Make Your Voice Sound Better - Vocal EQ Zones

welcome back to the channel this tutorial is for anyone trying to improve their voice or vocals using eq i do have videos detailing noise reduction and compression of vocals but this will be a real in-depth guide to equalization looking at which frequency ranges to treat to reduce some of the issues of recording in rooms and with microphones and also looking at which frequencies to boost to improve the natural characteristics of the voice so let's waste no time and get right into it i'm using fl studio 20 but you can use any audio editor and any eq this is fruity parametric eq this is the ozone 9 eq they look a little bit different but they all essentially do the same thing to start off with this tutorial i'm going to be using this ozone eq because it's really nice visual representation and let's just listen to the first sample which is my voice and i want to make it sound a little bit better as autumn takes a grip on the highlands and islands so the wind whips up the sea and white crested waves come crashing down on the beaches around the coasts i'm going to be breaking up the frequency spectrum into these different zones that we're going to sort of attack one by one in this video the first zone we're going to attack is from 0 to 50 hertz which is the extreme low end let's take a quick listen to what this sounds like not a whole lot of useful information so what i'm going to do is take a high pass filter which is going to allow the high frequencies to pass through and i'm going to set it probably to a 24 db or a 12 db per octave slope at around 50 hertz the idea is to remove all that low end information that isn't helping the voice but you've got to be really careful because some people say you can push it to 100 120 but i think there's often a lot of useful information between 50 and 100 hertz in a voice so if i start pushing this too far as autumn takes a grip on the highlands and islands so the wind whips up the sea you start hearing sort of a tinny and thin vocal so i would recommend just starting at 50 and removing that low end because that's quite safe it also removes sort of microphone handling noise if someone bumps the mic stand or those footsteps that should get rid of all of that the next zone we're looking at is from about 50 to 200 hertz and we're going to try and do two things here remove room resonances and also see if we can bring more warmth and sort of base to the vocal which often sounds great so what are room modes well one of the problems with rooms is that when any sound is produced in them either from your voice or from loudspeakers certain frequencies will build up more than others in your room you can listen out for these resonances with your ears but this requires quite good headphones and also quite trained ears to be honest so you can go to a website such as this one i'll leave a link in the description you put in the dimensions of your room and it will show you which frequencies might be particularly problematic in your room and then armed with that information you could hunt out those particular frequencies on your eq now i just like doing this by ear to help your ears lock in on these problems i've prepared quite an extreme example recorded in a small room let's take a quick listen this audio was recorded in a much smaller room it sounds pretty bad and it should be quite obvious to hear that there's a very big resonant frequency building up that i'm going to try and remove so the first very obvious place is when i say room and not only do you get the tone of my voice but you hear the actual room uh build up this frequency but in a much smaller room just at the end of room put it in a much smaller room and i'm going to highlight where it is exactly put it in a much smaller room but in a much smaller room it's about 138 hertz but in a much smaller room sounds awful and if i then take this frequency away let's hear a before and after this audio was recorded in a much smaller room this audio was recorded in a much smaller room so it completely controls that resonance but this room has many of them so there's also another one which i can hear around 200. there's a very big resonant frequency build you can hear it right here sounds awful a very big resonant frequency build so i'm going to now take that one down there's a very big resonant frequency building up so this is a very extreme example and you can hear just before and after it sounds night and day different quite obvious to hear that there's a very big resonant quite obvious to hear that there's a very big resonant frequency building up obviously there's a lot more to do before that vocal sounds any good but that's sort of a worst case scenario let's take a listen to the original example again if you can try to solo a band of frequencies on your eq often this can be done with alt or the shift key so let's take a listen so sometimes it just sounds you know like i've soloed a band and other times you hear a big resonance like here so i know there's one centered at about 117 116 something like that if i were to take away a lot say i was take out 10 or 12 db there it's going to make my voice sound very thin and hollow as autumn takes a grip on the highlands and islands i lose a lot of that warmth so