Working with vocals

Vocal tracks require special care when mixing, as they will be the element within a song that the audience identifies and latches onto on their first listen. Of course, other instruments are important, and if your music has no vocals then the focus will be shifted elsewhere, but our ears are evolved to tune into the human vocal range and focus in on it.

There is a lot of leeway with what can be considered the “right” way to work with vocals, and if you speak to 100 engineers, you’ll get 100 different answers as to what works best. The goal of this recipe is not to show you the definitive way to work with vocals, but instead to give you a taste of some of the more common vocal mixing techniques and what can be achieved with them. Once you know some of the tools and how they work, you can play around and experiment with them to discover different results.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need a Pro Tools session with a vocal track...