vocal effects -- where to begin?

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beastmaster

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I have vocals that I've recorded effects-free in Cubase on my Mac. And I have no idea what to do now to give it more of a polished, finished sound.

Are there tried and true approaches to vocal effects and mixing (compression, reverb, etc) that I can at least use as a starting point?

I want more of a pure rock sound, not too poppy or artificial. I mainly just want it to sound full and stand out in the right place in the mix.
 
OK, disclaimer time: I have *very* limited experience beefing up vocals!!

I first add compression and then add a little bit of reverb, add a DoubleDelay in Cubase VST/3 5 and bring up the treble in the EQ a bit.

I think a lot of it is highly dependent on the actual sound of the vocals - I have quite a low voice and I also growl on my metal tunes. :D

Jono
 
I'm pretty new to this too but I can share with you my experience with vox.. Anyone here that knows what they are talking about will tell you to leave the vox as clean as possible unless you are looking for some sort of an odd effect.

Ive found that adding to much reverb or delay can make the vox stand out in the mix, but not in such a great way.

You'll hear alot of people talking about cutting space out for each instrument in the mix... for example.. Cutting between 1-2k on all other instruments and boosting a little bit there on the vox. If you do this with the right frequencies on the right instruments everything will fall into place without being muddy... The trick is learning what frequencies to cut and boost when, and nobody can teach you that, its something your ears will learn with practice (I wish mine would hurry the F*#$ up)

Another tip is to use a slight delay instead of reverb. This keeps the mix from getting muddy, and I found on my last recording that a hall reverb worked great to spread my vocals out through the mix.. Experiment.

Dont ever use a phaser. (in my opinion) Nothing sucks worse than a phaser.

I compress the living bejezzus out of all my vocals.. I dont know if this is right it just seems to keep them level all the time.. especially if I'm patching in the vox section by section..

Anyway.. Dont listen much to me, Im still a newbie too.
 
You ever hear some asshole overuse a phaser.
God that sucks.. Like on one of the stone temple piolets cds the bonehead puts a phaser on the drums.. Makes me want to kill him and slaughter his family. The only phaser use I've ever heard will is in Incubus stuff. But again, that is only my opinion.
 
Of course it really depends on your voice and type of music. Some voices sound great and don't need much more than a little compression to level them out and bring them forward in the mix. If you need to fatten your sound up, first try some short delays (less than 20ms) and EQ. If your voice really sucks then just go for a complete overdub and experiment with the double-tracked vocal level. You want it to fatten but keep it underneath the main enough so it isn't obvious that there is another vocal there. A good way to develop your ear is to raise and lower various frequencies with your EQ and each time think to your self, does that sound more natural or does that.
 
It depend on a lot of things: eg how loud the track is, where your instruments are panned, mainly you have to look at what other things are affecting the vocal, then you can decide what will be done to it.
As a basic guide for a rock track, compress it a fair bit, then send the vocal to an aux channel (do this pre-compression) for the reverb.
Then the reverb would probably have a pre-delay of around 80ms on it. Now if you have guitars panned left and right, it would make sense to have the vocal reverb in mono. However if you have just one guitar down the middle, a stereo reverb might work better.
Another good idea when you are workin with reverbs (or mixing in general) is to work in mono as much as possible, that way you separate stuff with eq better and your reverbs won't clash with each other so much. When you switch back to the stereo speakers, your track explodes into life.
 
It depend on a lot of things: eg how loud the track is, where your instruments are panned, mainly you have to look at what other things are affecting the vocal, then you can decide what will be done to it.
As a basic guide for a rock track, compress it a fair bit, then send the vocal to an aux channel (do this pre-compression) for the reverb.
Then the reverb would probably have a pre-delay of around 80ms on it. Now if you have guitars panned left and right, it would make sense to have the vocal reverb in mono. However if you have just one guitar down the middle, a stereo reverb might work better.
Another good idea when you are workin with reverbs (or mixing in general) is to work in mono as much as possible, that way you separate stuff with eq better and your reverbs won't clash with each other so much. When you switch back to the stereo speakers, your track explodes into life.
 
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