So now we have our dynamics under control, we can move on to EQ. Now if you've seen my masterclass in EQ course, you remember that EQ is either corrective or creative. An example of corrective is that if you have say a boomy or a nasal irritation in your vocal and you want to correct that, maybe you want to cut out the first couple of octaves in a high harmony track, I would call these corrective EQ choices, we're basically trying to fix something now creative EQ, on the other hand, is trying to gently shape the tonal character in order to hide some of the the kind of unflattering parts of the tonal spectrum and maybe elevate some more pleasing neighborhood of frequency. So for example, in my voice, I know that there are neighborhoods of low mids that I produce that you know, I don't particularly like, like a little boost of 10 or 12.

K on the other hand, you know, sounds good on my voice. Now this will change a little from track to track if I'm, you know, singing different registers, of course, but you know, basically that's a good place to start. Let's start off with the lead vocal. We have it soloed. I'll go ahead and bring up the spectral viewer here. So here's our lead vocal is the EQ section here and we'll be able to see what's going on over here.

The greater love was leading, you'll see that your heart to mine, that's the melody right there. And the piece we share. So what's all this other stuff here? Well, if you've ever seen what happens between pure tones and complex tones, a pure tone if I was to, to place a like a sine wave in melody on this track, then you would just see that peak just moving up and down there, but all the stuff above is all of the harmonics that happen in my sinus cavity in My chest in. Basically it everything that makes my voice my voice, you can see that kind of a fingerprint right there was already there. So all the stuff above is all good the stuff below I don't need inside of.

So look at the, the hurts reading over here. Now one note made. I think the lowest layer down on Haiti is I know you've had your share of hurts. So what we're going to do absolutely high pass filter, we can drop that in there. And right over here we can change that and I know that I don't sing much below 80 hertz. So setting that about 80 hertz.

We'll get rid of all that really low rumble let's have a listen along the way. But at the end of the day, you got to trust Someone Let it be me. Interesting thing, whenever I release my voice, it tends to burst around 80 hertz Have you have you seen that listen to the to when I release a note, Look into my eyes and I got an tends to drop a drop around there. It'd be great if I could get that out but that's really where a lot of my lower vocal range will be. So I think 80 hertz is a good place to be in terms of my high pass filter. So what else would I like to do with this vehicle in terms of the EQ or first thing I'll turn it on.

And I have four bands of EQ here to shelving on the top and the bottom and then a low mid and a high mid are sweepable and then a bell shape right here. So to add some presence to my vocals, I typically do Do a number a number of things when I eat you vocals first thing, high pass filter, the first thing I do, then I start going after the air of the vocal which is normally around 12 case like that. So I'll move that up around 1213 K, and we'll give that a little bit of a bump. And then so have a listen to that or AB that by turning that on and off. Here we go. His flat you see is with the top that I'll go wherever you be.

I think I've captured your heart. You can hear it just adds a little bit of shame to that vocal. Next thing I'll go after is what I call the boxiness of my voice and that'll be in the low in the low mids, the kind of the boom Enos of my voice, and if you've ever seen me do any other issue I mean, this is not my my exclusive way of doing things, people been doing this for you know, for generations of our recording. The basically what you want to do is boost that narrow down and sweep around until you get the area that you don't like. So let's have a listen. And then know you got my heart was open and you were willing to believe that Gradle was leading your, your heart and mine and the piece we share yeah right about there is with that amazingly boxy quality is so what I would like to do is I would when I do my cuts, I tend to cut Make it kind of around the mid range in terms of that bell.

And I'll pull out just a few DBS of that sub listen to how that sounds. Ah. Now one No, it might be tough to lay your heart right on the line idea cuz I know you've had your share, and it's a little dull along the way, adding EQ, but at the end of the day, sounds nice. I might go up to some, some high mids as well I normally try to get just a little bit of intelligibility around around one K, which is one K is is dead. So basically the the mid range, so I might bring that around, I don't know, say one K, maybe a little higher. And then see if we can boost that up just just a little and see how that got dressed.

Someone Let it be me. Okay, he saw his flat Look into my eyes and he chewed, you see my saw that I'll go wherever, maybe a little you beat a couple of DBS. I think I've captured your heart and then No, you got my D. Okay, so that's the EQ on our lead vocal, saying that I am seeing all these other parts of the same vocalist. I could copy and paste that EQ across to all of these parts here. Now it will it will change if you know that this part here is the soprano part, then you would make a little bit of change in terms of that high pass filter instead of putting down about 80 hertz, maybe you'll go up an octave to 160 or something like that. Because you know, this vocal here is singing, you know an octave higher than your lead vocal.

