Your Vocals are TOO LOUD (Amateur Mix Fix)

[Music] hello everybody dylan pines here with musician on a mission today i've got another mix trick for you today we're talking about one of the most common calling cards of amateur mixes that i see as a teacher and that is a vocal mix that is too loud it's basically where people send me tracks i listen to them and i'm like yeah you know the vocals they sound great but i can't hear the rest of the instruments it's out of whack why is that well the reason is because most professional mixes don't actually have the volume of that vocal very high but they have created the illusion of loudness by completing three simple tasks creating brightness creating consistency and getting rid of masking we're going to be talking about those three things throughout this video but before we get started i want to let you know we are giving away a free bonus for today giving away our entire treasure trove of mixing cheat sheets these are the things that we've been designing for years now their stuff on eq and compression and mixing vocals and reverb and all different types of things there is absolutely something in there that will be helpful for you so if this is something that you would like go ahead and click the link on screen or down in the description below to get your own free personal access i really do think you're going to like it so with that out of the way i want to show you what i'm talking about before we get into these three tasks so i've got a song here called will by an artist named jq just a mix that i'm working on and i want to kind of play this vocal mix and i'm going to start by playing it with all of my processing off and then i'm going to add my processing and you're going to hear a big jump in volume but i want to let you know now i haven't changed the volume fader at all nor have i turned up the volume in any of these plugins other than just regular old gain staging you are getting an illusion of loudness and it's part of the reason that the mix around it sounds so good and silver demons on your every word i'm leaning dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing scenic it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that i haven't you can see it just vanished all of a sudden it sounded so much quieter and all i've done is done these three tasks i've created brightness i've created consistency and i've gotten rid of masking so let's talk about these so when i say creating brightness what i mean is using an eq and making sure that what i've got going on up here is actually making the vocal sound closer to the listener this is probably an eq curve not this stuff so much this is just for tonal stuff but up here in the upper mids in the in the top end it's probably an eq curve you've seen before it's pretty common in vocal mixing and the reason for this is that the human ear actually perceives sounds that are brighter as being closer to the listener so what that means is that we can take advantage of that we can make something seem closer seem louder without actually turning the volume up and this allows us like i said to get a mix where both the instruments and the vocals are loud i'm not having to sacrifice one for the other so let me show you a before and after on this and you're going to hear the brightness that i'm talking about i'm leaning dreaming one day of the goals that you gave me i'd be achieving the view from hearing it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that is it subtle absolutely it doesn't need to be anything but subtle but it does feel like it's just inching a little bit closer to the actual listener so looking at this next task creating consistency what do i mean by that well what i'm talking about is compression right i am wanting to turn the loud sounds down and the quiet sounds up the reason that i want to do this is that vocals are probably the most dynamic instrument that we typically deal with there could be a note that is 12 dbs louder than the note before it and it's not really that uncommon it happens all the time now that makes setting a volume balance very difficult because you might set a volume balance where the loud notes feel perfectly balanced but everything beneath it feels well you just lose it you lose it in the context of the mix and to get a professional vocal sound you need to make sure that you can hear every single word so one thing i will say there's a lot of different ways that you can do compression there's a lot of different combinations of settings that create different sounds and i'm not really here today to cover all of that so whenever i talk about using compression i'm talking about consistency compression or leveling compression basically it just means a fast attack a slow release and a high threshold the ratio can be set wherever you want i'm just wanting to grab those loud notes have the compressor stay on throughout the note and then let go and if i do serial compression which you can see i've done i've got two different compressors one after another that helps to massage those loud notes down even more so that i have consistency so let me show you a before and after so we'll start with after but guidance over demons on your every word i'm leaning dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving you from hearing it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that i haven't seen it i just pray i don't get caught up cause things on earth be deceiving trying to get right before i leave it but all these feelings brought up i ain't trying to keep repeating again you could hear that every single time i turned those compressors off it just felt like it faded into the background and you can see on here i was only ever getting two or three dbs of compression at a time i wasn't getting massive amounts or anything like that now i did do serial compression you know i did add a second compressor after this with the same settings but a slightly lower threshold but ultimately what that means is that i ended up getting probably somewhere between four and six dbs of compression but you can't really hear a tonal difference that's the important part of getting consistency compression right stuff feels like it fits in the mix but no tonal changes actually happen it's clean so this is something that i'll do on top of gain automation volume automation other layers of compression that are achieving other goals kind of like these two which are both achieving some glue between my lead vocals and my doubles as well as uh you know mixbus compression and stuff along the lines of that so now that we've created brightness and we've created consistency now we need to do our third task getting rid of masking so if masking is a concept that you're unfamiliar with it's basically an audio phenomena a physics phenomena where the perception of one sound is affected by the presence of another sound so when two sounds are played at the same time if they both have similar tones they've got a similar amount of frequency