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Hello and welcome to this week's tutorial! Today we're going to talk about an interesting technique used by some famous producer, which can be easily replied on our DAW, and that allows us to apply an effect on a track, mantaining all the clarity and the transient of the original sound.
The Wet/Dry/Wet trick it's a variation of the Parallel Processing system (also known as the New York Trick), but the Parallel processing is used mainly for Compression, while this technique is more suited to effect a track with a Delay or similar effects, and it's best suited for a central guitar (such a Lead Guitar), for a Snare Drum or for Vocals.
How does it work?
We have to create TWO mono FX Tracks, (instead of just one, as it happens with Parallel Processing), and to Pan them as much as you want in the stereo field, one left and one right (that's why we need a central instrument).
Now we must load on these two tracks the same effect, for example a Delay and select the amount of effect to be fed on the fx send of out track on a pretty low level: it has to be heard but it must not completely cover our original sound; Equalize the effect track, if needed, to select the frequency range to affect: usually the area that benefits most of Delay is the one that goes from 150hz to 2000hz, if we effect too much the low end, it's gonna become muddy and resonant.
Now comes into play the reason why we created two tracks instead of one: we're going to apply different settings on the two Delays.
This really goes according to the taste, but if they're tempo synced we can for example switch the rhythm of one of them into a polyrhythm (e.g. 5/4), or we can set one delay on quarter notes and one on eight notes, and so on.
Once we have achieved a thick, interesting double layer of delay, it's time to regulate the right amount of effect to feed to our track: remember that our aim is to keep the original dry sound loud and clear and just to apply, underneath, the effect tail, to give it that cutting through, professional, non-soaked effected feel that can be heard on the best productions.
Hello and welcome to this week's article! This tutorial is to be considered as an expansion of the Autotune article, since it shares with this the same basic concepts, but the Vocoder is a little different: Vocoder is the contraction of the two words "voice encoder", and it consists into an algorhitm that takes a sound (usually a voice) and processes it throug a synth, basically morphing it and tuning it on the note chosen by the player, with a keyboard, or writing it on a piano roll Automation (click here for an article about automations).
This effect has been widely used throughout the '70s and '80 by the first electronic music bands, such as Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder, and by some progressive rock band as the Alan Parsons Project, and today the effect is used to give a voice the typical metallic sound of that time.
A Vocoder can be programmed almost the same way an Autotune can be: First we need to create an audio track, which will contain the Vocals we want to effect, then we load into this track's insert the Vst Vocoder. At this point we'll need to create a midi track, choosing the Vocoder as output. Now we can draw on the midi piano roll of this track the notes we want our voice to go through, or we can play them in real time with a midi keyboard.
Here are some cool Vst Vocoder downloadable for free:
Tal Vocoder - an interesting vintage sounding Vocoder
Voctopus - 8 band real time Vocoder with built in synth
Hello and welcome to this week's article! This is the fifth article about modulation effects, and today we're going to talk about ring modulator, octave and harmonizer!
- Ring Modulator: This effect is a sibiling of Tremolo, which, instead of having its amplitude rhitmically altered, it uses a copy of the sound itself very altered, or another sound. Let's make an example: we put on a ring modulator two sounds: the sound of our voice and the sound of a guitar, the effect is like the guitar is "talking" to us, because the effect won't let out the single sounds, but just the "interaction" between them (e.g. Peter Frampton's "Talking Guitar").
- Octave: this one's much easier to explain, it consists into analyzing the input sound and creating a synth copy or more, one octave or more lower. This produces a deeper and more "bassy" sound, like the one that can be heard on Led Zeppelin's song "Fool in The Rain" guitar solo. A particular type of Pitch Shifter that not only works with the octaves, but that alters the sound's pitch widely, even of many octaves, it's the Digitech Whammy pedal, often used by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
- Harmonizer: this is a very particular type of pitch shifting (sometimes it's called intelligent pitch shifter), in which the effect creates a synth copy of the original sound that respects a certain harmonic distance (for example a third major, or a fifth minor...). This effect is often used to process vocals or guitar, and it can be set at a certain scale related with the original sound, or midi-driven, and in this case it can change its scale at a pre-programmed moment. This effect is part of the trademark sound of many guitar players, from Brian May of Queen to Blind Guardian's guitarist Andrè Olbrich.
