Your microphone: When you are using a professional quality mic you shouldn’t need to make any radical EQ & compression changes to get a good sound. If you have the opposite problem and these are too loud, check our Vocal De-essing video. Above 10-12 kHz can add a sense of ‘airiness’. A gentle rising boost here can help to brighten up the sound. Sounds above 8 kHz are mostly associated with fricatives (‘s’, ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘f’ sounds). A little boost in this range can also help to bring the speech out. Most speech/song energy is between 1 to 3 kHz so keeping this range relatively open in the music can really help your vocals to cut through.

Generally it’s best to make minor adjustments in the vocal range (+/- a few dB).

Also don’t forget you can automate (ride) the vocal gain.Įqualization: Unless you are after some radical effect, EQ should be treated with respect (assuming you have a good quality microphone to begin with). Experiment with the Threshold (30% to 70% the amplitude of the peaks), Compression Ratio (between 1.5:1 to 3.0:1) & Gain settings to taste. Compression is one of the most useful tools for achieving a better balance, raising the quiet parts relative to the loud parts, evening out their dynamic range and making them easier to mix. For this reason, vocals can be difficult to sit in a mix without some extra processing. When you turn up the vocal to compensate then the loud sounds can peak and clip your mix or just sound too loud. You can check out the final track at YouTube or discuss it in Looptalk.Ĭompression: Many speech/singing sounds don’t carry a lot of sound energy so they tend to be lost under the music and become difficult to hear. Thanks to C-Note NeSmith for the loan of his project. In this tutorial we look at Compression, Equalization and check out some vocal embellishments.

Record vocals in fl studio