Mixing background vocals in your bedroom

Yaya is going on you guys you're the mantra in raw form and welcome to another help me Devon raw tutorial and today and this helped me Devon tutorial I'm gonna be showing you guys how to mix background vocals I'm gonna show you how I got from this to this now the way I did this you could do this in your bedroom you can do this from anywhere it's nothing special as far as something that you can't acquire from a plug-in or something like that this is very very very easy to do and I'm gonna show you exactly how I do it so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you the background vocals in context with the song I want you to pay attention to the relationship between the lead vocal and the background vocal okay so pay attention to that relationship listen close [Music] yeah [Music] okay so if you listen to the relationship between the lead vocal and the backing vocals you'll see that there is support it's more like the lead vocal has its own life it's being unbothered by the background vocal the background vocal is serving as just mainly support and that's to me the most important thing with my background vocals I like them to sit in a place where it's not overbearing where it's not interfering with the lead vocals so much but more or less just making it sound better adding to its character I'm gonna show you exactly how I did this here we go so I'm gonna focus on this part in particular and what I'm gonna do is let me solo these parts right here first and did not explain what it is okay so just now you see me solo four tracks now obviously those four tracks are the four vocals that I have feeding this bus which you see is chorus OD bus so the way it was recorded was there was four vocals in unison that I recorded and basically each one of those vocals feed a bus simple enough to understand right okay so now let's look at the processing on the individual tracks that I processed so if you go right up here you see all the first tracks that can track their track fourth track right here one two three four you see it's the same exact name to each one now the most important thing that you're seeing here is besides the NL s bus which is just an analogue a modeled plug-in that gives you a little bit of analog saturation this is across all my channels you can look at another tutorial that I have on this particular thing that shows you exactly what it does but I just have a drive of three on it just gives it a little bit of character a little bit of analog saturation you could get this I'm pretty sure you have an analog saturation in your art so you can check it out so that's one all my vocals regardless of what it is okay so now you can come over here right and you see a CL a 76 a compressor just they stay on a compressor on basically each one of these tracks and if I click on each one you'll see that they're all the same it's all the same there's no difference in all of these tracks being processed this way so I know what you say you probably think it's yourself why are you compressing these vocals individually when obviously I'm going to be compressing when I get over into the bus of all of them well here's the thing this is how I have to think about it tappy that record vocals for instance in their bedrooms or don't have access to a lot of equipment a lot of times what recordings engineers will do is when you had the privilege of doing this is you compress your vocals coming in to the session thus gives you a more you know a totally better vocal a vocal that is more controlled in dynamics etc so in my head I say well each one of those OD background vocals are compressed in in with the big engineers in recording studio so for me mentally I'm saying why don't I use a compressor on each individual track as well kind of like it's coming into the board so that's all that concept is just kind of doing that and what that's gonna do is it's gonna give me a vocal and individual vocal that has a lot more control that has better dynamics as far as the difference between the quietest sound or the loudest sound now when I come when I affect the although all the vocals overall each vocal is up in level it's not peaking too much they're controlled so now I'm literally going to control a more controlled vocal stay with me okay so basically you see right here I have a really really fast excuse me a really really slow attack and a fast release on these background vocals you can listen closely right quick so it's a pretty pretty slow attack on this and a fairly very very fast release and basically it's it's more to control it's not really for me to do any hard hard super serious compression it's basically just a controlled piece and you can see right there that that's why I had the soil attack so that I can allow those transients to come in and then a really fast release so those transients in that information can release the compression because I'm I know in my head I'm going to be doing more compression coming down the line as far as when it's good bust out so I just want to vocal that I can hear everything the quiet parts are louder in the louder parts are quieter therefore I have a more concise vocal so that's the only reason I'm compressing this way you can see right here I'm getting about 5 negative 5 DB of gate of gain reduction and you can check right here yeah so you see it hitting around negative 5 on the DB reduction meter and that's about it and each vocal has this same exact thing okay all right now let's move on over to what the background vocals are actually feeding so all the background vocals are feeding into a bus so all four of those audio signals are feeding into this bus so let's go down our line obviously first thing you see is that in LS channel which I love in the door it's always on the top of all my channels the next thing I have here is an R desser which is basically a DSR plugin that's all it is and I have it attacking the 42 to be the 4237 Hertz