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Writer's pictureAlice Headlam

Vocal Compression

Updated: Dec 20, 2020


This week I have been focusing on make my vocals sounding thick and as full as the rest of the mix. I felt in all my tracks the vocals have been the weakest performance as well as not compressed enough to match the intercity of the guitars and drums.


I used mostly different stages of commission to make the vocals up front and full. I have always been a little scared of over compressing my tracks. After the lectures I have had this trimester I am feeling way more confident to use a lot of compression where it is needed. This is one of my favourite compressors I used thorough out the project mostly on my vocal busses. It is a super slamming compressor that really can bring out a lot of harsh top end if used at the wrong stage or with too much gain reduction. I found that it was most helpful on the vocal busses to bring out some of those high frequency's that I may had crushed while EQ'ing a little bit.

I used this Distressor plug in a lot on my vocal tracks. The Slate VMS is so great for mixing quickly on tracks with EQ and compression as well as on busses for more over all EQ on group tracks like vocals. I think in this session I had about 8 vocal tracks that had to be separated due to over laps. I was really struggling to mix consistently so I used this on the vocal busses which I had two of as well to glue together the other processing. I still ended up copy and pasting the settings some times to make sure but I also used my ear mostly to match them.

While mixing vocals for this project I wanted to try using more multi band compression to control frequencies rather than EQ's I really like this one from waves. Before this project I hadn't used multi band compressors as much as a should have so I was feeling a little nervous about using them so frequently. I watched some waves turtoials on how to use this one and what the presets are for and I found it really easy to use. I really like how easy it is to use I also thin that this is quiet a harsh compressor over all and in the future I want to fine one that its a little less noisy. It was really great for learning though because the compression is super present and easy to hear. I used it on almost every vocal track for the entire project! I am super happy with the vocal processing I have learnt this year and this is just a few things I learnt about compression that I wanted to reflect on this week!

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