3 Vocal Mixing Tips To Change Your Life

The right vocal mixing trick can take a song from average to awesome. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Parallel Compression

Wondering how to get vocal tracks to sound huge and warm? The secret sauce since the 60’s has been to mix vocals using parallel compression. If you’ve never experimented with it, you’re missing out. Here’s a video on how to get your vocals to sound huge with parallel compression.

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2. High Pass Filters

In every style of music, ALL vocals should high passed. All you have to do is gently EQ out the very low bass of a vocal. This is such an important part of getting a great vocal tone that most vocal studio mics and preamps have a switch to enable a built in high pass filter. If the vocal mic or preamp that you used doesn’t have that feature or it wasn’t enabled during recording, all you need to do is “roll off” your very low frequencies to significantly clean up a vocal mix. Usually, EQing out frequencies below about 80 hz is the standard seroquel medication. Here’s a video of how to do that with some popular EQ plugins.
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3. Doubled Chorus Vocals

The beauty of this classic vocal production trick is the magical way it hides vocal mistakes. Record a vocal for the chorus, and that first take might sound a bit hairy. Re-record it a second time, mix the second vocal take a little lower than the first vocal take, and BAM! Tons of vocal mistakes magically disappear. You can also pan each vocal take slightly left and right to make a chorus sound louder and wider than the verses. Here’s a quick video of a few different ways to mix doubled vocals.