So I have no problem copying and pasting across here. If there are some drastic EQs in terms of boosts, I would probably after I copy them over, just maybe pull them down in terms of a gain a little bit across there. But apart from that, I have no problem copy and pasting across with those a couple of provisos in terms of the high pass filter, and then also just easing up on some of those boosts as well. Well, I've copied and pasted that EQ or those EQ settings straight over to these other background vocals here I've changed the the cutoff right here the high pass filter frequency to a little bit higher on the soprano parts about approximately up an octave from 80 hertz to 172. So let's have a listen to these. Look into my eyes and you see that I'll go wherever you be.

I think I've captured your heart. And then No, you got here in context, exam and then no you So now that we have our tracks medicine and cleaned up, we've timed their dynamics done corrective and also creative EQ, let's add a little spice with some time based effects, namely delay and reverb. Now in terms of reverb, if any of you guys are old enough to remember when digital reverbs came on the scene, they were very, very expensive back in the day, and when they became affordable, everybody use them our whole lot. I'm not going to be using a whole lot here because times change and, you know, this is not the 80s when everything was drowning reverb. We tend to be a lot more judicial in terms of adding ambience, but in one thing, I We'll make note of in solo mode, you can, you can quite often hear a fair bit of reverb and it might seem like a lot, but if you place it in the mix, it doesn't sound as as large.

So therefore we're going to be adding some kind of two levels of reverb. I have a room here and also a plate, the room is a lot shorter, it will provide the early reflections and then the plate will provide the longer tail. And so we're listening to our lead vocal here. So we'll first add early reflections with our room. So here we go. You've got my Ah, me wait till there's something with an abrupt end so we can kind of hear that the tail the back end of it.

Okay, here we go. Should be coming up in a sec. There we go. Look into my eyes and that's dry. You see. Second here.

It's kind of like a tiled Van Gogh with a river. And that's certainly your terms of delight of its, I think have captured your heart and know you got my around and listen to a long tail which is provided by a plate here. So here we go. He's dry Look into my eyes and you see that I'll go wherever early reflections you be. Let's see that in the mix. I think I've captured your heart and then no gap Of course you can hear that was brought up a little bit too much.

But you can also hear that I've added a lot longer. Sorry a lot more sense to that longer plate over in my background vocals. If you want to play some further back in the mix, then you can up some of that a little bit might split the difference from what I had before and what I have right now. And let's have a listen to how that sits in the mix. back around the kings in my eyes. You see that you like stopping right on a phrase to hear that tail and how long it is.

Think I've captured your heart That's about right, actually, you know what that pad is kind of messing me up in terms of hearing that probably about a two second decay, that sounds. Now a way to add a little bit of depth to our lead vocal is to add a echo with maybe two or three repeats. On the end. It'll sound corny when you play it here. Let's see, let me turn it on here. And in most da W's, instead of setting this up in milliseconds, you can set it up in a musical interval.

So it will follow the tempo and the echoes will follow you know right on the, on the beats evolution. To this, look into my eyes and, you know, obviously I can hear that right in the mix. So we back that way the heck back until we can't even really hear it. But it just brings a little bit more fullness. So you can't really hear it in context. Maybe I'll split the middle and think I've captured your heart.

Then no. So you hear that there's probably more than that. It's probably four or five there. But in a mix, you can't hear those echoes but it really does bring some distant fullness to to that vocal. Oh god Now speaking of echo, here's, I'd like to drop in a special at the where's the bridge? So the bridge comes up about here.

And I'd like to lay it out an echo of one of these lines here. Let's have a listen. That's just at the right time. So I'd love to echo that particular part. So it says, could it be so right? That you fell into my yard just the right time just at the right time.

So instead of saying That's true, we could actually copy this lead vocal and put it onto a new track. So here's the part of the chorus here and I believe someone who's turn off snap here that just fell into my arms Is that the right so this is probably just the right time here. Let's have a listen. So if I could copy just at the right time, I've already duplicated a track or made a new track down here just called echo. And what we're going to do is just cut right here to right here. I'll turn snap on, and we'll copy that and paste it down.

With snap on, it's going to place it right here. Now, the echo should be probably half a measure. Let's see if that works. Oh, great. Now that level is not there right now. So I would go back here and his echo.

