Newbie Question-Blending Vocals and Instrumental Track

[chessl]

Good Morning,

I am very new to recording and mixing. I have been working on a song for my daughter. We uploaded the instrumental from iTunes, and she is singing the vocals. My problem is that her voice sounds superimposed over the instrumental track. No matter how hard I try to get the two tracks to blend, it just isn't working. Any suggestions?

 

[mixsit]

Likely it is a situation of a perhaps rather truer'/rawer vocal being placed into a backing track that is quite processed and dynamically compressed.
In a normal' recording process you would be mixing and blending all the basic tracks and processing them to fit' together with each other. In this case you might more be having to form fit' your new track into this existing palate'.
More can follow if you like

 

[Armistice]

Consider that it might not be possible to get a result you're happy with, especially if you're a relative newbie with relatively poor gear and skills.

I've never tried it but I'm imagining syllable by syllable volume automation might help. As might compression. The backing track you're trying to fit a vocal too it probably (a) an MP3 (b) heavily compressed.... so a normally sung raw vocal track is going to have heaps of dynamic range which will have it popping out all over the joint.

And you may well be recording in a bad room which can create all sorts of boxiness / reflectiony artifacts in your raw track, making it even more difficult....

 

[AirGigs]

I did a fair bit of this work for a musical theater producer a few years back. Anyway, it took some work to blend the vocal tracks against the karaoke backing tracks. I would suggest tweaking compression, eq and reverb. Try to match the room size of the vocal reverb to the basic room size of the backing track. If you can work with some of those plugins then it's a matter of using your ears to dial it in. It may just be a matter of spending a bit more time mixing.

 

[anoopbal]

Good Morning,

I am very new to recording and mixing. I have been working on a song for my daughter. We uploaded the instrumental from iTunes, and she is singing the vocals. My problem is that her voice sounds superimposed over the instrumental track. No matter how hard I try to get the two tracks to blend, it just isn't working. Any suggestions?

I do record with a backing track. Here is an example (not the greatest, too much low end): Munbe Vaa male version sung by Anoop - YouTube

Some reverb, compression and a bit EQ. Can you upload an example?

Another way is to make a shelf in the instrument track so that the voice can sit. So maybe lower the frequency which she sounds good in the instrument track.

 

[mixsit]

Consider that it might not be possible to get a result you're happy with, especially if you're a relative newbie with relatively poor gear and skills.

I've never tried it but I'm imagining syllable by syllable volume automation might help. As might compression. The backing track you're trying to fit a vocal too it probably (a) an MP3 (b) heavily compressed.... so a normally sung raw vocal track is going to have heaps of dynamic range which will have it popping out all over the joint.

And you may well be recording in a bad room which can create all sorts of boxiness / reflectiony artifacts in your raw track, making it even more difficult....

While this is all for the most part all real'... ya didn't need'ta totally scare him off