Recording and mixing vocals

gregplaysasixstring

With mixing, you should start with what your focal point of the song is. So if it’s a vocal led song then mix the vocal and get it to sound how you like. Then build the rest of the production around the vocal. 

In this process you actually generally cut away elements that distract the vocal - low mids in guitars, synths, etc. you can do this with eq, multi and compression, volume and space (reverb + delay).

I can hear in your mix the vocals are quite lost in the wall of sound.

There are plenty of great vocal chain presets you can either recreate from YouTube tutorials or buy directly for your daw / plug in - this is usually a good starting point for a great vocal sound. 

For example the Slate VMR plugin has a bunch of great starting points for vocal chains. Then you can play around with the preset to your taste.

I pretty much use 2 vocal chains on every singer, and I’m working with around 15 artists a month. All I tend to do is change the eq curve based on their voice and then dial in different amount of reverb and delay depending on the song. Sometimes I go for a very intentional mixing decision like using a guitar amp or a super retro reverb but that is very rare.

My other recommendation is to do small stages of eq, compression, and saturation. IE staged in series. 

A basic chain would look like this:

- EQ to roll off some muddy low end 
- Compression to catch some peaks - -3db gain reduction 
- Saturate to get some excitement 
- Compress harder to taste - I usually compress -6dB gain reduction here. 

- Saturate again for some more excitement 
- EQ to tame some of the highs and lows introduced by the plugins in between.

Then I “send” the signal to reverb and delay buses to taste. 

Hope that can help you out a bit!

ewal

All great advice thanks. 

Stuckfast

Listening to the mix snippet you posted, I don't think the problem is with the vocal or indeed any specific element, except possibly that the guitar is a smidge too loud. The main issue is that the mix as a whole has too much low midrange and not enough upper midrange. 

Just as an experiment I dropped it into Logic and threw an EQ over it. Try something like this on the master bus:


(Note that I changed the gain scale to ±6dB to make the curve more obvious!)

ewal

Again great advice!

I did some work on this song over Christmas with my daughter and will get back to it in due course. It's now part of our album project.

It's really useful to have the analysis above in your comments to refer back to.