My TOP 3 Vocal Delay TRICKS for PRO Vocals (any genre)

now when i work with bands and artists every time i mix their vocals i always add a delay of some kind in fact i use three different types of delays so in this video today i'm gonna break down everything i do with delay on a vocal to help make it not only sound great but add another layer of depth that's really gonna make your music noticeable hey thank you so much for being here today my name is bobby baylo and i'm the mixing and mastering engineer at raytown productions and this channel is dedicated to helping you make better sounding music without needing to spend a lot of money on expensive gear or unnecessary plugins if you're new welcome thank you so much for being here be sure to hit that subscribe button because i drop new videos every single week that's gonna help you level up the quality of your music now we're about to cover a lot when it comes to vocal delays and how to set them up in your session to really make your vocal sound amazing and i thought it'd be really helpful if you could just download a pdf that had all of these tricks that i'm about to talk about so if you are interested i have a vocal delay guide it's totally free you can go and download that there's a link in the description it's going to cover all the stuff that we're talking about in this video and it's going to go a little bit farther and show you some other really cool tricks that you can do with vocal delays so that sounds interesting to you go check out the description there is a link to download this free guide now the song that we're going to be demonstrating all these vocal delays on is by band called deerspring and these guys are out of washington dc here in the u.s so if you like what you hear definitely go and check them out they have some new music on the way i have a link to all of their socials in the description so i've already gone ahead and mixed this song the way i want it and i've taken off all the delays so we just have a very dry sounding vocal so let me just show you what that sounds like [Music] a fictional horizon it reaches for the okay so you can hear i mean it's the vocal is right in your face right if we want the vocal to mesh with the music we need to add some sort of effects either delays or reverbs to help get it to sit right and typically i don't like to use too much reverb because it gives a sense of pushing the vocals back too far and that's why i tend to use three types of different delays it'll help us glue the vocal to the song without giving it a sense that we're necessarily pushing it back too far so first of all the general strategy we want to follow when we're using delays is to set up a delay auxiliary track or a send effect if you're in cubase like i am we don't typically want to put the delays directly on the channel because if we do any other processing or we want to add plugins after the delay it's going to affect the sound of the delay so we like to have those separated because then we have more control over our vocal sound so how do we separate that you make what's called an auxiliary channel or a send effects in cubase they call it send effects and so basically it's just a new channel that we're going to send some of this audio from the vocal track directly to so let's do that now so we're going to make a stereo be sure you make a stereo otherwise some of these delay effects aren't going to work for you so a stereo auxiliary or stereo send effects and the first delay that we're gonna use is gonna be a quarter note delay i tend to always tempo sync my delays to the tempo of the song and that i find is super important because one it helps to enhance the groove of the song in two it makes the delays and all the echoes less distracting which is huge right we want the listener to listen to the vocal not be distracted by the echoes right here's my send effects in cubase this is the channel we're going to add the delay to this channel i really like this h delay by waves it just has all the different features that i really like on delay plugins all built into one super easy interface something about this particular plugin is turn this analog thing off it this adds a ton of noise that i think really builds up especially on a vocal track or if you have lots of vocals so just get rid of that the second thing that's super important anytime you add any delay to an auxiliary track is you need to make sure that the dry wet knob is a hundred percent wet if you're any percentage dry it's going to add some additional volume to the vocal anytime you send to this delay track and we don't want that we just want it to be an echo we don't want it to be an echo plus the main vocal so make it completely wet so i tempo time all my delays like i mentioned in this one i'm gonna do a quarter note and often when i work on music quarter note delay is about the right length to glue the vocal to the song sometimes the vocal phrasing might be really fast or maybe it's really slow so you might want to push this to eighth note if you have really fast vocal phrasing you want to keep up or maybe it's a really slow song so maybe a half note would be better okay and and just experiment with this so typically this type of delay is just here to add a layer of glue to the song so just something i want to bring up really quickly just in case you don't have a delay that will sync automatically to the tempo of the song so if you don't have something where you can adjust the notes right and you just have something like this where all you have is uh the number of milliseconds you can calculate the correct number of milliseconds is for the tempo of the song and i'm gonna teach you how to do it really quickly this particular song is 154 beats per minute so if you know that all you have to do is do 60 000 divided by the tempo so 154 and this is the number of milliseconds you need for a quarter note okay so if you want to do a half note that's going to be twice as long so you multiply that by two and that's not a half note so this would be 779 milliseconds if you want to do an eighth note you would divide it by two so if you want an eighth note it'd be and ninety four point eight milliseconds okay so that's the basic math to do that if you divide it by two again that's now uh a sixteenth note okay and you can divide it by two again that's a thirty-second note you can use that trick if your like i said your delay doesn't have the tempo syncing feature