Unfortunately there are no common basic controls to analyze for these three effects, except for the Mix control, which sets the amount of original signal to leave unprocessed. Then, according to the type of effect, we will have an octave control for the octave, a key control to set the scale on the harmonizer, and a control that will set the shape of the waveform for the Ring Modulator. Some Octave processors for guitar also feature a Distortion control to add some growl to the processed signal.
Today some DAWs already feature some basic Octave, Harmonizer and Ring Modulation Effect, but if you want to try something new and different here's a selection of the best freeware effects available:
Hello and welcome to This week's article! Today we're going to talk about Delays and Echos! These effects are also called Time Based Effects, because they take the first sound and repeat it continuously at a certain rate, as if you were talking inside of a cave, with the reflections of your voice coming back to you on a delayed time, summing up one another.
Although the two terms are today exchangeable since they refer to the same thing, usually with "echo" we refer to the natural phenomenon, while the delay is the implementation of that in the audio effect;
in common language many manufacturers calls "echo" a warmer, more vintage sound, and "delay" a crispier, more digital sounding effect.
Delay is an effect born in the '50s by recording a sound on a tape and playing it continuously to simulate an echo (the famous "Tape Echo"), but today it is a very common tool featured on pedalboards and racks of virtually any guitar player in the world; the two guitarists that probably own more of their trademark sound to this effect are Robert Fripp of King Crimson and The Edge, from U2 (which is famous for his riffs that are often exclusively based of the layers of delay).
Delay is the basic modulation effect, from which descends almost all of the other modulations: Chorus, Flanger and Reverb are consequences of applying particular settings to a delay, but there is also another use of a extreme settings applied to this effect: the looper.
A looper is a delay which records long phrases of an instrument, up to several seconds (e.g. a guitar riff) and set them in loop, so that for example a guitar player can play a solo above that base.
The most common and specific uses for a delay are the Doubling Echo, the Ping-Pong delay and the Slapback Echo.
Doubling Echo: Is used to create a sound that feels like the original instrument has been doubled by a second one, and to do this the delay time must be very short: 10 to 50 milliseconds.
Slapback Echo: instead is a longer delay effect (75 to 250 milliseconds), and was often used in the '50s records to underline the main vocals, and later in the '80s it's been used on synths and percussions too, to produce creative rhythmic textures.
Today Delay is often syncronized to the metronome of our Daw, to ensure that its repetitions are perfectly in sync with the song, but if we want to make the repetitions to cut through without being overshadowed by the other rhythmic elements of the mix it's suggestable to use the same metronome but with different beats, for example triplets, or a 5/4 rhythm; the delay will still be "on the click", but the repetitions will be noticed more.
Ping-Pong Delay: a particular type of stereo delay that "bounces" the repetitions (sometimes called "Taps") from left to right, sometimes it has been used by Jimi Hendrix and Brian May from Queen, among the others.
Here are the most common controls found on Delays and Echos:
Length (time) - The delay of the repetition in ms (thousandths of a second)
Length (musical) - The length of the repetition in beats (e.g. 1/8 note)
Feedback - How much of the delay output is fed back into the input of the effect.
Wet/Dry (sometimes these two controls are fused on a single control called "Mix") Wet - The amount of processed signal in the output. Dry - The amount of unprocessed signal in the output.
Lowpass filter - A filter, which filters out from the repetitions the frequencies ABOVE this value.
Hipass filter - A filter, which filters out the frequencies BELOW this value.