range and the reason is because I know this frequency range to be more of the pain frequency which is basically 3k paying frequency is that frequency think is really annoying on your ear so I like to attack that problem with all my vocals first and foremost before our boost cut do anything so I'll so I'll take all of these plugins off including its effects and I'll play this for you by itself so listen closely and you'll see a pretty drastic cut there but it's only cutting and taking out the piece that I really don't like because when I start boosting with the compression and stuff like that that frequency in that 4242 37 range is going to get annoying especially when I start to do stings and stuff like that so that's why I'm attacking it so hard you can see I have about 16 on the range which only means take out 16 on DB on that range if I'm not mistaken I don't know if this DB or if it's its own measurement but I'm taking out about 16 of it immediately from that frequency range when it hits a certain threshold as you can see right here once it hits that threshold I wanted to take that out so it's smacking it so look again [Music] but it got okay I'm gonna play the but it got to donate again I'm a bypass it listen closely now know what you thinking hey man that sounds better without it well what's happening is you're just hearing it getting louder and why is it getting louder because that frequency range has been taken out if I took this vocal and literally gain stage it just matched it as far as turning it up you would hear it does feel better and that's what I always go for something that feels better I know deep down that that original vocal without this are desser on it with I start boosting it with the compressors it's gonna get annoying to your ear it's gonna get strange so to me I know what you're thinking but I like to cut this frequency I'm telling you this frequency is the frequency that a lot of amateur mixes have a lot of and it can sometimes become very annoying if you don't tame it properly so that's there okay next thing I have here is an EQ and I'll play it for you with the EQ I'll bypass it back and forth so this is with out first listen close again without okay and from this EQ you can hear it get a little bit more bright you can hear the muddiness kind of pull back a little bit it kind of uncovers the vocal a little bit now it gets a little brighter without me even boosting anything and I'm not saying it got significantly brighter but there was a tad bit more that cut through the cut through that you hear and that's just me from doing subtractive EQ II and that's something a lot of people not doing sometimes to add brightness take out some of the darkness like you don't have to boost all the time in order to get more brightness so let's look at the EQ so you can see right here I did a big big cut at 127 Hertz next thing I did was I took out some of that 200 Hertz this is known as more of the muddier frequency so obviously for background vocals I like to take a lot of my low-end stuff out because I want it to kind of be more of a uh of an angelic feel that's what this vocal felt like it should have been to me as far as the background vocals I wanted it I didn't want it to feel a door I wanted it to feel more in gellick so I wanted to roll off a little bit a lot of that darkness and that muddiness to make it feel lighter on the ear so took that out next thing I got was the 314 Hertz frequency you can see I took on a lot my room isn't is it the best treated and this frequency tends to build up on mine so you may have the same issue and that's why I said from your bedroom you could do this this frequency tends to build up a little bit so I took out a lot of this frequency this is very specific to my room so you find the frequencies that you don't like and take them out for instance if I took this vocal and boosted it let's hear what I took out if I boost the crap out of it listen closely do you hear that boxiness that that ball has there's a lot of boxiness I'll play it again as opposed to this just feels better it took out some of that room tone that I didn't like that boxxy boxxy feel and sometimes you should check this raise the frequency and check and see what frequencies don't you don't like but before you even do that just listen to it see what you feel needs to be done like this vocal sounds a little bit too boxy or too muddy and then attack those frequencies don't just go sweep your frequencies and doing it literally listen to the vocal decide what should be best for the vocal next thing I did took a little bit of the 469 Hertz range basically I just sweep felt I felt vocals that I didn't like as far as what they were doing and took them out another one is 780 Hertz range I took out some and summing at 27 Hertz range like I said I like that range I'm really funny with because I know that frequency range can really build up really bad and and basically just destroy my compression and vocals when it goes down the line of annoying your ear next thing and this is some big EQ movements that I do in this next one so you see I have not even touched a compressor on the stereo buss yet only EQ so look at this EQ so long story short I did not use the compression side of this EQ at all shooting of this G channel excuse me of this a channel at all this SSL each other at all if you look closely I'll start from bottom to the top what I did on my EQ I took out a lot of the 300 Hertz range again I took out a lot of the 88 hundred and ninety Hertz range right here you see 3.4 DB was taken out I took a lot of that 3.5 K frequency out again I took out about 4.4 on that and then I boosted finally I boosted something and what I did was I did a shelf and the shelf is at about 1111 kilohertz and it's a 4.5 dB listen closely this is without with without now I know what you're thinking you're saying yo the body where did the body go well keep two things in mind one when it comes to the body of the vocal