Mixing Vocals in Cakewalk by Bandlab

in this video we're going to be learning about mixing vocals in cake walk by band lab [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you will lead vocals are massively important in contemporary music they have the lyrics which people get meaning from and of course they carry the main melody so it's important that you hone your skills in terms of getting those vocals to sit just nicely in the mix and it is a skill that you improve with over time so in today's video i'm going to be showing you my personal approach to mixing vocals in cakewalk by bandlab and i'm only going to be using stock plugins so the plugins which come with cakewalk so you won't need to be buying anything to get a great vocal sound so let's start off with the source no not the creative source the other type of source okay so this isn't to do with the mix exactly but it does have a massive effect on the mix when i'm talking about the source and getting the source right i'm talking about of course the vocal itself but also the room and what i'm going to focus on now the microphone that you use now i happen to have a number of different microphones in my collection which i use for vocals and i like to try out different ones before i go ahead and really do the proper recording now i've got a little hint for you here i don't always use the most expensive microphones i quite often use the cheapest of my collection of microphones it's not to do with how expensive the microphone is it's to do with how suitable it is for the task at hand that may depend on the person's voice and it may depend on the room that you're recording in as well as well as the kind of artistic choices you're making the kind of sound that you want to get so i know many of you will only have one microphone that's fine don't panic don't think oh my god i've only got this one microphone i can't make decent vocal recordings no you still can go ahead but you may have to do a lot more work in terms of eq especially to get the sound that you're looking for so try to get the sound that you are looking for during the recording process or as close as you can get to it so i just want to give you a quick look at the project that we're working in today you can see or maybe you can't see in actual fact that this screen is split into two this console view is split into two i've got a divider here which i'm dragging around on the left hand side we have the main tracks okay including all of the vocal tracks which are in pink now some of these are backing vocals and things we won't be dealing with those today um but we will be dealing with the main or the lead vocals there's actually two lead vocal tracks we've got the first one here which is just labeled susie that's the name of the performer and we have a second one which is suzy verse i actually recorded this song um i recorded the chorus and the verse separately and i recorded them onto separate tracks now you don't have to do that that just happened to be the way i did it on the day now the main thing is i don't really want to apply effects to each of those tracks separately that would get a bit cumbersome so i've got them both routed through to a bus you can see that their output down here goes to vox main if we scroll all the way over to the right hand side of the project and i scroll over here you can see vox main here is the bus and that's where um all of my effects are now you don't have to do it like that and if you've just recorded this on one track you can put all of these effects and things that we're going to look at today on that track okay that's absolutely fine but that's why i'm doing it here so don't get confused if you see that everything is on this bus so before we start using any plug-ins it's usually a good idea just to check that our gain level is nice and healthy what's healthy for vocals well for me i like the average or the rms to be around about minus 18 db that's the one i focus on for vocals now the peak is going to be higher than that usually it's going to be around about minus 12 to minus 6. as long as it doesn't go over zero and clip it doesn't really matter so much for me what the peak is but i do like that average to be about -18 because for some plug-ins especially those plug-ins which have some saturation effect to them then it's really usually a good idea to have the level of roundabout -18 rms now it is of course a great idea if you get that right while you're actually recording the vocal so when you're setting your recording level then you won't really need to do anything here but i've mocked up a situation where i wasn't careful with the recording level and so that i can demonstrate to you here how to fix it so i'm just going to play the vocal quickly and take a look at the meters here see where it's peaking see where the kind of average [Music] with is so you can see it's a little bit low it's not even getting up to -18 as a peak hardly so we're just going to push the gain up and we're going to just play the vocal push it up until we get to those kind of targets that we're looking for honey i was there with you only yesterday honey you are now a two only yesterday okay that's fine but you may have heard there as we went into the sort of third section of this that went a bit quiet again again i've mocked something up for you to fix here let's just uh get rid of a part of this console view and look at the waveform here you can see the sort of four different sections to this chorus here and you can see in this third section that it's definitely quieter now as i say i mocked it up but it could happen um