Friday Tip of the Week-How to Gain Better Vocals

Vocals are the most direct form of communication with your audience-so of course, you want your vocal to be a kind of tractor beam that draws people in. Many engineers give a more intimate feel to vocals by using dynamics control, like limiting or compression. While that has its uses, the downside is often tell-tale artifacts that sound unnatural.

The following technique of phrase-by-phrase gain edits can provide much of the intimacy and presence associated with compression-but with a natural, artifact-free sound. Furthermore, if you do want to compress the vocal further, you won't need to use very much dynamics control because the phrase-by-phrase gain edits will have done the majority of the work the compressor would have needed to do.

The top track shows the original vocal. In the second track, I used the split tool to isolate sections of the vocal with varying levels (snap to grid needs to be off for this). The next step was clicking on the volume box in the center of the envelope, and dragging up to increase the level on the sections with lower levels. Although you can make a rough adjustment visually, it's crucial to listen to the edited event in context with what comes before and after to make sure there aren't any continuity issues-sometimes soft parts are supposed to be soft.

The third track shows the finished vocal after bouncing all the bits back together. Compared to the top track, it's clear that the vocal levels are much more consistent.

There are a few more tricks involved in using this technique. For example, suppose there's a fairly loud inhale before a word. A compressor would bring up the inhale, but by splitting and changing gain, you can split just after the inhale and bring up the word or phrase without bringing up the inhale. Also, I found that it was often possible to raise the level on one side of a split but not on the other, and not hear a click from the level change. Whether this was because of being careful to split on zero crossings, dumb luck, or Studio One having some special automatic crossfading mojo, I don't know but it just works and if it doesn't, you can always add crossfades.

That's all there is to it. If you want to hear this technique in action, here's a link to a song on my YouTube channel that uses this vocal normalization technique.

LINK:	http://blog.presonus.com/index.php/2018/03/16/friday-tip-week-gain-bet...
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