Mixing Vocals Part 2 – Luke Williams Session

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Luke Williams Session. In the last video we uploaded we talked about the lead vocals and gave you some tips and techniques used to achieve a good sound for this particular situation. In this session it was important that before using an EQ or Compressor I listened to how the instrument/voice was recorded initially in order to make a good production decision on whether it actually needed processing or not. Sometimes It won’t depending on what you’re trying to achieve. It’s important to understand that music is an art and at times the producer or artist recorded an instrument/vocal and intended it to be a certain way. The point is to use your ears and listen carefully, you don’t need to force processing, but if you do, its good to try and preserve the performance, especially if the client calls for it. VIDEO TUTORIAL QUICK OVERVIEW:

I used auto tune on auto to set the tuning of the BGV’s perfectly in place.
Then I used a compressor with a fast attack.
I didn’t use more than 3db in order to maintain the dynamics.
Then I used an automative delay so I can have a repeated effect.

By doing this I preserved the spirit of how this song was recorded. Since I have three voices I panned one left one, one right and one down the middle. Sometimes using less processing will preserve the original feeling and let the song breathe more and in this session its precisely what we were going for. We hope this tutorial was useful, thanks again from Signature Sound Studios.