Mixing and producing vocals are arguably one of the most significant aspects of just about any modern music production in any genre. Articles, tutorials, videos, forum discussions on the subject are ubiquitous. Do you put EQ before compression, or compression first and then EQ? What reverb is better, a hall or a plate? Impulse response or algorithm? Where does de-essing go in the signal flow? Tempo sync the delays, or leave them loose? And on it goes. 

As many of you who follow the blog know, Chris Vandeviver and I have been doing an ongoing series of posts where we tackle some everyday essential tasks or workflows, and each demonstrates how we approach it. As an eternal student, I always find it an illuminating and learning opportunity to see how different people tackle the same situation and common problems we all face as editors and mixers. 

So why not tackle some vocals together? In this exercise, Chris and I work with the same vocal track and limit ourselves to using Logic's internal plug-ins. Neither of us discussed how we would be approaching it, and we both worked independently. It's interesting, at least to me (and hopefully to you as well), seeing where we handled things similarly and where we diverged. Of course, we both used various EQs, reverbs, and compressors; that goes without saying. But the ways we got creative with the mixing and the producing aspect were quite different.  

Do you like using Logic's "character" EQs (Tube, console, and graphic)for tone, or do you prefer a more surgical Channel EQ bread and butter approach to shaping the sound? What about compressors? Which models do you like? What about the Multipressor? Do you ever use that on vocals? It turns out Chris and I used them quite differently, at least in this context.

What about reverbs? Do you process the signal going into them? Or do you add processing after the reverb? Or both? Small spaces? Bigger spaces? Of course, there are no right or wrong answers. But it is interesting to see and hear the choices we both made, given the same set of tools.

What about delays? Do you like them long or short, synced, panned, filtered? Again, it turns out Chris, and I approached the same tools differently. 

The vocal track was recorded in a home studio by Ricia Rae, a vocalist/songwriter I often collaborate with. As is the case with most of us, her setup is modest. Her mic is a Sure SM58 and her Focusrite interface is nothing fancy. The bare track is far from noise-free or pristinely recorded. But we work with what we have and do our best to be creative within our means.

Both of our videos ran a bit long, given that we wanted to explain and demonstrate each choice we made clearly. Here is my take on this vocal track. 

And here is how Chris approached the same track. 

Let us know your thoughts? Which choices did you like? Which didn’t work for you? How would you have handled this vocal track differently?