01.05.07
Mixing Tricks: Smooth Background Vocals
Here’s a cool tip for smooth background vocals. This can be done in just about any DAW or on an analog console, as long as you have a stereo compressor available to you. As always, there are no hard & fast rules in mixing but these setting should give you a good starting point.
Step 1: Pan
Start by panning your background vocal tracks so that they are not right on top of your lead vocal. I tend to keep the lead vocal centered and pan the background vocals no closer than about 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, but will also pan them as extreme as hard left & hard right. Just try to place each voice in its own space.
Step 2: Low end management
Once you have tracks panned properly, bring the levels to about where you want them to sit in relation to the lead vocal. Now place an EQ on the track insert for each background vocal and engage a low shelf filter set at about 80Hz and start with -9dB gain. With the tracks playing move the frequency higher until you hear it begin to thin out the vocal part. Back it off just a bit to just before you really noticed it. Do this for the remaining background vocal tracks. This insures that the vocals do not interfere with the instruments that belong in the low end (like bass & kick drum).
Step 3: Submix
Now you want to add a stereo Aux track to your mix and set the outputs of all your background vocals to this track. This is how we set up a submix for the background vocals. This fader will now control the overall volume of the background vocals.
Step 4: Automate (ride those faders)
Now, you are going to want to go one background vocal track at a time and automate your volume levels. Listen to the track in its entirety and get an idea where you think it’s too quiet or too loud, and then go through and automate the fader levels to balance out those sections. I like to enable the automation record on the mixer and then have it memorize my fader moves as I play the song. Then I will go through and smooth out my automation by adjusting the automation in the volume track view with the pencil tool. Just to be clear – this is being done to the actual individual background tracks & not the aux submix fader.
Step 5: Add some gel
Now that we have the tracks all going to our aux submix fader, the low end is nice & clean and we have the levels where we want them we need to get these tracks working together. For that I like to add a small amount of compression on the Aux (submix) track. Insert your favorite compressor on the background vocal submix. Set the ratio real low (1.6:1) and the threshold at about -20 dB. Set the attack to about 10 ms and the release about 100 ms. Now play the song and watch those meters, you want a maximum of 3dB of compression. Adjust that Threshold setting until you get that to happen. Then play it through again and adjust the release point until the compression sounds smooth.
Step 6: EQ
I know we added some individual EQ to each track to tame the low end. Now what we want to do is affect the background vocals as a whole and keep them out of the way of the lead vocal. Place an EQ on the background vocal aux track just after the compressor and engage a peaking (parametric) filter. Set the mid-frequency at about 3kHz, the bandwidth (Q) about an octave and the gain at -3dB.
And there you have it. The great thing about this trick is that you can apply it to other elements in a mix, like guitars or percussion. Plus, the submix technique is very useful for keeping large mixes manageable.
