Another method i've been sleeping on! I'll try the trusty Waves C1 and see what happens. I've used the parallel trick several times on busy mixes and it works wonders, thanks @MrMister good looking out.

 

@MrMister Where do you put the saturation plugin in your FX chain? I find I add a saturation plugin, and I touch it, I can clip super fast. I've tried Waves tape saturations, to their Saphria (or something), to Fabfilters Saturn (I think my brain has left the building), to other ones, and adding back the "error" is as important as the reverb for us to hear the sound as if it was natural, (or us old guys are used to the errors introduced by analogue equipment and it just sounds good to us).
Cause for vox I use a multiband eq cuts> compress with some version of an 1176 > de ess > de breathe > reverb (front speed) send FX channel > saturation send FX channel > eq my mess (an API like one this time though) not reintroducing sibilance, sometimes having it parallel processed and hammered hard with only a fast attack compressor, and make up eq and mixed back. So I'd have the main vox track, a duplicate vox track compressed super hard and eq'd back as best I can, and 2 send FX channels all together. I am of the opinion, reverb exists in at least three spaces: front, mid and back. And saturation I separate cause it somehow fluffs everything up and adds too much energy. Even the Melodyne version, imo.

I've listened very carefully to the Bieber, "Love Urself" and they didn't use a debreather on him. At first it seemed it was produced by a friend of his that may be new to this "mixing" stuff, but the more I listened to it, I think everything was intentional. Sometimes, less is more and I don't mean just no debreather, down to the instrumentation, to overall sound.

 

Last edited: May 24, 2016

Some engineers will manually go through the whole vocal and delete every breath sound and all the extraneous little imperfections, create macros in PT to fade to black on every edit in order to get what they believe is as close to perfection as they can get without sucking the life out of the track. Others will ride the fader through its entirety to get a level that doesn't need a compressor. Still others depend on just the sound of the signal going through a compressor without actually compressing the signal to impart the magic that they seek. There are a million and one ways to do the same thing, you just need to try and try and experiment, doing everything and anything until you find out what works for you. Listen to the tracks that you respect and try to emulate the sound with the tools that you have.

 

for mixes that aren't in a live scenario, at some studios i have assisted at, they generally run directly through an 1176 (albeit lightly), then to a neve desk or something of the like. after that, ride the vocals, although, usually done manually and without a fader. it is considered more surgical to some, and i would tend to agree if you want that really modern "professional" sound. that doesn't mean you don't need to compress after the fact, it just means that you don't need to compress for vocal volume changes, and can concentrate any compression used for enhancement to the vocal to bring it to life. compression has many uses as i'm sure you know, and can do different things, but riding the vocal first, or leveling manually, then frees up a track to all kinds of dynamic possibilities without that over-compressed sound. the saturator question depends on the style of music you are doing for sure, and might not even be necessary. also depends on the wave form generator that is chosen to emulate (depending on the saturator), but if i do use a saturator, we are talking, like, two percent in the digital realm; just very lightly basically. but in a mix, sometimes it gives it the cut-through i need. that is why people love tube preamps. same principle, adding harmonics, but in the digital realm you always need to tread lightly because you can overdo things very very fast. the reason people end up buying an analog tube pre is because you can add more saturation and it wont sound like crap, and also the "imperfections" or rather, random "variation" to the saturation makes it sound even more humanized, which everyone still wants.

 

with debreathing, i usually just "strip silence" and do it manually from there, to taste. if your music is worth it to you, doing certain things manually can make all the difference. i used to think i could get away with using certain plugins to do certain jobs, but at the end of the day and all the tweaking they require, sometimes it is even quicker to just roll up your sleeves and get in there manually. people who don't mix or produce can hear the difference in a lot of stuff i didn't think they could recognize, but they just don't know why it is that way, how it gets that way, and usually don't care. they just want a good sound hah. people don't really care about the whole "it's not finished" or "i meant for it to be kinda different than it is" thing. they just want a good sound. that is where we come in to evoke that emotion.

 

@MrMister Cool, I missed your comments, before I responded. So they are recording the automation of gain thru the track first twiddling the track's fader on their vox, then do other stuff? Hmmm, my vast experience approaching 3 months sure missed that. I will try that too. So the mixer/master is the compressor himself! Do you have any opinion as to why Bieber kept the breaths in, in "Love Yourself?"

@superliquidsunshine My training may bias me (doing grad level Biochem last year in Stuyvesant HS, then various fields, winding up a medic), and I have noticed over time, my ears are getting trained and definitely can hear more and more finely, but I can't believe we can't forensically analyze this stuff. I find that hard to believe. In my life objective measures rule. Did my second son "smell" like me and my wife, yes, but a DNA test sure put me at ease. Subjective measures, even what colors I like change over time and days, it's really weird to watch, so how not so with listening to music and trying to be accurate and precise...must vary too.

