Hey friends!

I’m working on building a vocal mixing template to help speed up my workflow and improve consistency across projects. I'd really appreciate any advice, tips, of your own chains/templates that you use regularly.

Whether it’s plugin order, routing, send/return FX setups, or favorite go-to plugins — I’m open to any insights.

Also, if you have general tips for vocal mixing (compression strategies, automation tricks, parallel chains, etc.), I’d be super grateful for those too.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share!

 

Last edited: Jun 28, 2025 at 11:50 PM

I won't give away the plugins I use, but I will give you a good strategy:

1. APU Loudness Compressor, default attack release, source to target mode, -14 LUFS target, gain matched to the verse of the song (that's the only plugin I'm giving away, and it's the most important one)
2. Any EQ, saturation, de-essing, gating you want to shape the sound
3. Compressor in parallel (dry wet knob is ideal), no more than 60%
4. Any further tone shaping or problem-solving
5. Gain plugin with the volume knob automated, you probably won't need a ton of automation because of step 1
6. Effects send with reverb and/or delay, with a separate compressor right after to duck the FX with a quite long release (somewhere around 1000ms) and fast attack (between 1 and .1ms)

If you want to streamline this approach, I recommend doing step 1 and using the newest Pulsar Audio Vocal Studio plugin.

 

Vocal mixing is a big topic to unpack. And somewhat surprisingly, there are very few instructional videos by A-level mixers that focus on vocals.

1. Prep - can range from gentle trim levelling to Mutt Lange-style detailed consonant editing, pitch, timing, room tone, breaths, etc.
2. Method - small speaker, low level, etc.
3. Processing - remove problem frequencies (multi-band compressor, resonance suppressor, etc.), tonal EQ (e.g. Pultecs), level control (2A - gentle, 1176 - more aggressive, RVox, etc.), De-essing, Limiting

A lot of the actual processing is style dependent - e.g. metal vs pop, etc.

For starters have a look at:

Ken Lewis, Mike White, Mike Senior, Yoad Nevo, UAD ("How to Dial in a Pro Vocal Chain").

The two things I'd say are most important - consistent tone, being careful not to push the processing too far as we're very sensitive to how the human voice sounds.

Finally, automation is more-or-less essential e.g. less compression in exposed song sections, etc.

Cheers!

 

Trackspacer anyone? - on vocals - t=2.56s

 

I haven't much to add to shinjiya's excellent post other than to say that because we have the modern option of doing so, prep your vocals before processing them with plugins. What I mean is, look at the waveform and get rid or soften breath sounds, noise between lines and tighten up any timing issues that you hear not flattering the groove (the same can be said with the drums, percussion or anything tha stands out of the bounds of being in the pocket). Also, any sibilence can also be lowered in volume more naturally than most deessors can. Doing this kind of preparation can really help a vocal be precise and natural sounding. It can take time but to me it's worth the effort to do these things.