vocal compression?

A

alevy

New member
how much of db. difference should there be between the highest point and low points on vocals.. rap vocals? and how high should you allow it to go. i have been trying to keep my vocals between -3 and -6 but sometimes they drop lower then that but never higher then -3. is this a good practice?
 
I think you should squash the crap out of them until there's absolutely no volume deviation whatsoever between loud and soft parts. And they should be pegged -- in the red at all times, with lots of harmonic-rich digital distortion. That would be pretty cool.

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Look man, do you really want them bitches eatin' that chrome, or what? :D

No bitch will want anything to do with your chrome unless you get those meters pegging in the red.

That's all I'm saying.

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Haha, chess you're an ass, haha. Just don't let them go red and you'll be fine. Stick in the neighborhood your at, I see nothing wrong with that. And the vocals can go as soft as you want really...as long as you can still hear them. If it sounds good to you, then do it.
 
Hey, I'm just going by what he said in his song on his myspace site.

You mo' fuckers better leave me alone. Man yo' bitches won't be happy till they eatin' that chrome.

This guy's pretty good. He's "got the hood on smash." And his car is really good on gas, too. Seriously, I don't normally like rap, but I get a kick out his stuff. I have no idea why he's asking us how much he should compress his vocals :D ... but his stuff is pretty cool.

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are there genrally any rules as to where a lot of make up gain is too much?
on the ren compressor in waves theres a part of the plug that says attenuation (gain reduction), should i be setting the make up gain for the peak or more like the average of gain reduction? i dont know i clear i made it sound but if any of you guys use waves hopefully you understand me. :D
 
alevy said:
O and the eating my chrome i was referring to a gun.
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That's nice. I love giving recording advice to people who advocate and/or glamorize the use of deadly weapons within the lyrics of their "music."

It makes me feel like I've done a service to society. So for what it's worth ... what you want to do is push the makeup gain until you start seeing a whole bunch of red. That's the only rule in this.
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thats funny... just go back and listen to the context of how it was used with in that hook. i simply said leave me alone unless you want me to go that extent (eating that chrome). i dont advocate or glamorize drugs or killing in my music sir. :) of course to the ears of a person who isn't a hip-hop fan it would appear to be that way. because frankly you probably dont understand shit im talking about anyway.

sooo you said push it until it goes into the red? okay sure :cool:
 
Man Alevy this was a perfectly reasonable question and it seems you 've been given a hard time because you mensioned that it was for rap vocals... that pisses me off.

Ignore these knobs!

When you are compressing your vocals, the peak volume will be reduced. The makeup gain is for bringing the overall level back up.
Before compressing the vox too much, record an automated volume in your daw for that track so that the quiet parts are ate the desired volume etc. then compress after this. Hopefully this will give you more control over the vocal levels without over compressing them and making them sound shitty
 
chessrock said:
Hey, I'm just going by what he said in his song on his myspace site.

You mo' fuckers better leave me alone. Man yo' bitches won't be happy till they eatin' that chrome.

This guy's pretty good. He's "got the hood on smash." And his car is really good on gas, too. Seriously, I don't normally like rap, but I get a kick out his stuff. I have no idea why he's asking us how much he should compress his vocals :D ... but his stuff is pretty cool.

.
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He's got good flow, and the track has a nice 70's soul feel.

N'Awlins in da house, huh? Yeah!

Keep up the good work.
 
alevy said:
how much of db. difference should there be between the highest point and low points on vocals.. rap vocals? and how high should you allow it to go. i have been trying to keep my vocals between -3 and -6 but sometimes they drop lower then that but never higher then -3. is this a good practice?
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All horseshit aside... your best friend will be a good "peak limiter". The way to set up a real "peak limiter" [not to be confused with an "RMS limiter"] is to put a tone through the unit and set the threshold for like -.5dbfs. That will save your ass in terms of digital clipping.

Now the idea is to avoid getting into the peak limiter as much as possible while still getting a "hot" level... hopefully without the vocal sounding like it was 'squashed to shit' with a cheap assed compressor.