energy in the same parts of the frequency spectrum they are going to mask each other and what that means is that i'm going to hear one sound tonally different simply because of the existence of this other sound now if this is sounding kind of textbooky let me break it down with an example let's say we have two different instruments a piano and a guitar and those two different instruments are playing two separate parts it's not gonna be very difficult to hear those two instruments distinctly right you're gonna be able to tell there's a piano there's a guitar but let's say that those two instruments were playing the exact same part same octave same range same tone all the same stuff well if you play them at the same time your perception of their tone is going to be skewed you're actually going to hear these two parts as sounding different than you would hear them in solo basically it's going to be harder to tell the two parts apart from each other they're going to blend into each other and in some cases that's what we want we want instruments to blend with each other but in other cases when we really want to make sure that we can hear one distinct part apart from all of the other instruments that's something that we don't want and that is absolutely the case with vocals we don't want other instruments masking our vocals we want to hear the vocals loud and clear so this is something that you're going to fix with an eq and it's something that you don't do on your vocals you'd actually do it on everything else what i like to do is known as the mute button method so i'll go through my mix and i will one by one mute different instruments and i'm not actually listening to that instrument i'm listening to the vocal i'm trying to tell is the vocal suddenly louder is it suddenly am i able to hear it better all of a sudden if not then there's no masking going on they're not fighting for the same space but if there is that i have now found an instrument that i need to grab an eq and start making some cuts so i'm going to show you how to do that it's really simple i'm going to go down to my keys and my strings see if we can find something around in here and you're just going to see me go one at a time and dream and one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing it takes work to believe okay the piano sounded fine you know the vocals didn't really pop forward that much so not any masking issues don't need to worry about it okay now let's check out the main keys on your every word i'm leaning dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing scenic it takes work to believe it suddenly the vocals popped forward just a little bit more so i know that i need to make some cuts in the main keys okay now i want to check out the strings over here dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that i haven't seen it i just that went away and it was just suddenly like the vocals just sped forward in the mix so i definitely have a problem with my strings i'm going to want to go i'm going to want to grab an eq i'm going to want to grab a band and just sweep it around just sweep it around while i'm playing both the strings and the vocals and again i'm not listening to the strings i'm listening to the vocals and i'm trying to find the spot where it is the hardest to hear the vocals that is where the masking is happening so let me do exactly that but god and silver demons on your every word i'm leaning dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that i haven't seen it i just pray i don't get caught up cause things on her be deceiving trying to get right before i leave it right there it's the hardest to hear the vocals in that one spot so i know great that's where i need to be making some cuts now how deep you cut is totally up to your mix how wide you cut is totally up to your mix it's going to depend on the type of instrument on where it was recorded how it was recorded all that junk so i'm just going to turn it down a little bit we'll see if it your every word i'm helps dreaming one day all the goals that you gave me i be achieving the view from hearing it takes work to believe it even more work to conceive it just trust that yeah that already popped forward just a little bit and if i'm able to take out a little bit here a little bit there in different instruments a little is going to go a long way so those are your three tasks creating brightness in the vocal creating consistency in the vocal and getting rid of masking with all of the other instruments in the mix there is one final bonus tip that i'm going to give you and it deals with how you do your volume balancing so whenever you're doing your volume balancing most people will just turn all their faders down you know all the way to zero and then they'll start bringing in one instrument at a time maybe the kick maybe the snare maybe the keys you know and then maybe the vocal and one thing that a lot of people do which makes total sense based on everything we've been talking about is they'll set the level of that vocal way too loud because it's where it feels good at that moment with no processing but now that you've watched this video you know that you are going to be creating perceived loudness you are going to be a magician you're using sleight of hand to convince someone that a particular instrument is louder than it actually is so what i would recommend you do set your vocal level and then take it down a few dbs because it's probably too loud in comparison to where it's going to be after you've done all of your processing so even though when you do that the vocals will sound too quiet that's totally okay that's part of the game that's going to force you to create this perceived loudness it's going to force you to create the illusion that will make it easier for you to do masking you're going to have to be more aggressive with your cuts it's going to make it easier to create brightness and create consistency because it'll be harder that's the crazy thing is because it's harder the end result is better because it's harder it's easier to get something great so that's going to about wrap it up for me don't forget we are giving away our free collection of mixing cheat sheets if you are interested in this and i i really think that you would get a lot out of it go ahead and click the link on screen or down in the description below we've got stuff on all different topics of mixing there's definitely something in there for you and if you're new to this channel please like and subscribe we make tips and tricks and tutorials just like this one every single week on this channel and we would really love to help you grow so that's gonna be it for me this has been dylan pines with musician on a mission and remember create regardless [Music] you

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 124,646

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, home studio, home recording, amateur mix fix

Id: XWskyKzGvpc

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021