Today most DAWs already feature some basic Delay and Echo Effect, but if you want to try something new and different here's a selection of the best freeware Delay and Echo Vst:
Readelay, a one of the most used free delays around, very versatile and professional
Hello and welcome to This week's article! Today we're going to talk about Modulation Effects, focusing on the Chorus Effect. Modulation effects are filters that takes a given signal and creates a copy, with a given delay and pitch modification, to be summed with the original one, creating a wide range of different results. The Chorus effect is an effect that can enrich remarkably a sound: it doubles the sound creating a slighly delayed (usually around 20ms) copy whose delay will not be stable but will keep on variating, oscillating 5ms more and less, plus the copy's pitch is slighly detuned, giving the impression that the copy is (in case of a Vocal track) another person singing along with the first one: not identical, but very similiar, and this effect is used to make the original sound wider and fatter. This effect was particularly used in the mid '80s, for Vocals and guitar solos, in order to add more character and make them sound more metallic.
The Chorus' most common controls are:
Depth: This control sets the depth of the effect: the higher the value is, the deeper will be the oscillations. Basically it's the Chorus' intensity.
Rate: This one sets the effect cycle, which is the speed of the Rhythmic detunings, from very slow (less than a cycle per second), if we set it to 0, to very fast (rarely used), if we crack up the control.
Feedback: This control refers to the process of feeding back a part of the effected sound on the input of the effect itself, therefore we decide how much chorus will be sent a second time through the effecting process: this will lead to a much more effected result, good for creative uses.
Pre-delay: This control lets us choose after how many milliseconds from the original sound the effect will activate. A higher value will make the chorus to intervene after a longer time, allowing the original sound to be heard uneffected before it starts affecting it, while if we set it to 0, the effect will engage immediately.
Level: This one sets the mixing level of the Chorus with the original sound: a higher value will lead to a higher wet-to-dry ratio.
Most of DAWs already features a Chorus effect, but if you want to try some cool vst downloadable for free here's our suggestions:
OrangeChorus: one of the best free Chorus Vst Around, very simple.
After we've seen what is a Reverb and which are the different types of reverb available, it's time to take a look at the most common controls featured on the majority of the Vst reverbs, like the ones suggested on the First Part of our Reverb article.
There are LOTS of controls on the most recent Reverbs, allowing us to tweak any single detail of the effect, but the most important controls that will help us on our mixing phase are basically four:
- LENGHT: often called Decay, or Reverb time, or with other names, is basically the "Tail" of our effect. The longer this value is, the bigger the "room" will be, ranging from a "shower-like" ambience to a cathedral, up to the most psychedelic space effects. This will be the core control of our effect.
- PRE-DELAY: is the amount of time that will pass before the effect will be applied to the signal. I.e.: if the Pre-delay is 1 second long, the effect will begin affecting the audio track one second after it's started. This aspect is crucial to control the Transient of our sound: if the reverb start affecting a sound with a fast Transient such a Snare drum too early, it will smoothen it up and push it towards the background of the mix. Increasing the Pre-Delay value, instead, will give to the attack of our snare drum the time to leave its Transient unaffected, thus mantaining its place in the mix, and will give it a pleasant Reverb tail that will begin-some place in the middle of the wave.
- STEREO SPREAD: controls how the reverb will be reflected on our virtual room: the higher the value, the more the reverb will reflect widely on the soundstage, and it's used usually to spread the Upper-Mid frequencies. This control can be used in Mono tracks as well as in the stereo ones, just beware not to overdo with it, as it can create some weird resonance or Eq-Masking problems with the other tracks.
- EQUALIZATION - FILTERING: a solution for the above mentioned Eq-Masking problem is to Equalize the Reverb. Many producers tend to roll off or just High Pass the region from the Low Mids down, starting from around 300hz or less, to preserve headroom and avoid the Reverb Tail to mask the other instruments, since the Mid Lows, and Lows area is the "Mud Area", so the clearer the sound is, the better, unless we don't want a specifically dark sound.
Now that we have found the right setting for our Reverb (typically starting from a preset and tweaking the four basic parameters we have analyzed), we have created a "virtual room" where to put our single tracks in order to make them sound like the musicians are playing together in the same ambient. So like we've already seen on the First Part of this tutorial the idea is to create an FX track, load the Reverb there, Equalize the track, if we feel like we need it, and send it to the single instruments. Then, via the WET/DRY control of each track, we decide the amount of effect to be sent: for example, a little more on the Vocals and the Toms, a little less for the Snare, even less or none for the Guitars.