so let's send some of the vocal to this effect so you can hear what it's doing under sends we're going to choose that quarter note delay so we're just going to send some the signal from this track to the delay here we go [Music] [Music] so the first thing it's going way too long right so the number of times that that vocal is echoing and repeating that's controlled by what's called the feedback so we're going to want to dial this way way back and we just want to have it repeat maybe two or three times we don't want it to go really long because that's going to start smearing the image of our song okay we just want it long enough to kind of string together all the vocals and glue it to the song so let me set this feedback just so you can see how to connect it to the instruments so that's about two or three echoes right yeah so something like that so right now 10 is what i have it set to um let's hear what it sounds like in the mix see how distracting it is though right the echoes are so loud there's two things we can do the first thing is let's lower the volume that we're actually sending to this delay and then the second thing i want to do is hide the echoes a little bit more in the mix so the way we do that is by rolling off some of those high frequencies because if you have a consonant sound like a t or an s those tend to jump out on the mix and if we roll off a lot of the top energy it will hide those sounds it basically gets rid of them so you just hear the meat of the vocal and because it's the delay it's the echo and we're just trying to connect the vocal to the song this is a really good strategy to help glue everything together without making the echoes jump out of the mix so let's do both of that so let's set the volume by reducing the send uh so then we can adjust the volume of the echo and then we're going to roll off those high frequencies until it almost sounds like we can't hear the echo anymore so let's do that [Music] it's still a little aggressive let's go back a little bit further [Music] all right cool so that's a good level i think for right now but you can hear like tempered thoughts like that s uh it jumps out of the mix so let's roll the frequencies back and tuck it in separate thoughts of reason will define this inevitable decline a hint of nostalgia opacity so again listen to the echoes not the lead vocal get into madness down we go no it's six is the smallest push in the right direction so right around here we lose all the sharp s sounds and the t sounds all those consonant sounds and if you look the the low pass is actually at 1.7 k so we're getting rid of everything from 20 kilohertz all the way to 1.7 k it's like almost like a telephone effect at this point now something else you want to do is to also roll off some of that low frequency information um that's from the deep chesty part of the vocal reason being is those frequencies are really abundant in a lot of songs and we don't need extra low frequency information there especially from the vocal so what happens is that's how you make a song really muddy really fast so let's dial this up and listen for the uh the vocal delay to get a little bit more crispy sounding down at the bottom for you yeah i'll be right back okay i think i got a good spot for it now let me um just play the echo so you can hear the tone now balls golden you've been at it for quite a minute [Music] so it sounds like a telephone effect right but now in the mix it's adding glue but it's not distracting and it's just helping to blend everything together it's it's amazing so let's bring back the vocal [Music] [Applause] so you can hear it just it just adds this nice little layer there and if you can distinctly hear those delays then it's too much you gotta roll that back a little bit more okay let's talk about the second delay trick that i like to use on my vocals so again we're gonna set up another auxiliary track and this time it's a ping pong delay so what the heck is a ping pong delay let me let me show you what this is so again i'm using waves h delay and to activate a ping pong delay you have to make sure you have a stereo auxiliary or send efx bus and then you just click this little ping pong button and what this does is it's going to put a delay and it's going to sound like you're playing ping pong there's going to be an echo on the left side then the right side then the left side then the right side now if you just abuse this plugin and you just go all out it sounds pretty psychedelic let me show you what it sounds like by default horizon yeah it's pretty crazy right it's like way way distracting so we need to be really careful with this one now i also time this to the tempo again because i wanted to go with the groove of the song especially because this is kind of a weird thing right we don't want to distract the listener from the song so i have it set to maybe an eighth note sometimes you might go as fast as a sixteenth note and the purpose of this delay is just to give the vocal some width and some movement and make it a little bit more unique and it's going to help connect it not only to the center but also to some of the guitars and the side elements by having this delay that's moving around and if you can hear this delay it's it's too much okay so we're going to use the same tricks to tuck this delay into the song so we can't notice it as much okay so first things first let's pull this feedback back some more because it just goes on and on and on it's gonna muddy up our mix let's let's do that now because this is an eighth note ping-pong delay we can go a little bit more with the feedback than the quarter note okay we want to be not necessarily as long as the quarter note just a little bit less but it's gonna help just glue it sonically together in that stereo image okay now we have to roll off the high frequencies or it's going to jump out of the mix so let's do that okay so right there is good and what do you it's right on the same spot that i had the quarter note delay 1.6 k again you could probably go up to about two and a half 3k if you like that sound better but be really careful because if you start having those s and t sounds jump out those consonant sounds it's going to distract the listener and it's really easy to hear that when it's jumping around left and right okay all right so then let's do the same thing we're going to add a high pass filter and we're just going to roll off all the low energy on this and make