I can bring this back with compression when I start to bring up those quieter sounds I'm gonna bring some of that body back with my compression but what I want to do is I'm trying to accomplish a lighter sound on your ear so this is why I pulled and went this way with my frequencies is for us cutting and boosting I wanted to make the sound lighter on your ear a lot of times my background vocals I literally won't boost anything but I'll do a high shelf that's all and that's basically what I did here I did a high shelf at the 11 kilohertz range that boosted just that high-end frequency and then I took out a lot of those other frequencies that I felt would compete with my lead vocal and pull those frequency out so that that vocal had a little bit more a nice place a nice bed to live in so that's that now we have some compression finally right ok so I'm gonna play this before and after so before before now you can hear within that compression that I brought a lot of the body back and I know what you're thinking hey did you gain change that did you check to see if the volume was that was was there well I know my vocal very well and I knew in my head that I'll make sure that when I'm mixing that I put this at the appropriate level so don't worry about that for right now but for this particular vocal I use this compressor to bring back a lot of that body and you can see my compression right here so my settings if you look at the attack I have a medium to slow attack and a fast release once again so the medium to slow attack allows some of the transients through but at the same time I'm taming those transients as a whole now there is a lot of information coming into this compressor off the shirt that this is for vocals altogether so I'm using this compressor at a slow to medium attack to kind of control that so look closely at my DB meter to see how much reduction I'm getting so you can see I'm getting around 70 B of gain reduction um it's hitting and it's basically releasing I just want those transients that could be could be controlled I really wasn't trying to smooth it out yet and that's where the release is gonna come in to smooth out the actual feeling of those vocals and that's what I like to use at another stage I'll show you in a second of that but this is really to bring that volume back up it's to get that body there and that's it so that's basically what this stage of the compressor is doing is basically to bring that body back into the vocal next thing I like to do is I like to move on over to my c4 a multiband compressor I'll play it for you before and after before so you can feel it feels more present it feels more up front it's way more controlled it's compressed this is a compressed vocal um when you look right over here you'll see that I have the bands that I have engaged as the 40 Hertz of the 588 Hertz and the a thousand Hertz all together if I let you hear this top range by itself listen close I make sure that's pretty control because that's where it can get really se and stuff like that um and you gotta be careful in this particular range so basically I'll play it for you again with it let's look at the look out how the c4 is reacting to it so all I have it all basically compressing at different frequency ranges for different things you could hear the bottom and I have compressing even more because I want to control that low in because I don't want that to pile up when it comes to Miley vocal and to when it's the beat when the beat and everything is there so you can see I did a lot of multiband compressing in that 40 Hertz to 588 Hertz range to control that bottoming cuz that's really important to me I want to keep that low end kind of tucked but I still want it there for warm so I wanted it tucked but I still wanted it there so that's why I compressed and boost it so look at it closely so you see it right there how I had it and it's taken I even took out a little bit at the 1.6 DB of that because I just really wanted to to focus on that top end of the actual vocal so that it could support the other one I want it to be light on your ear that is the point of what I'm trying to create next thing I did and this is the biggest thing that I did this is where I'm getting the sound of the background vocal this is where I am getting the uniqueness of the background vocal vocal listen closely so this is before now know what you're thinking hey man it got lower in volume sure it did and this is something that I think a lot of people are missing from their background vocals using doubler effects and using modulation plugins so long story short this plug-in right here which I love is called the real ADT it's a modulation plug-in and it does really interesting things too vocals and a lot of times you can use a doubler effect for this type of thing and what the doubler effect is it'll take your vocal that is coming into the plug-in and it'll create more vocals of the vocal you brought in so you're getting more vocals that are strategically within the plug-in a little off a little detune and that's what makes it feel a little bit more natural in a sense as opposed to if I took one book one just copied it you wouldn't really notice a difference what makes a background vocals so dope and what makes it so cool is that there are these little human nuances in mistakes no human is perfect the way I go blah blah blah blah is not the second time it won't sound the exact same blah blah blah blah sure it may sound to you or rip as far as what you hear up front like yeah the sound saying but technically from an audio standpoint it's not the same and that's what makes it so beautiful and that's what makes it cool so plugins like these doublers or modulation effects takes vocals and it changes them and alters their their their timing and all kinds of things and that's what this vocal is do this plug-in is doing right here so this is what I got and I love the sound of it it sounds wavy it sounds so cool and