There is also a final use for our Reverb: the Mastering Reverb. This is to be used only in rare occasions, when our mix is too Dry and thin, and we need to add it a little bit of fullness or realism. It is used especially on electronic or pop songs, where almost every instrument is sampled, so everything may sound a little bit too artificial and harsh. The settings of the reverb should be low, the Wet/Dry ratio set low as well, and it's a good idea to add a high pass filter around 2000hz to avoid reverbering the vocals sibilance, and a low pass filter from 100hz down. Do some test bypassing the effect and turning it on again, to see if it's really useful, but be careful: it can really ruin the mix if overused!
Today we're going to talk about how to use Reverb when mixing!
Everybody knows what reverb is, it's the persistence of a sound that we create, as it reflects into an ambient. Fewer knows how to use it properly, as in a mix reverb is one of devil's favourite tools to create mud and make details disappear. It could take a whole book just to describe everything about Reverb and its various uses, but today we will see only its function in the mixing phase, which is to let the single tracks to sit better in the mix and to smoothen a bit the Transient, making it a bit less "In Your Face", letting it "breathe" a little more.
First off, there are different kinds of reverb, the most importants of which are:
- Hardware Reverbs: This kind of reverb, such as Plate Reverb or Spring Reverb, was used on the early studios, and are based on the physical reflection of the signal, sent on a resonant ambient and taken back with a magnet or microphone. Today, Spring Reverb, for example, is still featured as a built-in effect on some vintage guitar amplifier, and there are many Vst emulators, such as the free Spring Reverb Type 4. A good example of Spring reverb can be found on many songs played by Jimi Hendrix.
- Studio Reverbs: Those are digital or transistor reverbs, that have been increasingly used since the mid '80, with the advent of digital rack fx processors, and are known for their cleanliness and linearity. Today studio reverbs are still used because they do not colour the original sound too much and are very versatile: they can be used with very low settings too, for example to add some depht and room even in the Mastering Phase, after the Compressors, in the mastering chain. Some good free Vst of this kind are: DxReverb Light, Magnus Ambience, Voxengo OldSkoolVerb, EpicVerb.
- Ambience Reverbs: Those are the reverbs that tries to recreate a real ambient, and are used mainly on single instruments (especially with sampled drums, or guitar Amp Simulators, DI Bass, and all those situations where you don't have a microphoned sound, so there is no natural ambience on your mix), in order to have a more cohesive sound, as if all the instruments were played in the same room. Today, ambience reverbs are often Convolution Impulse reverbs, which are reverbs based on the real response of a reverb captured by a microphone. We have already seen them applied on Guitar Amp Simulators on This Article, but impulses can be successfully used for any instruments. A great free convolution impulse reverb plugin is SIR.
The ideal useof reverb when mixing is on a Fx Track, so we can use a single reverb instance with a sound that will be coherent through all the instruments of our mix: this will have the double positive side of giving to the listener the pleasant feeling that the instruments are played live on the same room at the same time, and will reduce the CPU load, since reverbs are some of the worst "CPU hogs" among all plugins. As we've seen of the Fx Tracks dedicated article, with a reverb loaded on this track we can send the effected signal to the single tracks, as many as we want, using the same effect instance and adjusting the amount of effect to be sent to the single tracks via the WET/DRY control of each track: this way we can decide for example to send more reverb to the Vocals track, and less to the Toms tracks, or to the Snare; 100% Wet means that the track is completely effected, while the Dry percentage is the amount of signal unaffected by the reverb.
Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about how to correct the pitch of vocals, or any other instrument. These pitch correction tools are usually plugins that takes a wave sound and drag it as it was a midi sample, higher or lower on the piano roll in order to match the correct note you need.