when you've got different takes which you've blended together with some comping or something so one is a little bit lower or maybe you know the singer is not that great with their mic technique and they moved away for a moment and got kind of quiet and then they came back again how can we fix it well very easily in fact if we go to the top left of this track in this drop down where it says clips at the moment i'll just click on that and go down to clip automation and click on game changes the color of everything here and you can see this red line this is where we can adjust the gain so what i like to do with a section like this and there may be an easier way to do this than the way i'm going to show you somebody will talk about that in the comments if there is but i like to create some nodes by clicking on that line okay so left clicking on that line um either side of that section which i'm going to adjust and then i create another couple of nodes just on the inside you don't have to be that precise about it okay um you can be sort of fairly inaccurate with this so i've got the one selected down here you can see that highlighted i'm going to hold shift on the keyboard and select another one so i've just ho i've just selected the two inside nodes there and then i'm just going to drag them upwards and i'm just looking at the waveform here until i get it so it's sort of consistent with the wave forms either side of it okay so let's play from the one before only yesterday honey you are now a two only yesterday when the sun was shining through seems okay i could possibly even push up a little bit further you need to experiment a little bit and just see how it actually sounds you can't completely go by the visuals here now another thing that you can sort of fix here is any sort of transients or sudden sort of peaks that you can see here um now they fixed in exactly the same kind of way so i'll just sort of perhaps make some nodes either side of them um grab those and then just drag them around and i could take that that sort of peak which is happening there which is really poking out and if i play that you'll find that although i've appeared to do a lot it's actually quite natural only yesterday honey you know it too and i i do like to do that i like to go through my waves and just look for anything which is really outstanding like that and that's because um it's sort of although i'm going to be using compression later on it kind of doesn't unnecessarily trigger compression if you know what i mean so we're not sort of using uh compression in a really aggressive way to fix kind of errors like that i would prefer to sort of eyeball that or listen listen ball air ball no anyway i would prefer to use either my eyes or my ears just to check out for things like that and then you can fix them again by using this clip gain automation tool now i like to start off my effects chain with a high pass filter if you don't know what that is just think of the words high pass it's only letting the high frequencies pass okay so in other words it's sometimes called a low cut it's cutting the low frequencies both the same thing now there's two reasons i'm doing it for this vocal first of all there's some information in the low end or there's some sound in the low end which i don't think is necessary for this track i've already got kick and um bass guitar down there they're occupying that space so the low end of this vocal doesn't matter too much at a certain point also there's something which i'm kind of fixing there because there were some plosives in this vocal that kind of sound and some sort of low rumble which i didn't like now you may get it with things as well like you know some reverberation or some something happening in the room or maybe someone kicking a microphone something like that so this is going to help with that let's just have a quick listen to this vocal and listen out for that low end stuff that i don't like we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we all mean to do what's right listen there we can live for life that's double [Music] but i get alone so let's tidy that up a bit this just really does help especially doing this before you go into your other plugins now i'm going to use the featuring cakewalk called the pro channel here this is really convenient because it's right at the top of the chain here so on the track i'll just open up my pro channel i'm just using the eq i'm just going to double click on it here so that comes out i've actually prepared my high pass already so to switch on the high pass filter you just click this hp button um using the frequency knob you can change where you start to do your sort of cut off and then you can adjust your slope here so i'm using a really the most aggressive slope here for this and i've just played around with the frequency around about sort of 80. sometimes you could go a bit higher than this it sort of depends on the song on songs which say only have one other instrument you want to keep a little bit more low end in there now let's just have a listen now with that switched on and listen for those lo that low end stuff we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we all mean to do what's right this part was bad we can live a life that's double [Music] so you can see let's fix those plosives right away now the key to this is you don't want to kind of destroy the sound of the vocal you should really when you're sort of setting up the sound be listening with the other music playing as well it's not a good idea to solo everything like this if you want to get rid of problems like those