This article is discussing a very common situation for all songwriters, producers, engineers… we already have a finished backing track that is mixed and mastered, and need to add some vocals to it.
Just Drums, Bass, rest of brickwall limiter logic pro x free download, all without a brickwall limiter — that makes it so much easier to add a vocal for a songwriter. But of course everybody kept slamming the 2-bus, and when vocals where added, more destruction occurred… such a standard thing in the songwriting world, and nobody is doing the right thing.
When you import them into your DAW software, you can see in the waveform that they are coming in at full level, maxing out the meters.
We need to remember that the producer, when she created the backing track, did not necessarily care about adding vocals — the producer just wanted the best sound for the track. Because we need some room for the vocals, we start by turning the backing-track down by — 15 dB using a Gainer-plugin in the first insert-slot of the channel. I wrote another detailed brickwall limiter logic pro x free download exclusively about creating a signal-chain for your vocals, what to avoid while recording etc.
A multiband-compressor essentially splits the audio into various frequency bands like lows, mids, highs which can be separately compressed before they get mixed back together. That way, you can for example only compress the low-end, and leave the mids and highs untouched. There are dedicated plug-ins who can do this job, like Waves C6 Sidechain, but we can get the same effect by sending the audio to three busses that we split out using simple filters low, mid, high.
We need to make sure the crossover points of the EQ still lead to a linear frequency response. HOWEVER, whenever the compressor receives a sidechain signal via the lead vocal, it dynamically carves out space in the mids for the vocal.
Which means even the reverb-signal carves out a space for the vocals in the mids whenever they need it. Time to add our the 15 db of gain back by which we lowered the backing track — it will end up sounding almost the same as before.
Skip to content. And yes, the compressor brickwall limiter logic pro x free download the mid-band is sidechained to our lead vocal. This is what the frequency-response looks like when the vocal is active. Related posts. December 17, Waves API April 17,
