Vocal Mixing Start to Finish

This tune came in with the vocals completely untouched. Lead straight down the middle, nine backing vocals piled on top of it in exactly the same spot, all of it a bit dull and flat. The backing track is mellow, so the vocals have to carry the whole thing.

The brief is simple: the lead sits out front and stays consistent, the harmonies make it sound lush without ever getting in the way. Here is how it gets there.

Level the lead by hand before you touch a plugin

The lead jumps about. Some lines sit back, one line really punches. If you throw compression at that, you are feeding the compressor a different level every line and you get a messy, inconsistent vocal.

So the first job is boring but essential. Chop the lead into sections and ride the clip gain by ear until nothing leaps out. On this one the punchy line came down to about -10, the lines around it landed anywhere between -4 and -10. The numbers do not matter. What matters is the vocal going into the chain at one consistent level, so every processor after it has something even to work with.

Pan the harmonies into a tulip shape

There are three high, three mid and three low harmonies, and every one of them came in dead centre, sat right on top of the lead. Panning is where they get their own space.

• Mid harmonies around 40% left and right
• Low harmonies around 25%, tucked in tighter
• High harmonies fully wide
• One of each left in the middle, dropped a touch so it sits behind the lead

Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. That is the tulip shape. It gives the vocals a proper stereo field with depth, and because the middle ones are pulled back slightly, the lead still sits on top of all of it.

Build the lead chain with the track playing

Do this in context, not soloed, or you will make decisions that fall apart the moment the track comes back in.

The chain on the lead does four things: pulls the performance together so it sounds like one consistent voice, adds a touch of brightness for energy, excites the top end to bring the lead forward, and holds the whole thing solid with a compressor. Switch each one in one at a time as you build it. If a plugin is not clearly earning its place, it comes off.

Add the space

Sounds good, still dry. The reverbs on the vocal template are already dialled in, so it is a case of switching them on and setting the send amounts against the track. There is no need to build a vocal reverb from scratch every session. Set it up once, then just adjust the amount to suit the song.

The real problem: the harmonies crowd the lead

With everything in, the backing vocals blur into the lead. The lead should sit on top, but the overall balance already feels right, so simply turning the harmonies down and the lead up throws away the lushness you just built.

What you actually want is the harmonies moving out of the way while the lead is singing, then filling back in around it. Two ways to do that. One is fine. One is much better.

Fix one: sidechain ducking (works, but thins them out)

The obvious move is sidechaining. Send the lead to a bus, put TrackSpacer on the backing vocal summing stack so it hits all nine at once, and feed it from the lead's sidechain.

It does the job. The lead has space. But listen to the harmonies and they go thin at the back. Pushing them out of the way by level alone strips the body out of them, and you lose the weight that made them sound good in the first place.

Fix two: carve the space with multiband compression

The better answer is to compress the harmonies down rather than duck them. Swap TrackSpacer for FabFilter Pro-MB on the backing vocal stack. The preset here is BV Balancer, and it works like this.

The part of a vocal you actually hear most, the presence, lives between about 1 and 5kHz. That is where the lead needs to own the space.

• Scoop that 1 to 5kHz band down by about 5dB on the harmonies
• Add gentle compression either side, roughly 180 to 900Hz below and 4 to 5kHz upward, so the middle does not sound hollowed out on its own

Because you are compressing rather than just dropping the level, the harmonies keep their weight and thickness. They sit back behind the lead but still sound full.

Put them side by side and the difference is obvious. The multiband version is smoother and sounds more expensive. It also glues the nine harmonies into one thing instead of a handful of lumpy voices scattered around the lead.

The result

Lead levelled by hand, harmonies spread into a wide, deep stereo field, a chain that makes the lead bright and solid, reverb switched in from the template, and a multiband move that gives the lead its space without thinning out the vocals around it.

The vocals are consistent from start to finish, the harmonies sound lush, and the lead stays right out front the whole way through.