plosives here but listen to it in context and what you want to do is as you're adjusting your frequency here just switch the effect off and on so bypass it there should be a point where you really don't exactly hear a difference where you know if you get it to a point where you can hear the difference then just back off again that's usually around about the right point to do your cut off of course you need to make sure that you've got decent monitors uh to actually hear that low end well oh by the way are you finding this video useful if you are go ahead and hit the like button for me do it right away so that you don't forget if you're not finding it useful hit the dislike button twice and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos now back to this video now in a moment i'm going to talk about the one and only plug-in i've got on this vocal as an insert that is the vx64 vocal strip which comes with cakewalk however for you this may be hidden so if you can't find it there when you go to insert i'll show you how to unhide it just go up to the top to the utilities menu click on that then go down to cakewalk plugin manager so click on that just wait for this to be populated then go down to vst audio effects so we'll click on that and then down at the bottom here click on show excluded okay and probably in most cases you're going to find that it's there in the excluded list so you just need to select it by clicking on it and then go down to enable plug-in click on that it will disappear from the excluded list and then when you go to insert it in your project you should find it available i'm not sure if you have to restart cape walk possibly to make sure it's there um i think not but give it a go if that's your problem so let's look at the one and only plug-in i have as an insert on this vocal track that's the vx64 vocal strip now if i click on that you can see it in all its glory this is a great plug-in first of all because it sounds great it's got almost everything you need to process your vocals in one little unit and also it's a great learning tool as well we can work our way around and see what each part of the processing actually does so starting off on the left hand side we've got a saturation control here this is to add some either warmth or some sort of texture and color to our vocal it's great to have at the beginning there because traditionally it would often be added at the beginning of a signal chain with things like tape or things like preamps things like that so i've got it switched on here i've got it turned up fairly high 75 or so but that's still going to be pretty subtle so i'll play the first part of this vocal here with it switched on and then i'll switch off see if you can hear the difference only yesterday honey i was still with you switched off only yesterday honey you and i were now it is very subtle if you've now listened to this five or six times you've rewound don't feel bad that you can't hear much of a difference what i hear is just a slight amount of sort of grittiness there a little bit of a growl which i kind of like on this vocal sounded much cleaner with it switched off as i say if you can't hear it is very subtle let's move on to something very key with vocals and that is a dsr that's to get rid of things like sibilance definitely make sure you deal with this because once it's heard by the listener and it can be annoying it can't be kind of unheard and they'll they'll just feel like they want to switch the song off to be honest with you so what we'll do is switch this on we'll have a listen to what it's doing to this vocal um with it off sorry it sounds like this only yesterday honey and with it on only yesterday so that's in yesterday is still there but it's suppressed a lot okay now with each vocalist it's going to happen at a slightly different frequency so you've got a frequency control here and you can see the graphic on the right hand side representing the point at which it's intercepting that sibling so you may want to fiddle with that a little bit depending on the vocalist and then a great tool they've got here is the listen tool okay if you switch this on then the only thing you're going to hear is the thing which is being removed by the de-esser so let's have a listen to that so you can hear on this on the yes today okay so definitely a tool that you should be using on your vocals almost every time next we move on to this which they've called compound which is an expander and a compressor all in one little unit here this is really quite nice and if you're not used to using compressors especially then this is a great place to start because there's not too many controls to fiddle with but we'll look at the expander part of it first and expand it as a little bit like a noise gate it's there to get rid of or to help you get rid of very quiet noises perhaps in between phrases of a vocal but whereas a noise gate will have a hard cut off point um an expander is almost like the opposite of a compressor there's a there's a little bit of a gradual cut off to it okay so it doesn't sound too harsh so i'm using it here on this vocal i'll go to this verse to get rid of some noise in between the phrases okay so let's just play it before i've switched this on we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we all mean to do what's right so you may get some voices some noises in between the vocals some breathing but there i've got a little bit of bleed coming from the headphones so i'm just going to use that expander to get rid of that i'll switch this on now the compressor is not working at the moment because the