In the last few years the technology has been developed in order to limit the inevitable degradation of a sound that is pitch shifted, especially when applied the vocal parts, which are the ones where the pitch correction is more noticed: today the pitch correction is blended with the introduction of a synth line almost inaudible right below the vocal, in order to help it to sound more "in tune".
Obviously the pitch correction part should be seen as a "last resort", to use only if you notice, before starting the mixing phase, that there are some errors that cannot be recorded again, but that at the same time are too big to not be noticed, and that risk to ruin the song. First off let's say that auto tuning tools works fine only with clean, monophonic sounds: any kind of background noise, or rasp vocals, or distorted sound may be misinterpreted by the algorithm and lead to mistakes. It's also suggestable to process the vocal parts without sibilant letters (s), and the guitar - bass parts where there are no slides-bendings.
There are two types of autotuning tools:
1) Automated Pitch Correctors: These are the kind of tools, such as Antares Autotune, or the free Gsnap and Kerovee, where you can choose the key of the song and other parameters, and let the plugin to automatically slide the wave on the piano roll, in order to match in real time the scale used on the song. It's a good thing not to leave it activated for the whole song, but to Automate it in order to be switched on only when needed, and turned off when unnecessary. It is also possible to create a MIDI track and route the plugin on it in order to manually decide the pitch as it was a regular synth, in facts today the industry standard is using Autotune manually, line by line, in Graphic Mode.
2) Pre - Scanning Pitch Correctors: These plugins, such as Waves Tune and Celemony Melodyne, works by pre-scanning the track and creating a "MIDI-like" version of the track itself inside their interface, so that you can use real-time autotuning (like an automated pitch corrector), or correct the pitch manually without creating an external midi track. Offline working (which means "not in real time") takes more time and efforts, but usually leads to a better result, since it leaves to you the decision of which single syllable (or even part of it) to be processed and which not. With the best Pre - Scanning pitch correctors, such as Melodyne, it's also possible to modify the single notes of a chord of an Acoustic Guitar, for example, just like a Midi file.
The famous/infamous "Cher effect" present on the song "Believe" has been obtained by forcing the vocals through wrong scales, or manually writing notes for the voice in order create that unnatural-sounding "glitch" (obviously in this case it has been an arrangement choice, but sometimes it's just a pure error).
In conclusion, regardless to the kind of plugin you may choose, autotuning should be used with extreme caution, only when impossible to record again, and only for the single parts that really needs it, since often is better to hear a more natural interpretation, although not perfectly in tune, than the "Midi-sounding" voice that sometimes can be heard, even on commercial songs. The risk is to have a completely flattened and lifeless voice, altough perfectly in tune :)
Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Automations in Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo.
An Automation is a system which will memorize and playback the whole variations we make, applied to the different parameters of the mixboard: volume, Panning, Eq, effect level, etc
Do you want the volume on your lead guitar to raise on a certain point of the song?
Or the volume of lead vocals to raise a little during the chorus in order to make it stand out more?
Well it's not a difficult task, let's see how to do it :)
I'm using the Cubase/Nuendo interface as an example, but the same mechanism can be applied on most of the recent DAWs.
In each channel of our virtual mixer there are (among the others) two buttons: W (Write) and R (Read):
we can press W, then playback the song and modify in real time any parameter of our song (for example the volume fader, or the settings of some plugin, e.g. an Equalizer), then we stop the song, and disable the W button, so that only the R button is on (this button must stay always enabled, if we disable it, the channel will ignore any automation set so far);
now if we playback the same part, we will see the parameters modify automatically exactly as we did in the "writing" mode.
This is the way to set manually in real time the automation, but we can also just write it (or modify an automation already created in real time) pressing the "+" button on the channel:
this way we will be able to see all the settings of the channel, automated and not automated.
Using the "Pencil" tool, we can now create new automations or modify/correct the ones we've already done, by creating points and moving around the lines between these points, for example if we create a "slope" line on the "Volume" parameter, we can create a Fade Out effect.
Practice around to discover all the various parameters you can automate!
