How To Ruin A Vocal Mix

You might think an article called "How To Ruin A Vocal Mix" is about mangling your EQ, drowning everything in reverb, or overdoing the compression. It's not. The real mix-killer is something far less exciting: the slow, tedious clean-up you have to do before the fun part even starts. By the time you've fixed the noise, the breaths, the levels and the sibilance, you've usually lost all the enthusiasm you started with. VoiceAssist exists to hand that whole job back to you in seconds instead of hours.

This post is about that really tedious part of every mix, the point where you've been at it for a while and just don't feel the excitement you did when you first opened the session. What we're talking about is cleaning up the vocal track: removing noises like headphone bleed and air conditioning, reducing breath sounds, setting compressors so the levels sit right, restoring frequencies lost to the proximity effect, and dealing with sibilance.

Some people spend an entire day just cleaning all of that up, and that's exactly why we built VoiceAssist. It's for anyone who loves the fun part of mixing but gets tired of all the messing around with vocal clean-up, setting levels correctly, compression, gating, de-essing, and the other techniques you'd normally use to get a vocal in shape manually.

Apply VoiceAssist to a vocal track and it can do in a matter of seconds what used to take a whole morning for some people. So how exactly does a single plugin replace an entire chain of manual clean-up tools?

Do It Right In The First Place

Before we get to the details of how VoiceAssist can help, we're sure that somebody reading this is going to say, "Well, you should have recorded it right in the first place." That's entirely true, and VoiceAssist isn't here to undermine the craft of recording. If you've got the skill, experience, gear and a perfect space, then the best place to get the vocal right is in the recording.

However, some people don't have the benefit of a great space, are in a noisy room, or have a live vocal they really want to use from a show. That's why VoiceAssist was invented. Enthusiasts and top professionals use it not to cut corners, but because sometimes they've been handed stuff they have no power over.

The Boring Stuff

Let's consider how each module replaces a previous part of the task.

First there's clean up. Not long ago, if a vocal arrived with noise, you did your best to clean it with clever filtering tricks. In the last decade, audio cleaning has been transformed, taking what were unsalvageable recordings and bringing them back to life. Even those tools can take time to set up and often still deliver less-than-ideal results. The Clean section in VoiceAssist works miracles, cleaning up the audio and restoring lost high-end information, if necessary.

The second problem can be lost low end, or resonance issues caused by poor mic placement. Of course, it's possible to try and use an EQ to boost the low end, but you can't boost a frequency that's not there in the first place. Lowend helps recreate missing low frequencies, as well as dealing with resonance issues. It can also apply a smart cut if needed.

The next weapon in the traditional clean-up toolbox is a gate. Gates are clever things, but even in the hands of an experienced engineer, they can take time to set up. On the one hand, you want to make sure you've removed the noise, but at the same time you want to avoid chopping off quieter notes, plus you need to make sure the attack and release are set just right. Smart Gate removes the need for all that faff - turn it on and let VoiceAssist work out what's a voice and what's not.

Levelling, Breaths And Sibilance

Next is levelling a vocal. The traditional weapons of choice were a compressor, riding the levels on the desk, or, more recently, using clip gain in the DAW. There are compromises with a compressor because true levelling requires the compressor to control the peaks transparently - that takes experience. This is why modern engineers use either volume automation or clip gain, but that takes time to do right. Dynamics in VoiceAssist are automatic, smart, and able to level-match to industry-standard specs.

Breaths can be something that needs attention in a mix; if the recording was over-compressed, breaths become really prominent. To get the best result in a DAW, it takes time to go through the vocal track note by note, check each breath, and adjust it. If you've got stacks of vocals, then settle in for a few hours! Again, VoiceAssist uses smart tech to find and fix the breaths; it's done in less than a minute, and you can make a coffee while it's working.

Finally, there's sibilance. Fixed in the past with DeEssers, both hardware and software. They are effectively a compressor with a filter applied. Set right, and they do quite a good job; set too hard, and your vocalist sounds like they have cotton wool in their mouth. Yes, you guessed it: our Sibilance section is smart and fast, so you save even more time.

Manual Is Optional

Of course, every element of VoiceAssist allows for manual adjustments, plus the modular approach allows you to turn off modules you don't want or need to use.

VoiceAssist gives you options: spend some time getting a vocal in shape before you get to do the fun part of mixing, or let VoiceAssist be the studio assistant you wished you always had.

That's really the point of VoiceAssist: it's not about taking the craft out of mixing, it's about giving you back the time you'd otherwise spend on the parts nobody enjoys.

The only question you then need to ask yourself is: what are you going to do with all that spare time?