This can be accomplished by chaining several compression units in a row that are each doing 3-5 db of gain reduction when they're working their hardest. Now it's best to use good compressors but more often than not somebody asking a question like this isn't going to have an arsenal full of things like "distressors" and "trackers"; "MC-77s" or "GMLs" so let's work from the premise that you have an RNC or two and/or a DBX 160_ or two.

You can run the signal into one side of the RNC, out of that side, into the other side, and then out into another compressor... the idea is to use a bunch of units a little bit rather than one unit a lot. All compressors will give you artifacts... some pleasant [see the list of things I have a feeling you don't own] and some not so pleasant [see things like Alesis, DBX, Behringer, etc. for details]. Even with compressors that aren't all that musically pleasant sounding you can minimize the damage they do by minimizing the quantity of gain reduction they perform.

In other words... 3 compressors doing 3-5db of gain reduction will have less of a negative impact on the overall sound, clarity, and emotional impact of the vocal [even in Rap] than one compressor trying to squeeze out 10db of gain reduction. The bitch of this beast is that it will take a bit of time to work out your gain scaling so that each unit is operating in it's optimal level range.

Roll the track with the rapper giving you "a performance"... let him know in advance that you're going to be plugging stuff in and his headphones are going to get weird... that it's just part of the process of getting a great sound.

Set up your mic pre so the output comes to like -3 on your recorder's peak meter. Add the first compressor so it's doing like 3-5db of gain reduction when the rapper gets loud... keep the output level around -3 on your recorder's meter. Add a second compressor after the first. Set it up so you're getting 3-5db of gain reduction when the rapper gets loud... return it to the recorder so the level is still around -3 on the recorder. If you have one, add a 3rd compressor... and set it up so the gain reduction is again around 3 to 5db of gain reduction... return to the recorder. This should be sufficient.

Now if you have a really good peak limiter [I'm not talking about one of the piece of shit limiters in some of the budget compressors... I'm talking about something like "soft limit" in an Apogee converter or even better a Pendulum Audio "PL-2" or the peak limiter in a Crane Song LTD. "STC-8"]... stick that at the end of the chain and raise the "gain makeup" [output level] of the last compressor in the chain until the peaks just start to kick in on the peak limiter. If you don't have a really good limiter available just leave 3db of headroom on the recorder and you should be fine.

If you're working with 24 bit digital you can leave a fair amount of room before the top of the meter scale... if you're working with 16 bit digital then you'll want to get as close to "0dbfs" as you can as the resolution will suffer the lower you go on the meter. One of the reasons 24 bit is so cool is because the resolution of the recorded audio is quite good even at lower levels so the ridiculous amount of compression and limiting that was kinda necessary with 16 bit recorders is not necessary with 24 bit recorders.

I hope this answer helps in some way... if you have any other questions please feel free to ask and I'll do my level best to give you a straight answer.

Peace.
 
thank you a lot. im about to try it out. if i can my only hardware compressor is on my eurkea presonus pre amp would you consider that a crappy preamp. all the other compressors i have are in waves would combining all of those compressor plugins have the same results?
 
alevy said:
would it be better to just limit? or will this be two totally diffrent sounds?
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why don't you just try it? you seem to be asking a lot of questions that could be answered by yourself with some careful listening. learn what each parameter on each plug-in does. read the waves documents about the particular plug-ins you'r e interested in, and then just try stuff out.

don't get me wrong, i'm not having a go at you. i just don't really understand when people ask "what setting should i use?", because it all depends on your program material (in your case, the vocals) and what sort of effect you want.

things like ratio, threshold etc can only be determined by listening to what you've got. there is no "right setting" for rap vocals. it depends so much on how you've recorded and the performance that you captured.

experiment. take into account the advice dispensed on this board, but remember that the advice is just one persons opinion based on the hard/software they have and the material they are mixing.

the best judge is your ears.


there is no point in saying "right well i want my vocals between -3 and -6db". the numerical values don't mean shit, all that matters is how it sounds (this is a gross over-simplification, but you see what i'm getting at). it strikes me if you
 
hey like i said i dont have all the hardware compressors. so i just went ahead and used a limiter and dude it sounds 100% better to me. thanks for helping me out. your ideas provoked my thoughts. i never really tried using it before (limiter) and man it worked wonders for me thanks man.
 
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