threshold is switched all the way up okay so we're only hearing the effect of the expander now i have a listening between those phrases we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we all mean to do what's right [Music] so very handy indeed now it's not going to make or break this recording to be honest with you um it's it's you may not even hear the difference it's sort of a nicety but in a a track which is very sparse maybe there's just a vocal and an acoustic guitar and that may be quite helpful to get rid of some of those noises that you'll have in between um the phrases so that's the expander now the compressor oh let's talk about compressors really quickly and it's a compressor is really an automatic volume control and what it does is it says hey when things get a little bit too loud over a certain threshold then let's compress them down or sorry turn them down by a certain amount that's a ratio okay that's a very quick um explanation of a compressor now you may be thinking well aren't compressors there to make things louder well because you can turn the peaks down yeah the very loudest bits because you can turn them down it means you can then turn everything up yeah without peaking yeah because those peaks have now been turned down lower so your lower or your more quiet parts of your vocal can be made louder and that's why compressors are normally thought of as making things louder even though in reality their primary goal is to make peaks or the louder parts quieter okay so that's how they work so in order to make a compressor work we're going to have to set a threshold so that's a point at which it starts to happen where it starts to turn things down we'll adjust that in a moment but i think you need to know that with this particular compressor it's got an automatic makeup gain in other words it's saying hey now that we've made things a bit quieter at the top using the threshold we can make everything automatically louder it does that for you automatically rather than you doing it manually so let's start off with the compressor off so it's all at the top listen to this vocal and we'll gradually bring it down we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we all mean to do what's right [Music] so you can hear that vocals starting to sound louder okay what we're doing is we're sort of squashing the dynamic range of the vocal so the difference between the louder parts and the quieter parts and we're making more narrow so we're making able to make the whole thing louder so it's a key part in being able to make your vocals yeah louder in the mix without um actually peaking now we do have a ratio control here so that's something you're going to have to experiment with your particular song to get that right how much is it actually uh squashing those peaks and then an attack now in most cases on a vocal i like to have the attack down pretty low um so that it really grabs those peaks those sudden peaks which are transients grabs those and squashes them um you could uh try a slower attack um for different songs it's going to have a different effect but in most cases i like to have it down pretty low so that's where i've got it there and that's the setting i'm going to go with for now although i should say this is only for demonstration purposes because in reality you really need to be listening to this vocal in the context of the rest of the music so you should have your backing playing as well please do remember that i'm only doing it this way so that you can more easily hear the differences okay so the next thing we have is an equalizer in fact it's called a tube equalizer here because it has a saturation feature attached to it but we're just going to look at it in terms of an eq it's a three-band eq which kind of makes sense in terms of vocals we're broadly looking at the low end of the vocal the mid and the mid part of the vocal and the high end they're all important um now the low end we've talked about that a little bit earlier we reduced the low end at the beginning so we've kind of dealt with the very very low end but here we'll probably be looking at it a little bit sort of higher than we were using it earlier so the easiest way to sort of uh sort of see what's happening to visualize it is to actually turn the level up of one of these bands so this is the low end level and i'm pushing it up okay now what i want you to remember with the low end is if it's a very sparse track again if it's just play a vocal an acoustic guitar um then it's kind of appropriate to have a little bit more low end in there that warmth okay but with a much more complex track where you've got other instruments taking care of that low end it can be a bit too much and it can make things sound a bit sort of muddy okay so that's not a great thing so just be careful of the low end in that way but that's your control with it and there's the frequency for that the mid side of things or the mid part of the frequencies which i'm turning up and down here we can change the frequency exact frequency like so um now this is a part where things can sound a bit harsh um and even a little bit sort of nasally in things it's very tempting all the time just to turn this down pretty aggressively you know and you'll get this sort of sound of this we all mean to keep from trouble [Music] we which sounds really sort of smooth yeah but out of context of the rest of the song what you can find is you kind of just lose all the definition of your vocal so although you know quite often i will have it just a little bit turned down um just be careful with this and if you find that your