interesting and it sounds a lot lighter on the ear once again what I'm trying to accomplish from my particular background sounds lighter before after big difference and it has a little bit of a different image on it as far as the space that it's in okay now next thing I use is this right here and this is an art compressor yes more compression I know what you're thinking I'm gonna play this for you before and after before so all I did was bring up the quiet stuff and bring down the loud stuff I control the dynamics of the vocal you see I'm getting about three DB of gain reduction and about a two-to-one ratio don't get tied up on that you'll notice that I'm using a much faster attack on this vocal and excuse me on this compressor and you'll notice I'm using a medium release now how do you set your attack and release when it comes to these background vocals this is the most important compressor and step in this in this chain and the reason is because this is the one that I'm listening to it back and forth with the beat and deciding how I want it to react how I wanted to feel within the mix and the thing is when you increase or when you slow down the release which you can see right here this is 150 if I took this 150 and threw it to the right or to 500 you'll notice the vocal sounds smoother the vocal gets smoother and you notice if I turn it to the left the vocal get more aggressive so pay attention right quick as I do this we're gonna back up a little bit so you can hear these things right here listen closely I'm going to move it to the left first so you here the aggression that it adds when I put a faster release watch this now I'm gonna take the same thing and I'm gonna go right instead listen closely now you notice the vocal got smoother as I went right and it got more aggressive as I went left now this is the reason why when it comes to my lead vocals I like to do fast releases because I like my vocal to sound a little bit more aggressive depending on the style of music that you're doing but for that background vocals I don't really want something that jumps out at me I want something that's smooth and lush with this style of music it's something that basically just fits so that's why you'll notice that I have this medium release where I'm getting a little bit of the pop of the background vocal but enough where is smooth enough that it's not jarring out at me so that's how I like to think about and conceptualize the release of the background vocal as far as how I set the compressor this particular compressor in particular next the attack now what's the difference when the attack the attack has the same kind of concept you see I did a faster attack because I wanted to control those moments of it popping out I wanted those moments of popping out to really be a little bit more tough compared to the back to the lead vocal because I want that lead vocal to still have all of its transients and pop as opposed to the background well I want the background vocal to come in smooth so I'm gonna go to the right and see and you'll notice that the background vocal gets more aggressive when I slow it down the attack when I slow down the attack it gets more aggressive why because those transients start to pop a lot more so watch this let me copy this so I don't lose it watch this where everything is just great yeah now I know what the lot of you were thinking hey man yo just slow that attack down cuz it kind of seems like the background vocal just kind of pop well that's not my intention what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a vocal that supports it so when I bring it in with a really slow attack and those background vocals are popping out just as much as my lead vocal they're gonna pile on top of each other instead of actually working together and being something that's more coherent so that's why I have it that way that is the way I like to set up my attack and release for those things okay and also if your big very familiar this is a side note if you're very a big user of the art compressor opto sounds smoother as far as this is concerned electro see if you can click this after sound smoother and smoother and smoother so I like to use those for my background vocals actually for my lead vocals I'll use I like to use electro just to let you know has a little bit more harshness to it cool and one of the last things in my chain is this right here and this is an imager this is pretty self-explanatory you guys all the imagers doing is it's spreading out that that vocal just a little bit on the sides it's giving me just a little bit of a push to my stereo image when it comes to those vocals so listen closely it's very slight nothing major listen closely if you listen closely it took that vocal that felt like that you didn't probably realize that was like really felt middle ish to some side it kind of pushed it out and what does this push out gonna do it's gonna allow more information or more space for my vocal in the middle to live now the vocal of it in the middle is gonna have a sense of this difference in space as far as these vocals being pushed out here in my lead vocal be in the middle it's gonna give you a better idea of space this is creating a house I'm literally creating a relationship between these two things my background vocals and my lead vocal that lead vocals gonna be right up and then I have the side information kind of pushed out for the background vocals that support it like a bed okay now last but not least things that I do for processing as far as the the effects this is a very simple thing you could do this yourself this is to taste I put a short verb and all the short verb is which I'll play right quick listen closely just gives it a little bit of space this is a plate verb that I put on here I'll let you take a look at my plate verb that I'm using right now I'm using a lexicon vintage plate um I'm using the vocal dark setting so you could use any one of your plates that suffice