Smoking hot vocal takes? Sounds ideal right? Getting your vocal tracks to stand out in a busy mix, particularly if your track really is as energetic and exciting as you think, is largely about using gain and saturation. In this article we’ll take a lead from some of the big name mixers and producers on PureMix to see how you can use gain in all its forms to turn an everyday vocal into something more attention grabbing.

When thinking about gain you might well think of setting preamp gain. As anyone who has experimented with different flavours of preamp will be aware, while they might sound similar when working well within their comfort zones, when pushed harder their individual characteristics come to the fore. Tube preamps sound very different from the classic units from Neve which themselves sound markedly different from API preamps. I could go on. Luckily if you don’t have hardware at your disposal you can access these flavours in software and while there is nothing wrong with clean, a bit of drive can really help with tone on the right vocal.

Fewer and fewer engineers are using hardware at the mix stage, the pressures of mix recall have made that unattractive for most but many engineers still favour using hardware at the tracking stage. Beyond using character preamps, hardware compression and EQ all contribute to capturing the ideal tone and a great example of exactly this, and how these different stages all interact with each other, can be found in the video below in which Jacquire King demonstrates how he sets levels for the preamp and the LA2A compressor he is using in a vocal take. The transformer tone and the complementary tube warmth both working together to get the sound he wants.

Plugins Or Hardware?

Hardware is of course very seductive but far more people have access to these sounds in plugin form, and there is nothing wrong with that. Great results can be found using quality software emulations of desirable hardware and in this second video Vance Powell demonstrates his technique using UAD plugins. Because of the clever Unison technology UAD plugins use to emulate the interaction between the mic and the preamp in UA interfaces, when using Unison enabled plugins you can get even closer to the real thing. Vance uses the 1073 plugin on a bus to reproduce the saturation he gets using his hardware unit and, when combined with his choice of an 1176 and a very aggressively set up Empirical Labs Fatso plugin, he gets energy and excitement into his vocal.

Using gain like this to drive circuits, whether hardware or virtual, out of the region in which they behave themselves and into the sweet spot between ‘clean and polite’ and ‘mangled and ruined’ is of course very source dependent and what is appropriate for an aggressive rock vocal might not be appropriate for something smoother. In this next video, Rich Keller shows how by introducing just a touch of ‘fur’ onto a vocal using a plugin version of his Distressor, he brings a different tone to what is essentially an exercise in controlling gain.

Saturation And Compression

Throughout these examples you’ve probably already seen how static gain manipulation for tone goes hand in hand with dynamic gain manipulation in the form of compression. When the link between more level equalling more distortion is broken by the action of a compressor turning it down, the result can be distortion which beds into the sound as added harmonic interest rather than noticeable distortion.

From Saturaton To Devastation

However there is always a time when subtle is just too.. err… subtle. The sweet spot usually lies somewhere between the aforementioned clean and polite and mangled and ruined, but sometimes just cranking it up into destroyed territory is just what is called for. In this video, Vance Powell gets heavy handed with a decidedly lo fi dynamic mic which is thrashing a tiny amplifier. You can see the surprise on the faces of the artists but when used as a character effect behind a more conventional treated vocal, there is often a place for even the most extreme of treatments.

Introducing Variation With Saturation

Speciality sounds, like the tiny amp example above, probably won’t find use across an entire track and using special treatments on different sections of songs is common practice. Whether you do this by automating different plugins down the timeline, rendering spot effects using AudioSuite or whatever alternative is available in your DAW of choice, or by duplicating the track and muting clips to swap processing chains from section to section, this is a very useful technique. If you change your reverb time or delay level between the verse and the chorus why not alter the tone and aggression of the vocal too? See how Tony Maserati does exactly this by ‘chequerboarding’ two duplicate vocal tracks by muting clips on the timeline to bring variation to his vocal saturation through his mix.

You’ll have noticed a common technique in most of these examples and that is the use of parallel processing. Using a heavy-handed treatment blended in parallel with a less heavily processed ‘dry’ track can bring energy and excitement and, in one of our favourite examples of this, F Reid Shippen demonstrates his ‘vocal air’ technique in which he uses heavy saturation and high pass filters it to add high energy sheen to vocal tracks. It definitely works though the jury is out on why the polarity inverts the fizz track against the dry vocal.

How do you use gain based processes on your vocals?

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