Let's bring that up and see if that's in time it should be in time all this happens because we're snapped and all the edits go to in this case, a half a measure two beats, so the echo should be perfect. Perfect. Now let's mix that and I want to do a little EQ trick on that. So here's what I want to do. I want to bring up a an effect, an EQ effect on this echo to make it sound like it's kind of through an am radio. Now if you remember anything about am radios listening soon there, they were not hi fi that we're really down into a very small band of frequencies around two The four case like that.

So what we're going to do in terms of this EQ on this echo is to really boost those frequencies. And let me see what the frequency is of this. It's two K, that'd be perfect. Let's just crank that up. I'll turn it on at two K, and this is me putting it up to around one K, and will boost that up as well. So because I've done such drastic boosts, I will probably bring this down a little bit here.

And let's hear how this fits in the mix. Whoops, we missed it. Let's go back to my that works Well, there's too much ambience on that. So I'll bring that back. Putting on the crush bus works fine. Let me listen to that.

Now. That sounds good. We could certainly do a high pass filter on that as well. And maybe match that up a little bit. Last listen and I think we should be good. So right.

That's you. Very cool. Sometimes it's kind of a little fun to get a little creative with some of these background vocals. Specifically, if the you're backing vocals are part of a pad and there's a part of the song where it goes mad. Everything that is a lash pad, I wouldn't do this on every one of my songs. But sometimes it's fun to get some of those.

Those pads rhythmically and reason has a really good filter gate that can allow you to in different bands, just get things out. Let me show you how we could use this. If I selected a bunch of these Whoops, I just move that fader if I was to let to select this, and all the way through my background vocals, six here, and if I was to right click here and make a new output bus. What that does is allows instead of these to be going to the left and right bass, but they all can be placed on this. On this kind of a master buss not the master buss, but a master buss, a background buckles that allows you to do a couple of things that allows you to mix your background vocals just with one fader. Rather than blending all of these and keeping these ratios all set, you can move around here.

In fact, let me just play. I've got that looping around that pad section. So not only does it gives you one, click access to mixing your background vocals, but if we were to go over to Iraq here, and this will be different on whatever da w had, but if you can make up a bus and then insert some things across that bus, so I'll show the insert effects here. I'm going to grab my alligator filter gate right here. And that means that this gate, which is actually three gates here, in various bands of EQ You can be randomly open and closed across here and there's a few of these settings here that might work or several listen. I'm gonna sell it so it's preventing the mix.

Now that might be effect that you hate it might affect you like, but things like this where you can some or your background vocals and then do something interesting then you can certainly blend that up. But all of these will be going straight in that so you can't do anything in parallel. But you know, what we can do is we could double that to another one and have one Bus affected and one bus without that to several Listen, I mean, it might be something you use every now and again. somebody gives it kind of a synth light quality when all we're doing is taking all of our background vocals and rhythmically getting them. Okay, so we've done a lot to have vocals done some, some micro editing, tweaks, some pitch correction, compression, gates, EQ and some delay based effects to kind of what I'd say put some icing on the cake.

I feel that I kind of vacillate between the micro and the macro worlds micro in that we can really sweat over the timing of a consonant or lipsmack versus the macro kind of hearing all the parts together. It's really important to do both and it's Back when you're really zeroing in on the one little edit in so I would bring it back in the mix and see whether it's even worth doing that. Anyway, let's finish off our song. Okay, so let's start out from the top of our song, what I typically like doing is listening to the lead vocal and how that's playing against the lead vocal crush. So I will go to the top of the song and I'll just solo those two tracks and hear how they're playing against each other. My predict gait on those as well since the date.

Let me start at the beginning and then put the gate on. See how those those default settings should probably work. Let's see how what happens when the actual vertical start. Two measures go in since the day your heart was no Pam and so I was talking about it that listen listen. Since the day your heart was No Pam, and you are willing to believe the Gradle wisly. Now in context of the mix, that echo is going to work out fine.

Let's listen to it in context your, your heart and mine. So you can't really hear echoed a bit typically when I'm listening to these in so what I'll do is take that echo off, or I could have muted the the master over here but that should work out well. So let's listen to how these play against each other. Now they've been graded and the piece we share, it's already there. Let's assume the crushes that have said before it's on the crush I like to accentuate the tunnel. So that might be a lot of hard drives hop in, but it's so crashed down there and typically when you will really crash signal with a very fast attack, you'll lose a lot of that top end.

