I wrote an article yesterday (see post below) about what effects you should be using to make your music, at the very least, more interesting. The person who sent me the idea for the article later asked me what he should do for his vocals specifically. So here’s a short writing about how I process vocals (and how you may want to as well).

1. Filter
I always put my filters first. If I’m using a EQ/filter combo plug-in, then obviously the EQ will be first. I usually put a low-pass and hi-pass filter on vocals. Hi-pass around 60Hz, low-pass around 13-14k. Whatever sounds best.

2. EQ
EQing is something of an art in itself. It takes some serious practice and some major fuck ups before you really know whats going on. First, I’ll do the subtractive thing. That is, removing all the harsh frequencies from the recording. You should choose a band, narrow the bandwidth by quite a bit, and then move it around the frequency spectrum until you hear something that sounds bad. It might sound like tin, it might even distort, but if it sounds bad, remove it.

After you’ve removed frequencies that sound like shit, then its time to add some frequencies that might compliment your sound. One of the most important things I learned for vocals and voice-over recordings is to bump around 4kHz (this is typically the range for pronunciation). Again, you might have to sweep around 4k to find a frequency that sounds good, but once you do, feel free to bump it.

That being said, be careful how agressively you bump. A general rule of thumb is while subtracting, you should be more surgical and your cuts should be more exact. While bumping (additive EQ), the bandwidth should be a little broader and less surgial. For example, look at the 4th band in the picture above. That’s how your bumps should look.

3. Compression
After you’ve successfully gotten rid of all the garbage noise in your recording, now its time to tidy things up. But you may be asking, “why can’t I compress and then EQ?” Answer being, if you compress before you EQ, you’ll be compressing all the garbage you just spent time getting rid of. Do you really want those harsh frequencies being compressed? I don’t think so.

I used the “Agressive Vocal” preset (obviously) and I think it fits the freestyle pretty well. If you’re just starting out, choose a preset and play with the controls a little to get it exactly where you want. But, if there’s a preset you fall in love with, don’t be afraid to use it.

4. Other Stuff
You may or may not have noticed that I didn’t talk about de-essing here. I didn’t because I’m trying to make this article fairly simple and accessable to new producers. However, I always de-ess my vocals. If you were to insert it into my chain of processing, it’d go right after EQing and before compression.

Now that your vocals are clean and exactly where you want them, you can consider adding all your favorite effects to them. Reverb, Delay, Auto-Tune,* and anything else you can think of.

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So this should be a pretty good jumping off point for you to start treating your vocals. If you have any questions, feel free to leave us an email or a comment!

*Note: Auto-Tune can be used in a few different ways. You can use it the T-Pain way (as an effect) or use it as an engineer would to treat vocals (pitch correction). If you’re going to use Auto-Tune/Melodyne for pitch correction, this process should be done before you do ANY processing to your vocals. If you’re using it as an effect, put it after you have treated your vocals.

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