- Addictional Awesomess: Usually on a project the tempo is set to "Fixed" (you can see it on the Transport Bar), which means that the metronome is set for just one speed for the whole project, but what happens if we want to use one single project for more than one song, just using the same channels, and the two songs uses a different tempo?
Or what happens if we just want to throw in a tempo change inside a single song?
How can we tell the DAW to change the metronome tempo from a certain measure on?
Well, there is an Automation for this too :)
Click on "Fixed" to change it to "Track", and press CTRL+T to open the "Tempo Track".
This will open a timeline where, using the Pencil tool, we can create points, in order to change the tempo on a certain point of the project, so ad example, once the song 1 is finished, for example, at the measure n.200, we can change the tempo here in order to have the right click for the song 2, from the measure n.201 on.
We can also create "ramps" of metronome, in order to give a "speeding up" or "slowing down" effect, that will obviously affect all the other plugins and virtual instruments, especially the Delay speed and the Drum Sequencers!
Another interesting feature of Steinberg products it's the "Musical Note" icon featured on Midi tracks: if it is engaged, if we change metronome, all the notes in the piano roll will be quantized according to the new tempo, if it is disengaged instead (it becomes a grey clock icon), the grid will change, but the notes will remain where they were.
Hello and welcome to this week's tutorial! Today we're going to talk about how to use Group channel tracks and FX Channel tracks on your DAW. We'll use as example the standard Cubase / Nuendo interface (two of the most commonly used DAWs), but the same mechanism can be applied to almost every other DAW. The idea is to avoid applying the same effects to every channel we need, thus losing time, cpu and ram usage, and to have a cleaner and easier-to-mix interface, by creating groups of channels that shares the same effects chain, using just a single effect instance, applied to more than one channel.
- Group Channel Tracks: just click to Project->Add Channel->Group Channel Track (stereo, if you're not going to route on it just mono instruments, or you wish to use stereo effects like the "ping pong" delay, or you want to pan the single stereo instruments on different positions), name it as you want (for example "Rhythm Guitars", or "Lead Vocals") and then select on the Output Routing of each channel you want to route into this Group channel track, the name of the Group Channel Track we've just created. Now that we have all the desired tracks routed on our Group Channel Track, we will notice that if we Mute or Solo the Group channel track, all the single routed tracks will be affected, and the same will happen moving the volume fader, or creating Automations. Obviously on the "insert" section of this Group Channel we'll be able to put any effect, for example a reverb or a compressor, and it will be applied to all the tracks passing through this channel. You can also route a Channel Group (i.e. cymbals) into another Channel Group (i.e. Whole Drumset), but only if the last channel group (i.e. Whole Drumset) is created for last; for some reason in facts, if you create a new channel group and try to send it into an older one, on some DAWs this will not be possible.
- Fx Channel Tracks: these tracks are not whole channels, but just simple effect chains (or FX buss) that can be sent to the "effects loop" (send/return) of all the single tracks we want, choosing the amount of it to be sent to each track (which can't be done with a Group Channel track). Let's click to Project->Add Channel->Fx Channel Track (stereo, for the same reason explained above). Let's name the track the way we want (i.e. Vocals), and this will create another Channel called Fx Channel, with all of the classic inserts, where we can load all the effects we need, for example a Reverb (but obviously we can choose more than just one effect). Now, if we open the tracks we need to be effected, in this case our vocal tracks, we can load in the "Fx Sends" section the FX Channel Track we've just created. In order to choose the amount of effect to be applied on this track, we will move the volume fader just below the slot in the "Fx Sends" section of the track; the orange button above the slot selects if this FX buss is applied Pre Fader or Post Fader. If it's On, the effect is post fader, so the amount of effect applied in not modified by the track fader: the effect is sent as the fader is always set on 0db. Now we must send this FX track on the "FX send" slot of all the tracks we want it to be applied, and we're done :)
- Additional Awesomeness - Linking Channels: From the Mixer Interface (just press F3), hold the Ctrl button and select more than one channel to have them selected at the same time, then right click on one on those and choose "Link Channels": from now if you Mute, Solo or change the volume on one channel, this will affect all the linked ones. If you want to modify just one of the linked channels without removing the link between them, you can do it by holding the Alt button, this way the change will affect only the select channel. In order to remove the link, just right click on one of the linked channels and choose "Unlink Channels".