So I'm just restoring some of that there. Let's see them both together. Share of Kurtz along the way. But at the end of the day, I'm also listening you gotta trust someone would not well let it be me. Good that's quietening everything down Look into my eyes and you see that I'll go wherever UB think has captured your heart and then no you got my He comes the second verse. I'm sorry, the Solo is going on right now.

So I'll scoot forward a little bit more. When you think about times that I could have across Japan, what were the chances that we both, we both could meet, not just with all the music not playing right now we're really zeroing in on these two. It sounds like that crush is probably a little louder than it should be. But I suspect if we're hearing that in context, it should be fine. Well, we could happen anywhere. Okay, so let's hear some of these paths or go from the top and we're gonna solo all of the vocals and just hear how some of these parts Since the day your heart was open and you were willing to believe the greater love with leading your your heart to mine holding on this here and the piece we share it's already there inside of it is that along the way coming up with no one no it might be to lay your heart right down the line because I know you've had your share of hurts along the way.

Now the day not you got off that we worked on. And actually let's hear how it sounds in the in the verses. Here we go. Look into my eyes and you see right there I'll go wherever you be captured your heart. And then No, you got my great that works. Well let's go to next.

What were the chances bad we both we both could meet so we'll look into my eyes and you see that I'll go around you again That that reverb town might seem like a lot here in solo but in within a mix. That'll sit there fine. I'd normally give that a lot more reverb on the backing vocals than I ever would on the on the lead vocals. I think I've captured your heart and then No, you got you got so right now let me actually hear that in context. Maybe I'll split the difference there. bring that up just a little bit.

Eyes captured your heart. No you got So you can see that I've done a lot of work before I get to this final mix. We started out with just generic levels and then we added some compression and then we added some EQ. Then we added another vocal crush here also added a crash bass on the background vocals there just to add, you know, some more harmonics and just some grit to those backing vocals. A little bit more reverb. added a little bit of echo without an eye, maybe five or seven repeats there rhythmically going in eighth notes, I believe.

Yeah, eighth notes in there. And so when it comes down Oh certainly we did some gating up here. We also remember we went through all of our vocals here and did some, just some generic tuning. We also went in and grabbed individual notes and move them around. We moved the hard consonants of these background vocals around so that when it did that you've got you've got mine all those tees were lined up if you can't learn them up, chop up chop off a few of them so if you have a sick bet six backing vocals here maybe only have to hit the tee, the rest is you got you got mine. I bet you sound Cockney, and Sara Lee cool.

I mean, it's just a way to not have too many there but with this micro editing, you can go in there and just really, really Line them up very well. The next thing I would do, and I didn't hear it in here, because there was so much compression going on, we've really leveled out the peaks and valleys of these performances here. But if there's any particular parts that seem to be a little too loud, in any certain passages, the songs you can start doing some automation, just looking at your da w in terms of that where you can write these fader moves so that when it's if it's a little too loud, you can just stack it down just for half a measure then bring it back up or if it's a little too quiet then you can you can bring it up or that can be done but you know that find the more compression I use, the less I need to do things like that.

You can certainly do that with your backing tracks. I think with this solo, I've ducked that up and down and didn't did some automation there. But now from that, I'm pretty happy with that mix. We ended up doing a pretty good job with when you consider at the beginning You know, I didn't really nitpick over all my vocals, I just led them down the best I could. And it was some post, you can get some really good mixes going. Well, we got through it together.

These are the ways in which you can get great results in producing a killer vocal tracks. Once you really know these best practices, nothing like the, you know, the back of your hand, the best way to elevate your tracks is to do a lot of them, cut as many songs as you can and even pull out maybe some of your old archives if you still have them in multitrack form and try to do a better job now that you know, all of these principles. Now, I don't really think there's any better way to elevate your tracks than to just hit record and produce as many of them as you can. Now by the way, if you really want to push deeper into EQ and compression then I also have master classes on both those subjects at the mass class in EQ and the master class in compression limiters and get in the near future I will be doing one on mixing too so keep an eye out for that one there.

These master classes are designed to really give you the best training, short of spending, you know, 80 grand or whatever at Berkeley or Full Sail University. I really hope that you've enjoyed this one now drop me a line if there ever things you would love a training course on. I'm David, thank you so much for your time. And I will see you on the next one. Ciao for now. Bye bye