vocals just sort of disappeared it may be because you just cut out too much of that um middle part of your vocal so that's where a lot of the sort of pronunciation and the core of your vocals actually is now in terms of the high end up here what we're looking at here is the sort of airiness the breathiness okay that can be quite nice to have in there but if you go overboard with it then um you can make things sound a little bit harsh and maybe even piercing and do think about the relationship between the high end and the low end yeah sometimes rather than actually add more high like so it's worth just trying re reducing the low end okay just play around with that yourself but that can often get you a better effect and you're avoiding all that kind of harshness and stuff now with this particular plug-in and i don't use this often i must admit it has this feature of adding saturation in on a per band basis so you can add it in on the low the mid or the high end frequencies there okay and you'll just use that slider to add saturation so that's that um the next thing that i'm going to look at is the next part of the chain is this doubler down here now a doubler is mimicking the effect of recording the vocal several times okay and then having them play alongside each other let's just listen to it and see what the effect of it is first we'll go back to the chorus and we'll have a listen to it quickly by itself only yesterday honey i was there with you and with the doubler switched on only yesterday honey i was still with you [Music] now it's almost like a very short delay effect and and it kind of is probably more or less there may be some detuning going on there as well this is a great effect to have if um especially if you automated this switch on for choruses and things like that however i don't use this i don't tend to use doublers what i tend to do is record vocals uh doubling up of recording of vocals so i actually re-record the vocal again the phrasing will be slightly different it should only be slightly each time the singer sings it but i find it just has a better effect than sort of doubling plugins but you may not have the option you may not have the singer available you may not be able to record it again in which case this is a good substitute so that's the doubler there the next thing again i think is really important with vocals is delay and i'll talk about the way in which i use delay on vocals in a moment but just so you know it's there of course it could be a very overt uh effect so if we just turn it up like so only yesterday that's fine you know if that's what you're looking for sometimes um you'll have that on a track but where i prefer to use delay is with a with a very short time of very short feedback um to get this kind of effect only yesterday i was there with you now it's similar to that doubler granted but the idea here is just to put the person in a little bit of space i've got it up a little bit high there to be honest with you only yesterday honey i was there now it's subtle but we'll talk in a moment about why we use it okay we're gonna get back to this i don't actually use it from within this plug-in i use it as a bus and as i say we'll get onto why i do that in a moment now um you can with this plug-in also add saturation in at the end as well and apart from that one of the great things about this particular plug-in is the fact that you can change the routing now sometimes for example you'll find that it sounds better to use the eq before the compressor or vice versa sometimes you might need to add that de-esser on it a little bit later on after you've actually changed your eq so look it's just nice that you can just grab units and drag them around and change the order of them there so that's one of the great features of that plug-in so let's move on to the other effects which i've alluded to which i actually use on buses so i'm adding my next three effects using buses i'm doing that because i want them to work independently of each other rather than one feed into the next one so with effects inserts if i've got a vocal with a reverb on it and then that goes into a delay the delay is receiving the vocal with the reverb and we'll add delay to the whole thing i don't want it to happen so you can see my three buses up here reverb delay and compression they're all working independently and it really doesn't matter what order they are here now one of the main effects that people often think about with their vocals is reverb as every karaoke singer knows around the world that adding that little bit of reverb gives your vocals that professional sound however you can actually really ruin the sound of your vocals with reverb i guess you're trying to put them into a kind of a space make them sound like they're in a room not so dry but the problem with reverb is it can also make the vocal sound much further away and that's probably not something you want you probably want your vocals to be up front i have used reverb on this track and i usually and often do subtly but i've used it rather aggressively on this track for a specific reason we'll get back to that later but what i first of all like to think about before reverb in order to put my vocals into a space is the use of delay so i'm sending my vocals through to this bus which has the solidist delay in the insert section so i'll just open that this of course comes for free with cakewalk now the aim here is to just put the vocals in some space so they don't sound quite so sterile and i do in a very specific way so in terms of the settings with the left and right channels i have a