Create Your Perfect Vocal Channel Strip Preset
25/02/2022
We all know how important vocals are, and the Fat Channel is an excellent channel strip for creating vocal presets. So, let's go step-by-step on how to create your own Fat Channel preset. We'll cover the reasons for choosing the parameters in fig. 1, and the order in which you want to edit them. More importantly, we'll describe how to customize parameters for your mic type and voice.
Figure 1: Channel strip settings for my voice with a dynamic mic.
HPF/Gate
The HPF can reduce pops, as well as excessive bass from singing too close to the mic. Choose a frequency that tightens up the low end, but doesn't thin the sound. With a ribbon mic, you might want a higher frequency.
To keep low-level noise out of a vocal, try setting the Expander threshold to -55 dB. This should be high enough to get rid of residual hiss and room noise, but low enough to retain vocal nuances.
Equalizer
EQ settings are like a combination lock-get them right, and your vocal opens up. As to signal chain placement, equalizer before compressor is more forgiving of substantial EQ boosts that create character. Let's run through the order for adjusting the edits.
HS (High Shelf). This gives the vocal air. Freq will be in the 8 to 10 kHz range, but Gain depends on your mic. Some mics have a high-frequency lift, so you don't need much gain. A ribbon mic might sound dull, and need more gain. Turn up the Gain to where you get sibilance problems, and then back off until the sibilance issues go away.
HMF. The frequency range from 2 to 5 kHz is all about intelligibility. A broad boost helps the vocal stand out in a mix. Turn up the Gain until you hear more definition and greater intelligibility, then back off just a bit. The ear is most sensitive in this range, so too much boost can sound harsh.
LMF. A broad cut in the lower mids between 200 and 500 Hz can reduce muddiness. This isn't always necessary, but reducing the lower mid response leaves more room for other instruments. Besides, with the HMF and High Shelf boosts, the vocal should come through just fine. An easy way to adjust LMF is to temporarily increase the Gain in this range, and sweep the frequency for the most boxy sound. That's where you want to cut.
LF. With the HPF active and LMF cutting, a slight boost here re-introduces a little more warmth into the vocal. With a ribbon mic, or if the vocal was recorded with a significant bass proximity effect from singing too close, you might want to cut here instead.
Compressor
The Tube Comp is a favorite for vocals, and it's blissfully easy to adjust: Set Peak Reduction for the desired amount of compression, then use Gain to make up for any decrease in level caused by compression. I usually aim for 6 to 8 dB compression on peaks, but a lot of engineers like to slam the compression harder, especially for rock vocals.
Limiter
Setting this to -3.0 provides insurance against stray peaks going higher than desired.
The Preset
The downloadable preset has the parameters shown in fig. 1. Although it can serve as a point of departure, I strongly encourage you to tweak the parameters to perfection for your own voice and microphone. You'll find the effort is worth it!
Download the Fat Channel preset here:
CA-Fat-Channel-Dynamic-Mic.preset-2Download
More from PreSonus
22/03/2024
Create Rhythmic Alchemy with the BeatCoder
By Craig Anderton Over three years ago, I wrote a blog post on how to make a drumcoder. Its design was somewhat like a vocoder-drum audio served as a modulat...
15/03/2024
Make Stereo Downmixes More Immersive
By Craig Anderton One of Atmos's coolest features is scalability. No matter how complex your Atmos project may be, you can render it as Binaural, 5.1, 5.1....
13/03/2024
Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Great Good Fine Okay
Watch the Brooklyn Synthpop duo remix their song Blame in Studio One Less than 24 hours after meeting each other, producer Luke Moellman and vocalist Jon San...
10/03/2024
Stamp Out Boring Flanging!
By Craig Anderton The impetus behind this design was wanting to add envelope flanging to amp sims like Ampire. But there's a problem: most amp sim outputs ...
01/03/2024
Creating Room Ambiance with Virtual Mics
By Craig Anderton Supplementing close-miking techniques with room mics gives acoustic sounds a life-like sense of space. Typically, this technique involves pla...
27/02/2024
Notion Mobile 3.3 Now Available
Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows, Fire OS and macOS. Now v3.3 adds many enhancements and fix...
26/02/2024
The Sweet Spot with Grammy-Nominated Producer 6ix
Logic's Grammy-nominated producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. Before he found success as an avant-garde hip hop producer, 6ix was just 30 units shy of a de...
