You should have a vocal master

Everyone’s pretty comfortable with the idea of the master bus, right? The bus that everything goes through on its way out of your DAW?

The master bus is super useful because it’s a place where you can touch your whole mix at once. You can put saturation on there, compression, EQ, limiting … hell, sometimes I put a reverb plugin on my master bus with the mix at like 5%, if it feels like the mix needs a bit more of a sense of space.

And, similarly, I always have a vocal master. Always always, in every song I do. And why do I do this? Because, as with the master bus, it’s a place where I can touch everything vocal-related, all at once!

This is so helpful. And it can give your songs such a polished, finished feel.

I have a couple different kinds of saturation on my vocal bus, a couple different EQs, a couple different de-essers, and a couple different high-frequency expanders. The basic idea is saturate => add high end => de-ess => EQ => saturate => add high end => de-ess => EQ. (And of course you know that I have a mouth de-noiser very first thing!)

(You may have noticed that I don’t have compression on my vocal bus! I don’t generally use it; I don’t love how it sounds. I don’t like that you can hear the attack and release of it; it makes the reverb sound weird to me. Sometimes if I need just a little more smoothing I will put a compressor at the very end of this chain and compress 1-2dB tops, but I generally don’t have to do this.)

I don’t always use all those modules, but I load them all up to start with. I have a preset for it and everything. The gloss and sheen this chain imparts have become part of my sound for this era of my work, and that’s a wonderful side benefit of it, but it wasn’t the reason for it; the reason was to make my life easier.

Because, it turns out, if you have all the vocals going into a bus, and you compress on that bus, the vocals all push each other out of the way in a dynamic fashion, and you have to do way less automation! (Or you can saturate it, which is what I do; saturation imparts compression characteristics, and I prefer the sound.) Once you get all the channel faders in the right places pushing into your vocal master, the vocals will sort themselves out to a large degree.

I should note that I’m also compressing each individual vocal channel. That’s kind of a must. The vocal master is to bring everything together and make the vocals sound cohesive and dynamic. Usually I’m just using the channel compressor in the brainworx SSL 9000 J plugin; it’s first on every channel in every mix I do, so it’s convenient, and it happens to be one of the best vocal compressors there is.

I also very often do a backing vocals sub-bus on the way to the vocal master — compressing a few dB there, just to set all the backing vocals in a nice controlled chunk. And if there are multiple clusters of backing vocals, I’ll do a bus for each.

Always simplifying — jamie