slightly different setting for the delay time but they're both very very small on the left here i've got about 50 milliseconds on the right i've got it at 12. you could use different values that's fine but keep them rather short and keep them different to each other that gives that sensation of space the next important thing is to have the feedback and the crossfeed controls down to zero essentially the aim here is to only have one delay okay i don't want to go on and on with lots and lots of repeats just one repeat to the delay and then the the last control in these sections is that i have the mix all the way over to 100 so i'm only hearing through this bus the actual delay effect because i've got the original sound on my original channel yeah so often when we use effects like this on a bus we have the mix all the way up to completely wet okay and then we blend them either using the send or using the fader on that effect okay now the very final thing that i have set up here is a filter i've got a low-cut filter set up here around about 550 hertz or so this means that the repeats have that low end cut out of them the reason i'm doing that is because if we keep repeating um the low end of things with both the delay and the reverb you can get a low end build up it sounds very muddy and just not that great so i love to use a low-pass filter in there let's just have a listen to the vocal without this delay effect only yesterday honey i was there with you and then we'll switch it on only yesterday honey i was still with you now that may or may not be too much of an effect for you as i say i would generally control that with the level control over here for the send but as i say you could also use the fader in the bus over here to adjust the level of that so that's our delay now we can more safely add some reverb so of course reverb can be used to put your vocal in a space like a cathedral or a hall or a studio or something like that but it can also be used in a stylized way so i'm thinking of certain eras of music maybe the 50s and 60s where they did like to use a lot of reverb and echo and if you want to mimic that sound then you tend to use reverb in that kind of way now i do find myself unusually in that situation because this track is trying to mimic something from the kind of motown era or something like that so i'm using much more reverb than i normally do um because normally i find with more modern music just to have it kind of subtle um so that you don't lose the definition of the vocals is a good idea up to you in terms of credit creative decisions with that so the important thing is it goes over to this channel here and i'm not using a plugin this time this time i'm using the pro channel in cate walk so i'll just open that up so we can see it and you can see i've used the brever module down there which i find to be quite a good reverb now i've got the wet signal turned all the way up of course the dryer all the way down and i just use the whole preset here okay there's a few different presets there and a number of different shapes so you can sorry control so you can adjust them but that's all i did in this case importantly and what i'd suggest is always use an eq before it to do a high pass filter or a low cut filter so in this case if i just open that up you can see i've cut everything sort of down below 1k or so so fairly aggressive there i could even push up a lot sorry you could even push up a little bit further um that would be fine i'm just i've just got the reverb happening on that sort of high end of the frequencies again this is to avoid making things sound too muddy so let's take that vocal i'll start playing it with the reverb level all the way down and i'll gradually introduce it only yesterday honey i was there with you only yesterday honey okay let's have a listen to that with the rest of the song happening [Music] that's the kind of effect that i was looking for but most cases it would be a lot more subtle and subtle than that okay so that's that sort of those spatial effects done now let's just make sure that that vocal stays more present than the other instruments so parallel compression is extremely effective and extremely easy to use so great for beginners i have my vocal here going through to my vocal compression bus you can see it here and the actual compressor i'm using is on the pro channel i'll just open that up here and we can see it inserted here and it's got the easiest settings you'll ever use for a compressor because i've just got the input turned up full okay i've got the ratio set up very very high i've got the attack on very quick as fast as i can make it so it's just grabbing everything and i've got the release on so that hangs in there for a long time it keeps that compression uh switched on for a long time so basically it's just crushing everything okay removing all the dynamics out of it okay so when i send it from my vocal i then blend it in using this fader that's the key okay so let's have a listen look at the needle see what's happening when i play the vocal i was still with you so so should sound awful right well it does actually sound awful but because it's blended in you can hardly hear let's just try and get an idea of how it sounds i'll turn off all of the other elements i'll get rid of the reverb i'll get rid of the delay i'll turn down the main fader and so we won't be hearing the main vocal now we'll just be hearing the compressed vocal it sounds like this only yesterday honey i was still with you it's a bit mental isn't it you don't want your vocal to sound like that so as i say if you blend it in so