i'm just looking to take away a few db something like three or four db should do it but obviously that entirely depends on your voice i also want to make sure that the q is quite high because i'm only looking to affect a very narrow bandwidth a very small range of frequencies here i don't want a big wide thing like this that's going to take all the low end out of the vocal a very quick note is that if you're finding you're having to make lots and lots of these cuts it's either that your listening environment is lying to you and making you think there's problems where there aren't or or potentially your recording environment was just so bad that you should try to record maybe in a different place in your room or maybe at a different distance from the microphone because you shouldn't need to be making lots of big cuts like this you should just be needing to make one or two small cuts of a few db just to help the voice sound more natural i also said that this 50 to 200 hertz band would be a chance to boost to bring some warmth back into the vocal so you can do this here make a nice wide boost and do something like this but i tend to like using different eqs for boosting and cutting uh it can be because it sounds better but often it's just for variety so that i don't get completely bored so there is one that i'm liking i like a lot of stuff from acoustic audio they also make excellent free plugins which i showed in my free plugins video but i like centering around one or two hundred uh you know making it quite sort of gentle bandwidth and then boosting just a db or two can just bring a little bit of warmth back into the vocal i was also doing that boost after i did this cut but it really doesn't matter just do what sounds best to you the next zone that we're going to look at is from about 200 to about 600 or 700 hertz and this is where we can start hunting out some either nasal frequencies or areas that sound particularly congested i sometimes struggle with sort of a sinusitis and it means that sometimes my voice can sound particularly nasally i think it sounds okay here but i'm going to hone in on these frequencies for you let's take a listen it's that sort of sound so this one's a tough one you've really got to do a lot of sort of a b testing turning it on and off but i find that sometimes making a cut somewhere in this 200 to 600 range is entirely dependent on your voice can just make the vocal sound so much more open as though you had a cold and then you just take it away and sometimes with a microphone it's as simple as whether it was pointing up to your nose when you recorded or whether it was pointing down towards your chest sometimes these things make an enormous difference to the recording and it can make your vocals sound really congested even if you didn't have a cold so on my voice i'm just going to make a small 2 or 3 db cut close to 300 just to try and remedy a little bit of that while we're still looking at this 200 to 600 zone i want to show you that often you don't need to do much eq work at all i've gone to this female vocal sample which my wife kindly spoke for us and if we take a listen as dawn breaks in the caledonian pine forests a very different chorus echoes through these ancient trees her voice is higher so you don't have the same sort of resonant build up at about 116 like i had because there just wasn't much energy there so i didn't need to cut that away at all i would still put this sort of uh high pass filter here but there was no sort of nasality or any issue with her vocal here anything i remove from 200 to 600 is simply going to make her voice sound thin as dawn breaks in the caledonian pine forests a very different chorus echoes through these ancient trees and it might be that we just got lucky with the recording or she just has a really really nice voice but don't be trying to correct problems if there are none if you're not hearing anything wrong with it potentially just leave it the way it is but i'm sure you're on this tutorial because you're hearing things wrong with the recording so let's carry on i've gone back to the stock eq for the next band which is from about 600 hertz to about 4k and this is a band that i would say almost always leave alone there's not usually a huge a lot to gain from hunting around in this in this region from my experience at least but what you could do if you feel your voice the microphone isn't bright enough or it sounds a little bit dark is that you could make a really wide band like this and just make a gentle boost or cut of half a db or so so if i center that on around 2k as autumn takes a grip on the highlands and islands so the wind whips up the sea and white-crested waves come crashing down on the beaches around the coasts so it can take a lot of the harshness out of the voice but i find there's not a lot to be gained from trying to hunt around and and do this sort of stuff higher up i find that it often really uh destroys the integrity of the voice the next zone that we're going to look at is from about 4 to 8k and remember that these regions are are loose they can move with your vocal but around four to eight k is where we're going to look for sibilance and sort of annoying whistling frequencies these can either come from your teeth or your voice box or they