Even still, knowing how to dial in the correct attack and release parameters in balance with your threshold is a tough act to master. One compressor will catch the transients whilst another does smooth leveling. Cascaded compression is a method that uses two or more compressors and spreads the work between different processors. Compressionīeing too aggressive with compression is another reason your vocals don’t sound radio-ready. By using dynamic EQ vs just making cuts we can preserve the natural feel and tone of the vocal, yet still reign in on nasal, boxy, harsh, and generally bad moments in the performance. Once you’ve deciphered the bands you want to make cuts at, dial in a negative range and threshold to taste. Doing this will make you aware of frequencies that are causing problems and could lead to bigger issues further down the line. Then engage solo mode on F6 and sweep through that band. Start by applying a tight Q value to each individual band, this allows your ear to focus on fine nuances as opposed to large regions where problems might not be as apparent. By using F6 we can home in on individual bands and solo them to listen for resonant frequencies. Waves F6Ī great solution in this scenario would be to use a dynamic EQ, like Waves F6. It can be tricky to decipher where problematic frequencies are if you haven’t got years of experience behind you. You need to make decisions based on the performance the vocalist and microphone have captured. Copying another engineer’s EQ decisions will more than likely make your vocal sound worse. When it comes to EQ there can be a lot of misleading information available.
If that sounds too good to be true then read on… EQ What you want is a simple vocal chain that isn’t destructive to the original audio but still tames problematic frequencies and smoothes out the dynamic range. Making drastic cuts and boosts can be counterintuitive and are these problems only become worse as we introduce more signal processing.
Something all too common in vocal processing is overcomplicating the vocal chain. Crafting great pop vocals can sometimes feel like a monumental task.