i'll bring the main vocal back up i'll play and then i'll gradually blend this in only yesterday honey i was there with you so it's very effective at generally keeping the vocals up front without you necessarily hearing that anything is going on so if we switch on what we've got so far switch the reverb back on i'll switch on uh the delay and we've got that compression on and let's have a listen to that vocal in the mix now only yesterday honey [Music] now there's one more thing i can do here it was more than one thing but the next thing we're going to talk about i alluded to earlier and that is with doubling so something can be very effective is doubling this can really add impact to a vocal and i like to use it on well any part that i want to have extreme impact but it's normally going to be something like a chorus okay now with doubling what we do is we re-record the vocal several times in this case only twice and then we pan hard left and hard right it's important here that you do re-record the vocals you can't just copy and paste them that doesn't work that's they're too close to each other they're identical to each other we want those slight differences but roughly the singer should feel like they're just singing the same thing again it's the slight differences which make this work so i've done it here you can see my main vocal is over here i've got as i said earlier the chorus and the first parts and then i've got these two susie duplicate left susie duplicate right they are over here and they are both going through all the way over here to a bus okay the duplica vox bus let's have a listen to the vocal by itself only yesterday honey i was there with let's listen to the duplicates by themselves [Music] now listen to both together only yesterday i was there with you now this is my personal choice but i like to leave those duplicates completely dry i don't send them through delay or reverb or anything like that i think it helps for the presence of the vocals for those to remain dry but you can experiment with using effects if you wish so those are the key components of my vocal processing in a mix in terms of the way i've got things routed and the plugins but what about the actual mixing okay so this video went on much longer than i thought it would so i'm going to give you a quick explanation about how i set the levels of the vocals and these two things are very very important for me first of all i start off with the chorus or the loudest part of the song i always find it's best to start there and then work through to the other sections of the song i used to start at the beginning of the song yeah which is normally quite quiet with my style of writing and it gradually builds up now start with the loudest part and what i like to do is set the level of my vocal first and then bring the other instruments up underneath it now a lot of people struggle with saying that they find it difficult to get their vocal to be present and i found that that was a struggle for me before when i used to start off with the instruments first and then bring up the vocals i guess it's so you'd think it would be the same difference but i guess it's because you know you're prioritizing those vocals and you're making sure they stay on top whereas before you're sort of privatizing everything else and then trying to squeeze the vocals in there or trying to shove them on top of everything else anyway it's a philosophical difference in approach but it works for me if i start off with vocals first let me know about that give this a try once and see if it doesn't revolutionize the way that your vocals fit into your mix now as i say i start off with the loudest part first that's usually the chorus now often when i when i've set the levels right and it's sounding great i'll then go to the verses and it will sound out it won't sound good in terms of balance that's when you need to use automation if you're just trying to use a fader and setting a level for your vocals for the whole song all the way through even though your song is dynamic and it starts off low and gets louder in other parts then obviously the balance is going to be out in other parts of the song i've got other videos on automation i'll put a link for those in the description down below but do make sure you use automation otherwise you will never get your whole song sounding like it's in balance so what do you find most difficult about recording vocals was there any sort of light bulb moments in this video something you thought ah i must try that let me know in the comments down below if you're really struggling with something in particular let everyone know in the comments down below maybe we can help each other out thank you so much for joining me in this video check the link in the description down below for my patreon page where for as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 6,279

Rating: 4.971581 out of 5

Keywords: Mixing Vocals in Cakewalk by Bandlab, How to Mix Vocals, How to Mix Vocals in Cakewalk by Bandlab, How to Record Vocals, how to record vocals in cakewalk by bandlab, how to record and mix vocals in cakewalk, cakewalk by bandlab tutorial, cakewalk by bandlab, cakewalk vx-64 vocal strip, cakewalk tutorial, how to use cakewalk, how to use cakewalk by bandlab, creative sauce, how to process vocals, sonar, bandlab, cakewalk, mixing vocals, cakewalk by bandlab recording vocals

Id: MRS9tByRUNk

Length: 41min 12sec (2472 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! A number of people have asked me about mixing vocals in Cakewalk - so here is a video about it, using ONLY stock plugins :)