 

Last edited: May 25, 2016

ta tranquilo, ta favoravel is a Mc Bin Laden song, it means something like evrything is cool, good to go (-ish)
he used a lick of the song in the video you gave us.
you can see him (& others) on a Vice show called Noisey (in Brazil) ...
the guy is "mad", and the rhythms of his brazil-funk may be difficult to apprehend for some people
there's some interesting "programming gimmicks & ideas" in his riddims

sorry again for the off topic

can't say much, but the sound is very very (very very very) clean for a live performance, I understand people who said lipsync.
I actually thought there was other people backstage singing along, the cleanliness is too weird here.
(xonar d2 + beyer dt770)

bololo ha ha , bololo ha ha ha haa

 

This looks definitely like it could've been overdubbed...

performing live, even with dynamic microphones like that, there would definitely be bleed, and i thought they might've used some noise reduction, which there probably is a touch of, more likely on the instruments though... and there's no way an auditorium that large sounds that dry unless treated..

what they probably did was take bits and pieces of the live performance tracks that were recorded, noise reduction, and overdubbed anything that didn't work and mixed it; common technique from live recording from Duke Ellington days to Depeche Mode 101 to modern live performances sold as 'live'

the video by Eboe is what a typical live vocal sound would sound like.. even with the processed reverb on it, you can feel the natural reverb of the room

 

Haha that's where I found out about him! I love the Brazilian production, the drum patterns and vocal rhythms are so new to me, I love it

Is this the reason the Waves Vocal Rider exists? I've used it before with a C1 just to ' give back the life the compressor took '. I'll give manuel riding a try though, luckily I have a MIDI controller with a pretty decent fader.

It's the mastered audio with video of one of their live shows that played, I was fooled too, sounded too good to be true hehe, but you might right in terms of the percussion though, it would be a cool thing to mix up some live stems with a studio record.

Ahh good old strip silence, haven't used that since my Pro tools days, i'm pretty used to manually editing breaths etc, sometimes I even lower the level of them instead of remove them, as I remember once reading about some listeners who said they enjoyed hearing the breaths of their favorite artists as it gave them a more 'real' experience.

 

I think this is good practice, and very smart of you. When I totally strip the breaths off of my vocal tracks I always think it sounds weird, audibly unnatural. If I just create a fade before the next word and bring the breaths down to barely audible levels, much better result.

 

Me too, just until recently. Izotope de-breath does an awsome job: it can set an amount of db to it bring down or it can be set too a nominal target level of breaths. So I combine the two for what suits best

 

In my life objective measures rule. Did my second son "smell" like me and my wife, yes, but a DNA test sure put me at ease. Subjective measures, even what colors I like change over time and days, it's really weird to watch, so how not so with listening to music and trying to be accurate and precise...must vary too.

I feel that my perception informs me about how I feel about certain certain things, but unless we are talking about change on the quantum level (which is change none the less), things like frequecies tend to remain rather solid and unwavering. F below middle C is always that same rascally F, but it may irritate me when played in conjunction with a buzzsaw tuned a diminished 3rd, some days more than others. It is more about relationships and not the things themselves.

 

@superliquidss I beg to differ, only cause I just got lucky and am watching a tut that makes a lot of sense...so this is from a guy teaching mixing one sec, checking for his name again..."Achieve the Mixdown you Always Wanted" Has a wiggly "S" logo;

He prefers to use multiple reference tracks while he's mixing and goes to them every ~10mins for about ~3 secs to in effect "reset" his ears. He said if he didn't, and just mixed without references, he wound up going done a path that was almost always unpredictable. So our hearing and perception of our hearing changes over time like days, but also hours and potentially few minutes, so using our ears as our machine/objective measuring device can be done, but with having to reset often (I still think, uh oh). So I don't mean perfect pitch*
--------------------------------------------------------

But with regards to vocals the dude said something else to explain compression that makes it more meaningful to me and is relevant to this thread:
He used an example after this explanation: The purpose of compression is to allow the range of emotional expression of the softest and loudest parts of your instruments/tracks to be heard without losing (as much as possible) the loudest by over compression or the softest by lack of compression. There is an emotional dynamic between the loudest and softest sounds a human voice can produce. The human voice can shout and they can whisper, but with compression, both the shout and whisper can be heard and clearly understood, with the proper use of compression. That emotional dynamic can be maintained with a little help at times with compression.

Then he turned on pink noise^ to represent your music, after he said, "consider my voice a synth." Then he spoke loudly and softly, and you could hear the loudest, not really hear the softest, but hardly understand either. Then without stopping, he played a properly compressed recording of his voice with the pink noise, (or given he was using Ableton, it was his voice again in real time, idr, I was too shocked) and both his soft and loud speech were clearly audible. To me, I finally understood, all the flowery descriptions other engineers were saying for their kicks or snares after they go, ohh that sounds good) For some reason that finally got me to understand compression+

Hopefully, this may help to understand how compression was used with the vox for the example tracks that started the thread, to sound "so upfront," which now I think means as much clearly understandable, as it is heard. Idk about you guys, but when you get older, you will think ppl are mumbling, so you hear ppl's voices, but can't understand them. That's what my 82/76 y/o parents say alot, because that is a sign of hearing loss, and they don't understand that... Compression, not only makes things audible in the mix, but understandable, and that may be it's real power. You not only hear an instrument that is getting drowned out, but hear it clearly.

Anyone know why the avg Brit/German tutorial is was more insightful than the avg US dude? It makes me nervous...

--------------------------------------------------------------
*which I've had since I played the clarinet like a robot as a kid fearing emotion...but perfect pitch only makes most gfs sound horrifying while singing ya know...the ones that can actually sing to me are goddesses.
^all freqs equal gain which I thought was white noise, so I have to look that up now
+took 6 different explanations, over close to 3 months, trying not to do a modified white man dance while I'm typing...

 

Last edited: May 25, 2016

Interesting. I got rid of Nectar because I've been trying to stick to stuff I own and I feel Izotope is all so overpriced that I'll never buy it. But maybe I'll try it out again and wait for a sale if I like it.

 

you can set your strip silence so that it doesn't take out the breathes and then you can edit manually to taste. in my opinion, it's good to do to save some time, but doesn't need to strip out the breathes and make it mechanical.