25/02/2024
The Sweet Spot with Multi-Platinum Producer Warren Huart
The Grammy-nominated multi-Platinum producer breaks down his Sweet Spot. From the studio with chart-topping artists like Aerosmith and The Fray, to empowering ...
23/02/2024
Don't Make This Mixing Mistake!
By Craig Anderton Do you think of mixes in absolute terms, or relative terms? Knowing the difference, and when to apply which approach, can make a huge differe...
16/02/2024
Tuff Beats
By Craig Anderton Calling all beats/hip-hop/EDM/hard rock fans: This novel effects starts with drums modulating the Vocoder's white noise carrier, and take...
09/02/2024
Reinvent Your Stereo Panning
This tip is about working with stereo, NOT about Dolby Atmos or surround-but we're going to steal some of what Atmos does to reinvent stereo panning. Stud...
07/02/2024
Studio One: Mix in a New Dimension with Jeff Ellis
The GRAMMY-winning recording and mix engineer shows us how he uses Studio One to create an artful immersive mix. Jeff Ellis is a force to be reckoned with. The...
02/02/2024
Presence Electric 12-String (the Artist Version Remix)
Presence's sound library includes a fine acoustic 12-string guitar, but not an electric one. So, perhaps it's not surprising that one of the more popula...
26/01/2024
Faster, Simpler, and Better Comping
At first, this might not seem too exciting. But follow the directions below, and try comping using this method-I don't think you'll be disappointed. Thi...
19/01/2024
How to Quickly Slash Your Latency
You know the feeling: You're tracking or doing an overdub with a virtual instrument or amp sim, but you're frustrated by the excessive latency inherent ...
12/01/2024
How to Fix Phase Issues
Recording audio using more than one feed from the same source may create phase issues. For example, when miking a bass amp and taking a DI (dry) input, the DI...
05/01/2024
Bigger, Wider Sounds: Try Stereo Miking
If you haven't experimented yet with mid-side stereo miking, you'll be in for a treat when you do. Here's why: Record background singers with gorge...
29/12/2023
How to Prioritize Vocals with Mix Ducking
This complements the tip Better Ducking for Voiceovers and Podcasts and the tip Why I Don't Use Compression Anymore. It applies the concept of voiceover duc...
22/12/2023
Should You Use Highpass Filters when Mixing?
Engineers sometimes advocate using high-pass filters to clean up the low end and tighten the sound. Others believe that because of issues inherent in highpass...
20/12/2023
Studio One: A Brief Exploration with Josh Cumbee
The GRAMMY-nominated artist, producer, and songwriter shows us how he uses Studio One to cook a musical idea from scratch. Josh Cumbee is a triple threat: The ...
15/12/2023
Why I Don't Use Compressors Anymore
This wasn't a conscious decision, or something I planned. But when I looked through my last few songs while seeking candidates for a book's screenshots,...
08/12/2023
Phrasing-The Final Correction Frontier
First, a follow-up: In the October 13 tip about creating Track Presets for parallel processing, I mentioned that Track Presets can't include buses, which is...
01/12/2023
Vocoder Tweaks and Tricks
Vocoder's aren't normal effects. For example, Arturia's Vocoder V is an effect/instrument hybrid, because it's an audio effect that includes a...
24/11/2023
Release Your Music in Stereo and Immersive
For over a decade, stereo and mono vinyl records co-existed before the transition to stereo was complete. During that time, many records were released in both m...
17/11/2023
String Arrangements Made Simple
Strings can enhance almost any genre of music-and with a little more effort, you can do string arrangements that go beyond simply adding a string pad preset. So...
10/11/2023
The Metal Amp De-Harsher
Since Dynamic EQ was introduced in version 5, I've used it to replace and improve some techniques I used to do with static EQ. For example, I'm a fan of...
03/11/2023
Capture-and Keep-Your Creative Impulses
Gregor Beyerle recently posted a video called Producer vs. Engineer-What's the Difference?, which had quite a few comments. It seems most people feel that f...
27/10/2023
Better Drum Reverb with Dynamic EQ
Sending too many low frequencies through reverb gives a bloated, muddy sound. This is one reason why you'll rarely see a send from a bass track going into r...