can just come from the way the microphone interacts with the sound waves that are hitting it you'll notice on this eq there's quite a handy heat map that shows you buildups of frequencies frequency energy i should say and around 4 to 8k you can see that there are these peaks on the s's the sibilant words here and what i'm trying to do is just hone in on these a little bit and reduce them they sound like this don't listen too loud so the wind whips up the sea so the wind whips up the sea so the wind whips up the sea so you can see on my voice i found one at 8.5 k so these ranges are quite loose you just you know adapt them to your own voice so if i make a small cut at around 8.5 and i heard another one around here so the wind whips up the sea around 5k or so if i just make two small cuts like this so the wind whips up the sea i mean to my ears that is just so much smoother there is an effects processor called a de-esser which listens out for these sibilant frequencies or harsh whistly sounds and it reduces them for you automatically now if you have one of those plugins and you want to experiment with it i do have a tutorial showing you how to set that up but i find for you know at least 80 or 90 of tasks just a little eq cut like this really just smooth as it smooths it all out and it's all you really need a quick word of warning though you don't want to be doing too much cutting here because otherwise it completely ruins the intelligibility of your speech take a listen any summer holiday makers are by now long gone and the beaches are deserted so it sounds very smooth but over time that's going to start sounding like a problem my voice no longer sounds like me the next zone is from about eight kilohertz and up and this is an area that people can often define as like a vocal air frequency or just a shimmery or silky top end in my experience after testing dozens and dozens of these more affordable and pretty good microphones whether xlr or usb and recording in normal rooms of all shapes and sizes not just this treated room i'm in right now i find that boosting anything in that extreme top end always just sounds sizzly and harsh or maybe not always but 95 of the time and i think often we boost it because uh we've been listening to it for like five ten minutes editing it and then we boost it and it sounds different and it's exciting so we keep it but i mean i've heard a lot of podcasts which just sound really sizzly in the top a lot of vocals which are just too bright in my opinion and i would say just leave that alone up the top unless um you've taken a good break you've come back to it and you've really decided you know what this vocal is too dark it's too muted it could do with a dbr2 on the top i'm going to wrap this up with a quick recap we're looking from about zero to 50 hertz just to cut off those lowest rumbly frequencies to stop footsteps microphone taps stuff like that then from around 50 to 200 we're looking for those room resonances then from around 200 to maybe six or 700 we're looking for any sort of congestion or nasality in the vocal if you don't want it to be there if it doesn't sound natural and then between about 600 hertz and 405 k i would leave that alone or make a very wide very subtle boost just to make just to smooth things out or make things a little bit brighter then i'd hunt for sibilant frequencies between about maybe four and eight or nine k and then i'd probably leave the extreme top end alone because it can tend to sound really sizzly but if you want a little bit of brightness feel free to add some there once you've done all the cuts away i would also recommend adding a little bit more of that warmth to the bottom end just a db or so can just make listening to the voice so much more bearable nice and warm and thick but anyway thank you very much for watching i hope it was helpful and i hope to see you in the next video too bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 450,201

Rating: 4.9751534 out of 5

Keywords: vocal eq, how to eq vocal, how to eq voice, dialouge EQ, podcast eq, settings, make voice sound better, de ess, microphone sound better, how to, EQ for podcasts, equalisation, EQ, fl studio, logic, ableton, audacity, free, how to make voice sound better, how to EQ your voice, professional, natural, in the mix, post production, film making, audio for film, audio for podcast, vocal eq tips, eq tips

Id: pjMCyLsRNig

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LockeClone]

Good for podcasts. A bit heavy handed for VO. Even though I wouldn't try to "copy" this for VO, it's clear that this guy has a good ear and understands the concepts he's talking about. There's a lot to learn here, just don't go too far with VO. ESPECIALLY AUDITION SUBMISSIONS.

Specifically pay attention to when he plays with where to point the mic. That's where you live in VO world. Good thoughts there. For me, the mic is always off axis pointing down.

He's also made a very good point about people hearing themselves and letting their biases mess up the eq.

[u/ronton]

I wish I had an ear for this kind of thing. I feel like I haven’t quite nabbed the “mud” in my VO but whenever I try to figure out where it is, I can’t really tell what I should be taking out. Wish there was a tool for this kind of thing.