I spent 12 hours working on a vocal sound
I’ve been working on the new 80s kids song. The song we’re doing has an absolutely iconic vocal. It’s a single solo vocal for the entirety of the song — no harmonies, no doubles, no layers. Just one vocal, out front, in an impassioned and dynamic performance, carrying the entire song, building steadily along the way.
The challenges for this were immediately clear to me going in. I knew that I would have to find a vocal processing paradigm that did these three things:
locked the vocal into place in the mix
honored the wide range of dynamics in the performance
sounded natural, but also sounded special
I knew from my experience that this would hinge a lot on the compressor involved. Also, I do other vocal processing downstream, on a special vocal master bus that I’ve developed over the last few years, so there’s interactivity there. And then of course the master bus processing will weigh in, particularly when the vocal is out front — it will interact with the saturation and compression and even the limiting. So … it’s complicated!
Further: there is a lot of emotional nuance in processing a sensitive vocal. Some vocals aren’t that complicated — you compress them, put some reverb on, sit them in the mix, and you’re good to go. But when you have a complex performance with lots of specific emotions and drama, little choices you make can have outsized impacts.
For example: with this vocal, I wanted there to be enough weight to ground it and to give the lowest notes gravitas. But I quickly found that when I had too much low end on it, or when the low end wasn’t appropriately balanced out by targeted high-end presence boosts, it lost its bounce. This song is about the existential tension between joy and despair, so the vocal has to have both gravitas and bounce. It was so hard to find the balance.
I want you to know that I experimented with a ridiculous number of compressors before I found the one the worked. I tried the SSL 9000 J, two different Distressor models, the UAD silverface LA-2A, the UAD SSL G bus compressor (a highly underrated vocal compressor), the Purple Audio MC-77, the UAD Fairchild 670, and the Universal Audio 176 — before arriving at the Universal Audio 175B.
And when I say I tried them, I don’t mean I quick put them on for two minutes. I mean that I worked with them each extensively over a period of half an hour to an hour, also adjusting most aspects of my vocal master along the way and frequently also adjusting the master bus. I put in time with each of these compressors.
The thing that I was trying to find, aside from the obvious needed dynamic control, was the perfect balance of compression-related distortion artifacts. Too much and the vocal sounds crunchy, which is sometimes great but absolutely not for this song! Too little and the vocal sounds lifeless.
Frankly, this process was exhausting. And also sometimes emotionally fraught! It’s extremely uncomfortable to sit in that in-between space for that long. That constant discomfort; that feeling in your chest that it’s just … not …. quite … RIGHT. It’s so tempting to settle for something, anything, just to make the discomfort go away.
I’m sharing this with you because I want you to know that, if I have a mix that you’ve heard where you’re like, “Holy fuck, this is great” — I have worked for that.
I know that when I was a younger engineer, and I heard the effortless-sounding, perfect mixes that inspired me, I assumed that it was indeed effortless for the person who did it. That they had reached a pinnacle of technical achievement that allowed them to toss off perfect mixes almost as an afterthought.
And now that I’ve gotten good at mixing, I understand that probably for the vast majority of those people, that’s not true at all. They probably agonize over the minute details of their work just as much as I do. And, because our ears have gotten so much better, we can hear a lot more details over which to agonize. It never ends!
So: if mixing feels hard for you, just know that it still feels hard for me too sometimes. But the hardest ones are the ones that end up meaning the most. So stick with it, and don’t settle.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint — jamie