I like to use vocal place for my short verbs they just give the vocal a sense of space that it was recording in a space it does it it just takes off some of the dryness of the vocal that I just don't like a purely dry vocal even for rack vocals we use plate vocals plate verb scuse me then on this we get a little extreme we get a long verb and this could be any one of your whole reverbs I just want to let you know for me I'm using my bit of a howl of vintage verb which I love in a door this is my favorite setting which you could probably pause the video and check out yourself um listen to it closely this is before now that's a lot of reverb I know what you're thinking but for the style of the song I really enjoyed it it felt amazing it gave me this lushness and this background vocal isn't going on for that long where it feels like it's just piling up on itself so long verb brew a heavy long verb to move the vocal more to the back even more that's how I like to use my own background vocals my my long reverbs next thing I show you is this doublet plug-in that I got and the only thing about this doublet plugging that I use basically on everything is that I use my doublet plugin to add more stereo information so like I told you about the doublet plug-in that I used actually on the inserts I also do use it as an aux and what I do with the aux is I have a doublet plug-in and then I also have an imager on that double plug-in that pushes the crap out of those vocals to the side now what's happening is not affecting the vocal in the middle I'm creating copies of this vocal with the doubler plug-in and bringing the side information up so it feels more so I get more of into a stereo image a wider stereo image than I had before it's a really cool trick to do double a plug in with the stereo Widener on it and use that as an oxen you could put that on a bunch of vocals watch your face listen closely before and after you heard a sense of a little bit more space that got pushed out without me really altering too much the middle information that I had on those background vocals now some people may say that the vocals tend to interfere with phase in the middle et cetera yes you're absolutely right here's my solution check the phase make sure that you're not destroying basically your stereo image as far as when you throw it into mono and destroying exactly what's happening in your middle information that's it just check and see that's a rule of thumb that I just give you guys when it comes to even messing with anything your stereo image do something check it make sure your middle information your side information just doesn't disappear make sure you listen to that information to make sure it's there okay last but not least thing I use is a fourth delay and all the fourth delay does is it gives it a little bit more space I use delays to give more space etc listen closer that's it just gives it a little bit more space helps me with the tale of the vocals so that it feels like it kind of dissipates it makes it feel more in the background so I'll call a collaboration of delay and reverb will help things feel like they're more in the background etc okay cool so if you listen to this closely you'll hear that this is what we have okay and if you listen to this vocal guys basically if I know some of you guys are looking at my other backgrounds with the other harmonies same concept I'm doing the same exact thing to all of those that's what I did there's no secret as far as the EQ and stuff like that changing and things like that I know some people will say well it changes the EQ should change when you're doing different pitches of vocals and stuff like that with the harmonies well to be honest yes you can do that but I'm just telling you the sound that I got for this I didn't need to do any of that it sounded great from the low harmonies to the mid harmonies to the high harmonies to just the oldies I use the same exact concept for all of these the one thing I didn't do was I didn't add an imager to those other vocals because I didn't want too much stereo widening and that's where I always say be tame yourself when you decide what you want to be spaced out decide what you want to just sit in a certain spot so basically with these you see these two vocals hi-oh DS they're bust out same thing compressed same thing to a bus and they're doing the same exact thing so there's really no secret once you kind of got that one chain with your background vocals to be honest I use that for all my other background vocals as well that's just me when it comes to that so I hope that this tutorial was extremely helpful when it came to mixing background vocals I hope you don't even need to watch another background vocal tutorial after this make sure you comment like subscribe make sure you go head on over to help me Devon info for all kinds of stuff like my templates drum kits melodic loops awesome stuff that I have over there for you guys make sure you follow us that helped me too on the Instagram email me with your questions concerns were also offering mix and mastering surgery services you can email me at help me Devon at gmail.com for that and um just let me know if you guys have any comments questions or concerns make sure you comment and uh it's a lot of information and I hope that helps you so much with mixing your background vocals until next time you guys

Channel: Help Me Devvon

Views: 105,825

Keywords: mastering, mastering tutorial, how to master a song, master, mixing, audio mastering (industry), tutorial, how to master, music production, recording, how to, producer, audio engineering, easy, fl studio, how to master music, plugins, mastering music, home studio, logic pro x, home mastering, mastering plugins, simple, mastering in fl studio, mixing tutorial, how to master in fl studio, audio mastering, mastering plugin, learn mixing, background vocals, background

Id: MoscljZOsrM

Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020