Unleashing the Vocal Magic: A Sneaky Trick to Clear Up Your Mix
- Alex Carney
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
Mixing vocals can often feel like balancing on a tightrope. You want your lead vocals to shine, yet they can get buried under other sounds if you're not careful. The clarity of your vocal track is essential; it can dramatically affect the quality of your music. Sometimes you have a vocalist whose presentation is soft and intentional, even in the face of powerful backing tracks. That isn't a bad thing, and even after compression, EQ, doubling, octaves, etc., it still doesn't sit *right on top* like it should. Sometimes the track is too dense, but too good to be compromised - *be very careful about that.*
Fortunately, a bit of cleverness can help you create the space your vocals need without compromising your mix. This guide will provide you with practical steps to make your vocals stand out.
Understanding Phase Cancellation
Before we jump into the process, let’s clarify what phase cancellation means. In simple terms, phase cancellation happens when two audio signals combine in a way that cancels out specific frequencies. This can happen under a number of different circumstances and occurs organically when reflections of a sound or identical/similar sounds overlap in a way such that the peaks and troughs of the waveforms cancel each other out and your waveform goes flat. Interestingly, a phenomenon proximal to this is where we get the term "phaser."
The wizards of mix engineering recognize in this an opportunity, however unwieldy.
The Setup: Duplication of Stereo Output
The first step involves duplicating your stereo output. Inside your DAW, you should already have a BUS dedicated as "backing" or "music" or some other cutsie way of saying anything that isn't a vocal. (learn about orderly mix and bussing protocol in our Remote Production Course, or any of our engineering courses) You will want to create a second BUS which receives output from that non-vocal BUS and instantiate a native plug-in with a phase inversion function (such as Gain in Logic Pro X or EQ1 or Trim in Pro Tools). To reiterate, this bus has everything **except** your lead vocal/vocal FX and possibly BVs/BVFX.
The volume on this track should be set to -inf for now. If you bring it up your mix will progressibly get quiter and quiter until the fader hits 0dBFS, at which point the backing will go silent. If this does not happen your bussing matric is not correct.
Side-Chaining the Vocal Track
Add an expander or gate plug-in in your DAW. Make sure it is native as DSP may create latency and your DAW may or may not have auto-calculated cross-track latency buffers. Route the side-chain input from the lead vocal bus to the dynamic expander or gate, which should be instantiated on the duplicate mix bus. When you raise the volume of the duplicate mix bus to 0, the whole backing track should drop out completely whenever the vocal comes in.
(Example)
EQ: Carving Out Space
One of the most critical components of our phase cancellation technique is EQ-ing the duplicated track. It’s essential to pinpoint the frequencies that clash with your vocal line. As a rule of thumb, you will start with your vocal formants (M 500 & 2.5-3k | F 1k & 3.5-4k), and then your sibilance (7k and up). From there, add to taste. Not that we are carving the "negative space" with this EQ. In other words, what you subtract from this EQ is what will stay unaffected in the mix. The frequencies left at, or near, the zero will pass through the EQ and begin to cancel out their phase-normal counterparts in the mix, thus reducing their volume.
A/B Testing: The Essence of Hearing the Difference
You are going to want to run that inverted track at a low, somewhat consistent volume. Generally, I run mine anywhere between -inf. and -10dBFS with automation. It depends on the track.
---
Comentarios