it kind of more like telephony again [Music] that sounds good to me i think it's still a little bit loud in the mix so we'll roll this way back we shouldn't be able to hear it okay so when we have everything playing we'll pull the send effects back back back until we just can't hear it in the song like right that moment that we can't hear it then roll it back a tiny bit more and then that's the perfect level because when you go into master the song and you start raising the volume it's going to lift up all these delays and then they're going to get really loud okay so you want to be really careful with how loud you set that up because you can really ruin a mix really fast by having your delays too loud [Music] okay so right around here i have a hard time hearing it in the context of the song okay so i want to dial it back a little bit more so like right around here um let's listen to the verse because it's a lot less dense and we want to make sure that we don't hear that [Applause] [Music] perfect all right so that's two delays that i use on pretty much every single vocal this third one is a cool little trick i love to use when the vocals don't feel like they're big enough okay and we need something to make them a little bit more larger than life and this is kind of a crazy thing but i want you to definitely experiment with it because it can really make a vocal pop in a song again we're gonna make another send bus okay it's gonna be stereo again and this time we're going to put on uh just a stereo delay now it's important that it's stereo because we're gonna have a different delay parameters on the left side and the right side so pick a side what i like to do is maybe a quarter note sometimes even a half note and on the other side we're going to do something like a 16th or a 32nd note let me show you what this sounds like because it's pretty crazy [Music] [Applause] you know i forgot to do i've got to take this mix and make them totally wet so don't forget that okay i know that sounds insane okay just bear with me a little bit longer we want to do is we want to adjust the feedback so that both of these delays basically end at about the same time okay so the quarter note delay or the longer delay you're going to have a lot less feedback the shorter delay like the 16th note delay you're going to need to increase the feedback to make it about the same length as that quarter note so this quarter note delay is still longer than this 16th note so let's increase the feedback here decrease this feedback okay that's closer again we don't want this to be super long because this is even more insane than the ping pong delay we're going to probably want to filter it a little bit more but it really is going to come down to the mix right so if you want a little bit of high frequencies in there just kind of give it a little bit more air in space you can do that experiment but typically those s sounds are going to really screw us up so i tend to more often than not roll this all the way back to about you know 1.5 k or so so let's do that for both of these delays and then again let's clean up that those low frequencies so that they don't muddy up the signal [Applause] right now what we have is a delay that is doing all sorts of stuff but they're texturally different on the sides so it's going to add this sense of larger than life space to the vocal it's going to make the world of a difference for your tracks so let's dial this in and again we're just going to roll this volume back until we can just barely pick it out and then a touch more and then that's it and then we'll combine all three of these delays and check the levels and i bet you're going to hear that the vocal has this huge increase in width and it's glued now to the instrumentation so let's let's let's dial that in for the truth or a convenient life and we can actually put more high frequencies in that 16th note delay because of it being so quick and that just kind of helps give it another sense of space so let's keep going i think we need to dial it back a little bit more circling the sky all right so right there i think is perfect let's hear what it sounds like in the mix way too much [Music] so like right here again i'm having a hard time hearing it so a tiny bit more brings us to about right here all right let's bring all those delays in and listen to what it sounds like so you can hear what it does to this song [Music] now i'm gonna take them all out [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so let's listen to just the vocal now [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then in context in the chorus [Music] [Music] you can just hear that with those delays in everything is just like glued together in a beautiful way and then without those delays the vocal just sounds kind of isolated by itself and in front and it's really not doesn't feel connected to the song as a whole so do you use any of these same vocal delay tricks in your music let me know in the comments below i'm really curious to hear your thoughts about that crazy delay that i have with the quarter note in the 16th note on the sides that just is kind of really odd but somehow makes a vocal sound larger than life i want to remind you that i have that free vocal delay tricks guide that you can download in the description so if you like what you saw and you want a few extra tricks to try out go and check that out download it and let me know what you think if you made it this far thank you so much be sure to thumbs up because it tells youtube that this video is actually helpful and it's going to show it to more people and if you want to be notified when i drop new videos every single week don't forget to hit that subscribe button with that i want to thank you so much for your time and attention today and hope to see you in another video you

Channel: Raytown Productions

Views: 60,695

Keywords: vocal delay trick, vocal delay tricks, vocal effects, mixing audio, mixing tip, mixing reverb and delay, vocal effects plugins, waves delay plugin, cubase delay setting, cubase delay plugin, best vocal delay settings, vocal delay, vocal delay effect, vocal delay tutorial, vocal delay mixing, vocal delay plugin, mixing vocals, how to mix vocals, vocal mixing tricks, best vocal delay, best vocal plugins, waves h-delay, best delay plugins for vocals, mixing vocals 2022

Id: HDSm373YL10

Length: 22min 50sec (1370 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022