In this video you’ll learn my favorite vocal
thickening trick that you can do in any DAW and I’ll also share two more quick tricks
for creating a thick lead vocal, because a thinner weak vocal will ruin the rest of the
performance. So, knowing how to fix this issue could really
save your ass. But first be sure to grab my free vocal mixing
cheat sheet. There’s a link in the bio or on screen now. Okay, so the first trick I want to share with
you is called the Thick Reverb trick. Now, a lot of videos you’ll see in YouTube
about vocal thickening will talk about chorusing or Waves Doubler. I’m going to show you in this video too,
but a technique that I haven’t seen anywhere else is using reverb to change the tone of
a vocal and make it sound thicker. Let me give you a quick demonstration, so
if I just create a new send on my vocal to create a new buss. I’m going to call this reverb and I’m
going to increase that to zero. On here we’re going to first add an EQ. I’m going to make this really thick by adding
lots of body around 200 and we’ll play around with this in a sec but that’s a good starting
point. Taper off the low-end and maybe let’s reduce
that top-end a bit. Now, I’m going to load up a reverb. For this I’m going to use Logic’s new
ChromVerb , which is awesome and we’re just going to go to something like dark room that
sounds like it’d be quite warm, and then we’re going to just get rid of this because
we’ve used an EQ plug-in already. Now, let’s see how this sounds when I solo
the vocal with this reverb. So, it’s quite a dark warm sound. This is the vocal on its own. And in the context of the mix it sounds a
little bit thin. It sounds good. It does need more brightness as well, but
quite often with female vocals if they’re singing in a high pitch you start to lose
some of that warmth and body. So, now let’s solo this again and bring
in that reverb and listen to how it affects the tone. And this is just another way you can shape
the vocal into how you want it to sound is by using reverb as well as EQ on the vocal
itself. That’s adding quite a lot of body. Now, if I was to do the opposite if I reduced
that body and increased the top-end now listen to how it sounds? Now, it’s adding air and it’s adding sibilants
as well. And let’s go back to warmth. You can really hear how much warmth that’s
adding to the voice. So, this is a great way to thicken up a weak
or thin sounding vocal without having to use EQ on the vocal itself, because sure we could
try doing the same thing on the vocal. We could try boosting around here to make
it a bit thicker and I’d probably do that too. But this is just another way we can thicken
up that vocal that sounds a bit more natural than just apply EQ directly to the vocal sometimes. And normally a combination of those two EQ
directly on the vocal and a kind of warm dark reverb is going to thicken that up. Let’s listen in the context of the mix now. So, now we just need to get to the point where we’re
happy with the way the reverb sounds. Now, this track hasn’t been mixed yet we’re
at the balancing stage, And the reason I’m taking up the vocal here
is because normally when I’m prepping for a mix I am going through, I am checking the
channels, I am adding gain staging I will spend some time on the vocal doing some subtractive
EQ removing any room resonances. I’m not trying to make it sound different,
because if we’re soloing the vocal in this context and we’re just prepping the mix
we don’t want to make it sound different. We just want to find any ugliness like room
resonances or sibilance and try and tame that. And often what I’ll do is fix these kind
of issues here, because at this point it’s more about the production quality and the
tone being not where I want it to be, so I am happy to do that in the prep phase if it’s
a major issue. Now, that does pose somewhat of a challenge
in that we don’t have any of the reverb going on, so it sounds a bit unnatural but
we could still experiment with maybe I think a plate is going to sound a bit more natural
here. So, we can load up a plate and play around
with that. So, this is without that reverb. And this is with. Without. With. So, we’re adding thickness but it’s quite
subtle, it’s quite musical and it sounds quite natural. So, now I’m going to move onto the next
trick which is using Waves Vocal Doubler. I find myself using Waves Vocal Doubler quite
often on backend vocal groups if I want to give them a bit more spread and beef them
out to make it sound a bit more choral. But it works really well on second buss with
the lead vocal sometimes and we can call this doubler. Let’s solo that vocal again and I’m going
to use Waves Vocal Doubler which is very affordable if you don’t have already. Don’t be scared off by this, because you
can get it for $30 Wave sales bundled with a bunch of other plug-ins. So, let’s use doubler 4 and let’s just
leave it as it is that’s fine. The default setting we’ve got like detuned
on the left, so basically what it’s doing is we’ve got multiple variations. We’ve got the original down the center,
and because we’ve got this on a buss we’re going to get rid of that. And then, on the left hand side we’ve got
one that 6 dB quieter. It’s got a bit of a delay and it’s detuned
by 6. And then, we’ve also got another one of
the left that’s a bit quieter, bit more of a delay and bit more detuned and then the
same on the right and you have graphical representation of it here. Right now, only two of these are engaged that’s
not going to sound quite dramatic, so we’ll give that a go first. So, let’s just increase that buss then,
solo this, and have a listen to how it sounds. So, it almost sounds like chorusing. It’s got slightly different characteristic
to a chorus and I’m going to show you how chorusing sounds in a second. But we can just tuck this in underneath and
as I bring this up the vocal starts sound thicker but it will also start to have kind
of this nice shimmer to it and this nice sheen that fits really well in a lot of modern mainstream
pop kind of tracks. So, I tend to
have it quite subtle. When we bring it up here it starts to get