20/10/2023
A Happy Accident for Drum Sounds
While trying to do something else with Melodyne, I stumbled on this way to add depth or tightness to drum sounds-quickly and easily. Here's the sound of an ...
13/10/2023
Create Track Presets for Parallel Processing
Parallel processing splits a signal into two or more parallel channels. Bi-amping is a common example of parallel processing: One channel processes low frequen...
06/10/2023
Easy Atmos: Grab Headphones, Mix, Have Fun!
Everyone talks about the importance of Dolby Atmos for post-production, but the implications go further than that. Atmos really does change how you create and ...
29/09/2023
You Can Do Immersive Audio. Right Now.
You don't need a massive surround system with speakers wired all over your studio to create immersive audio. Whether you want surround or Dolby Atmos mixes...
22/09/2023
Better Ducking for Voiceovers & Podcasts
By Craig Anderton Background music or environmental sounds are usually an essential part of commercials, movies, presentations, podcasts, and more. When doing ...
15/09/2023
Steal Your Intro-with Ripple Editing
The post Mixing la Studio One had a great response, so here's another tip that relates more to making better music than making better-sounding music. We...
08/09/2023
Quick EQ Fixes with Dynamic Tilt EQ
This FX Chain's inspiration is the Tilt filter circuit created by Tonelux designer Paul Wolff. First used in the Tonelux MP1A mic preamp, the Tilt filter h...
01/09/2023
Create Authentic, Customizable EDM Pumping with X-Trem
But first, some breaking news: Version 1.5 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is now available from the PreSonus shop. Like previous versions, it...
25/08/2023
Superspeed Comping with Studio One 6.2
Studio One 6.2 reworked Layer and Take handling, and some of the new functionality is exceptionally useful. For example, suppose you want to record comp vocals ...
18/08/2023
The PhaseTone Warper
We haven't done a boutique digital effect for Studio One Professional in a while, so let's use a plugin in a totally wrong way-yet end up with somethi...
11/08/2023
Improve MIDI Drum Loop Flow
MIDI drum loops have a bad rap, because some musicians consider them metronomic and boring. But they don't have to be. Subtly leading or lagging the beat at...
04/08/2023
Mixing la Studio One
Ask 100 recording engineers about their approach to mixing, and you'll hear 100 different answers. Here's mine, and how this approach relates to Studio ...
28/07/2023
FL Studio Meets Studio One
FL Studio is a cool program. Yet when some users see me working with Studio One's features like comping tools, harmonic editing, the lyrics track, Mix FX, M...
21/07/2023
Make Bass Pop in Your Mix
Bass has a tough gig. Speakers have a hard time reproducing such low frequencies. Also, the ear is less sensitive to low (and high) frequencies compared to midr...
18/07/2023
Notion Mobile 3.2 Now Available
Notion Mobile v3 took mobile music creation to the next level with support for iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Now v3.2 adds many enhancements and fixes, as we...
14/07/2023
Enhance Your Reverb's Image
First, an announcement: If you own the eBook How to Record and Mix Great Vocals in Studio One, you can download the 2.1 update for free from your PreSonus acc...
07/07/2023
Free! Three Primo Piano Presets
Let's transform your acoustic piano instrument sounds-with effects that showcase the power of Multiband Dynamics. Choose from two download links at the end ...
24/06/2023
Fix Boring Acoustic Drum Loops
Acoustic drum loops freeze-dry a drummer's playing-so, what you hear is what you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. What you get. ...
16/06/2023
3 Special FX for Lead Guitar
Melodyne can do much more than vocal pitch correction. Previous tips have covered how to do envelope-controlled flanging and polyphonic guitar-to-MIDI conversio...
09/06/2023
MIDI-Accelerated Delay Effects
Synchronized echo effects, particularly dotted eighth-note delays (i.e., intervals of three 16th notes), are common in EDM and dance music productions. The foll...
04/06/2023
Friday Tips in the Real World: the Sequel
This is a follow-up to the Friday Tips in the Real World blog post that appeared in 2020. It was well-received, so I figured it was time for an update. Althoug...
26/05/2023
The Surprising Channel Strip EQ
Announcement: Version 1.4.1 of The Huge Book of Studio One Tips and Tricks is a free update to owners of previous versions. Simply download the book again from ...