In this tutorial I'm going to explain my way to record vocals. I'm not saying it's the best method, it's just the one I have chosen after severeal experiments, but I'd LOVE to hear comments, feedback and opinions from you! First off import vocals on your DAW, or record them (possibly with a decent preamplifier and/or decent good interface-mixer) dry, with an antipop filter in front of the microphone, in order to reduce explosive "p" and "t" sounds.
Once you have the vocal tracks recorded at the right level (the signal must not be too low nor too loud to minimize data loss), and the proper Editing and Autotuning (if needed) is done, the first vst to put on the insert chain (or bus, according to the number of vocal tracks you have and how fast is your computer's cpu) is a DE ESSER, a plugin to remove the "hiss" frequencies from your vocal track (SPITFISH is a great free vst de esser, for example). This plugin is needed if there is a sibilance problem, that cannot be solved by changing mic or moving the singer sliglhy back from the mic. After you've found the right frequencies to remove, it's time to insert a COMPRESSOR, and there are many free HERE, so just try some and choose, the functionality are basically the same for all of them. If you want to use the KJAERHUS compressor we've already seen, for example, you could set a 5:1 ratio (adjustable from 4:1 to 8:1), a fast attack (often as fast as possible), a medium release (around 0,5 seconds) and then adjust the treshold in order to activate it at the right time, like in this picture:
After the compression you'll need an EQUALIZER (for example the NYQUISTEQ), and luckily most of DAWS have one, so you can retouch some frequencies, but this is really variable according to the kind of vocals, so it's hard to suggest the right frequencies to modify. First off remember that subtractive eq is always better than additive eq, anyway you might want to filter off some of the useless frequencies below 80/100hz, reduce a few db (like -2,5) around 200hz, and boost a little (+2,5db) around 2500hz, which is the main frequency area the human ear captures, and it helps to put the vocals even more at the centre of attention. If you feel that the signal is too weak (because of the poor microphone, or of the lacking of a decent preamplifier), this is the place where to add a TAPE SATURATOR, like the JSMAGNETO, to thicken the sound a little bit before passing to the effect phase. Talking about effects, someone uses delay and reverb, some just one of them, personally I prefer to use just the DELAY (click here for a dedicated article with free plugins). The ideal would be to create an FX BUSS where to put the delay and then to send it to the various vocal tracks, so you can adjust the right dry/wet signal ratio for every track, but this time we're just going to add it to the vocal insert chain (click here to see a dedicated article on how to use an FX Buss), and set it with a short delay (100ms) and a short feedback, in order to make it sound more like a reverb, but without that "ambient" feel.
In order to give the vocals a bit more "room", to make them sit better in the mix, we can also add a short REVERB, to give them a less "in your face" position, possibly on a FX channel track to make it less "Cpu Hungry", but this choice is optional. The reverb recommended setting is with a decay time of around 3 seconds and a Pre Delay of 50ms.
The last thing to do is to CLEAN UP your sound of breath and other various noises recorded before the beginning and after the end of each take, and you can just cut them away, or make those takes to fade in and fade out.
Sometimes it's also a good idea to put a LIMITER at the end of the chain, not to squeeze the sound (for this task we have already used a Compressor) but just to set a threshold, to make sure the vocals will stay on their place and will not consume headroom later, on the Mixing and the Mastering phase.
Additional awesomeness:
If you want to add an interesting effect that thickens up your vocals and gives them a cool "chorus" effect without using an actual chorus, just copy the vocal take into a new track, apply the same effect chain and then add a pitch shifter at the end of the second track. Put "semitones" to zero and change the variable "cents" to -20, to create a track just slighly different, and mix between the two tracks to give your vocals a cool effect that works really well with clean singing.
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