into that obvious kind of chorusing effect and I just tend to get to that point and back
it off a touch. Let’s listen in the context of the mix now,
so this is without. And with. So, again it’s pretty subtle but it’s
just adding a bit more thickness and a bit more interest. It just adds that kind of sheen as well where
it starts to sound a bit shimmery and a bit more produced, but in a lot of situations
that works really well. Now, you can still do this trick if you don’t
have Waves Vocal Doubler, because we can manually replicate this because it’s just a delayed
and detuned duplicate. So, I’m just going to show you one example
of this, and then if you want to go and do four different versions like Waves Vocal Doubler
then you can do that too. But first we just need to create two busses
and you can do this in any DAW the process is going to be similar. So, now we’ve two more busses so we can
do detune 1 and detune 2 then if we link them it’s going to make this a little bit easier. So, I’m going to send them to the same group
and that just means when we turn the faders up and down they’ll both go together. The first thing we want to do then is detune
them, so we can go to pitch shifter and then we can pan this one to the left like so pan
one to left one to the right, and then we can turn that group back on. And we want to detune this left here by let’s
say 6 sends, so if we solo this. So, we’ve got left here we want to make
100 send mix and let’s do 6 sends. And then, on the right here we want to do
the opposite, so we want to do plus 6. And then, also in Logic it’s pretty handy
because we have a delay in the same plug-in of the pitch shifter. In other DAWs you might have to add a second
delay plug-in, but here we can just adjust this. So, let’s try doing 4 milliseconds and about
4 milliseconds on the left or maybe a slightly different one and let’s see how this sounds,
so we’ve got a delay and a pitch shift on each side. So, it’s pretty drastic there but then we
can do the same thing. We could bring this until we notice it, and
then back it off. And then, you can do it again with another
two and you could detune them more and delay them more and just play around with that. So, you can still do this without Waves Vocal
Doubler that doubler plug-in just does the same thing just quicker and makes it a bit
easier to shape that. So, now let’s move onto the next trick. And trick number 3 is using subtle chorusing
to add thickness to the vocal. So, I’m just going to do this directly on
the channel and you can use any chorus; the one that comes with your DAW. If you don’t have one in your DAW TAL is
a great free one which stands for Togu Audio Line Chorus LX this is a great free plug-in. I’m just going to use the stock Logic one,
so let’s get rid of that and solo the vocal and just listen to how when I bring this mix
up just before we get to this place where it’s really obvious chorusing. We have this kind of section where it’s
just going to start to sound a bit thicker and it’s going to sound quite similar to
Waves Vocal Doubler because it’s doing a similar thing once we combine the doubler
where we’re combining the detuned delayed vocals we get this kind of interesting phasy
effects and that’s what we get with the chorus 2 it’s just got a slightly different
characteristic to it. And this might be easy to hear if I disable
that doubler, so let’s do that again. So, you can hear that when I bring that back
in it’s subtle but it’s doing similar thing. It’s sticking it up is adding that shimmer
and when we combine that with the Waves Vocal Doubler. So, we want it to be pretty subtle. It’s not meant to sound like an obvious
chorus effect unless that’s what you’re going for and that’s fine if you’re using
it creatively. But in this context when we’re just trying
to add a bit of thickness we want it to be quite subtle, so that old trick of brining
up till you hear it and then backing it off until it’s just really nice and subtle. And you just notice it when you’re bypassing
you just kind of notice that something is missing when that plug-in is bypassed. So, now let’s compare with and without all
three, so let’s do this first as solo. So, this is with no reverb, no chorus, no
doubler. And now this is with those effects. So, now the vocal has a lot more body, it
has a lot more warmth to that and we can now start to work with this in the context of
the mix and as we’re shaping the vocal itself we don’t have to rely purely on EQ to try
and add that body. We can now add some top-end to make it sound
brighter whilst keeping that low-end warmth and body. So, let’s do that again in the context of
the mix, so this is without anything. And this is with. So, when you combine those three tricks together
you can really notice that. I often find myself just using one or two
of those. If there’s a particular issue then maybe
you can use all three, but any of those tricks will work if you just want to beef out that
vocal. So, there you go my favorite vocal thickening
trick with that EQed reverb, and then two more quick tricks for making it thick lead
vocal. Of course, there’s so much more that goes
into mixing a lead vocal and I don’t have time to cover it here. You need to make sure after doing this that
you get the EQ right, the automation right, the compression right, delay reverb. So, I put together a free vocal mixing cheat
sheet and if you want to get all of that other stuff right as well as this every single time
then go download that and it’s going to help you to make your mixes and your vocal
sound professional because you can reference it when you’re mixing. It’s completely free. There’s a link in the description or on
screen now. So, go to that page now to get that free PDF. And then, I want to hear from you. Which of these techniques have you used before? Do you find yourself EQing and reverbs or
do you actually rely quite a lot on using a chorus when you’re mixing vocal? Leave a comment below, because I’d love
to hear from you. That’s all from me. I’ll see you again next week and remember
Create Regardless.