I also add some slight saturation to the delay taps to increase harmonics and control their dynamics, making them easier to hear. Then I’ll introduce subtle modulation to make it more complex, and reduce the wet output to blend the effect. I’m going to use this delay to thicken my vocal before reverb, so I’ll set a quick delay under 10ms, use moderate feedback, and isolate the reflections to below 5kHz. Let’s listen and notice how the vocal has more detail. Lastly, I’ll add a little saturation to fill the vocal. This will increase the volume of each band from the noise floor up, but in a tasteful way, since it’s only being increased slightly. I use the same technique for my release that I used in the last chapter, and then very subtly increase the midpoint. Since the male vocal’s fundamental is low, first, I’m going to lower my mids to separate the processing on my fundamental and 2nd order harmonic. Let’s listen to the vocal with controlled dynamics and de-essing. I’ll achieve a few dB of attenuation on each band and set the release for each band to right above what would cause distortion to the waveform - so above 50ms for the lows, 40ms for the mids, and 10 for the highs. I’ll compress the lows and mids, and use the high band to de-ess my vocal, which for male vocals should be around 7kHz. Next, I want to compress the vocal, but since FL Studio offers this convenient MB compressor, I’ll use it as opposed to a typical one. Let’s listen to how these curves clarify the vocal. Lastly, I’ll boost a higher-order harmonic above 2kHz to increase presence, and then add air with a shelf at 20kHz, and a Q value that decreases the band to unity by 10kHz. Then I’ll use a bell to balance the area of the low-pass’s cutoff, use 2 bell filters to boost the fundamental and vowels respectively, and dip some nasal tones.

I’m going to start with an EQ, with which I’ll use a high pass up to right before the fundamental. Get a FREE Mastered Sample of Your Song ➜įor these first 6 chapters, let’s work on a vocal recording from a male singer, and use only stock plugins. FL Studio makes parallel processing easy with wet/dry insert dials, so try these as well. When mixing vocals in FL Studio, you approach the vocals similar to how you would in other DAWs - start with EQ, compress if needed, try upward compression or maximization, and then use temporal processing.

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