit from when we were recording. Sometimes that helps you just match
the level of your microphone better while tracking a vocal, but it's always important to remember
to turn it back up when you go to actually master it. The first plugin I'm going to use
in this master chain is some EQ. I really like the Channel EQ because
I feel like it adds more harmonic color rather than like sterile frequency boosting. And we're going to do just a tiny midrange boost on this whole master.
Let's close all of these vocals and let's click down here. Now let's boost around... 3-4k. But just a little bit. Just like 1dB. Right around 4k sounds perfect. This is going to add a little bit
of the midrange that's going to get lost through all the compression and stuff that
we're going to add in this master chain. Next, I'm going to follow this up
with some saturation. Just like we've been using to make our vocals
a little bit louder to cut through, I'm going to do this to the whole entire mix and we're going to
blend this at 50% just like we've been doing. Let's listen to it during the drop. So you really got the midrange to wake up
and the overall loudness just be punchier without actually making it louder
on the meter using saturation. Speaking of dynamics and loudness,
the next plugin I'm going to drop on this is going to be the compression,
but not just the regular compressor, some glue compression, because this emulates the very famous SSL
Master Buss compressor that I love to use with a slow attack. fast release, just like before -
high ratio, low on the dry/wet. Mix it in... that's full blast.
Can even hit the Makeup a little bit. But we're not going to leave it at full blast.
We're going just a little bit. Next I want to use some multiband dynamics to
control just the midrange a little bit. I'm going to do that by just
applying some compression. No expansion, just pull this down a little bit.
Just a very low ratio compression. I'm gonna turn these up. Just a little bit more control in the mids,
not so much in the highs and lows. I always like to turn it 100% to see what I'm really doing and then back
down closer to zero, just to blend it into touch. So we've used multiband compression to control the mids with a little bit
more compression, not so much on the highs and lows and again, a very small percentage on the Amount. And then the Glue Compressor doing its thing with the parallel
compression, you also have the option of using it as a clipper too, which you could just leave this as the last plugin in your chain
and it'll keep the volume completely under control. I love combining clipping with limiting. So that means after this, we're going to drop the Ableton Limiter
and just do that final little gain push. We're not really trying to push this attenuation meter at all.
I don't want to see too much ceiling coming down, I just want it to be a little bit louder. Back off. And last but not least, the little bonus,
I'm going to do some vocals during the drop back when we were recording,
we did some little samples, Karra did some. So we're going to do some kind of vocal sound design EDM stuff during
this drop as the icing on the cake. This isn't really part of the acapella.
This is intended to feel like it's more part of the beat. I want to drop down the pitch of these to record... by going into Warp, we're going to leave these warped because
we are actually trying to pitch these down and warp these. Let's go. And that's just a special little vocal production moment that we made
very quickly and easily just by squashing, distorting, compressing, adding some reverb
so it sounds nice and big. So now that we have our master chain,
vocal chain, some special samples, ad libs, doubles, background vocals,
let's take a listen to how far we've come that we mixed and mastered with stock Ableton plugins. So there you have it.
Recording, mixing and mastering EDM vocals using almost entirely stock Ableton plugins. If you want to get all my personal chains for mixing or mastering in
Ableton, check out my links below to 'wholeloops.com'. And I'll catch you guys next time in another tutorial.
Peace out.
