Hi!

At which stage of vocal production tuning of the vocal should occur?

I've got a vocal which is compressed, EQed and de-essed, (and generally sits well in the mix). Can I tune a few notes of the vocal right now (after it's processed with these FXs) ?

Can it make a difference if a vocal is tuned before or after compression?

Cheers!

 

When I use vocal tuning plugins I do it before anything else, just because those types of software are so prone to sounding unnatural it makes sense to not throw any additional curveballs at it. But I don't know that some run of the mill mixing stuff would be much of a problem (i.e. no heavy disortions or reverbs, etc.). Although since vocal tuning plugins work by capturing the audio, you're not gonna be able to make any changes to parameters afterwards.

If you use, for instance, Cubase or Studio One, those DAWs have vocal tuning built in at the editor level so it makes the most sense to do it within your DAW (therefore before any other plugs)

 

You can do it whenever you want. But.. you'll get the best results if it's the last thing in your chain before any of these.. vocoding, distortion, pan mod, limiter. And any delay, and reverb should be the very last thing. Reason being is if you Compress, EQ, and DeEss after you tune your vocals you'll detune what you just tuned to a degree based on how heavily you use those.. because you're going to cut portions of the signal that was targeted by the pitch correction, and boost portions that weren't targeted as much. Pitch correction works better when applied after those because there is a more consistent signal for it to target at that point in the chain as well.

 

Last edited: Apr 9, 2017

(I'm on FL Studio)
The vocal I have is run through 2 compressors. The 1st one has a gain reduction (in a few moments) at 7dB.
The 2nd compressor's gain reduction is a few dB
(the vocalist sang very dynamiccally).
I also de-essed and EQed the vocal.

So you say that this is the best place to tune the vocal, right? (after it's compressed, EQed and de-essed)

After tuning the vocal I'm probably gonna limit/compress and de-ess it just a little bit more

(and the last thing in the chain will be a reverb/delay)

So it's a good sequence of processing a vocal, right?

 

Yeah, tuning them after you've cleaned the vocals up and done your initial stages of compression, EQ'ing, and de-essing will give you better results. You didn't mention cleaning and prepping the vocal. If you're not doing that.. you should.. before you even start with the VSTs. The same concept applies.. you should should manually cut your vocal track in every space available so you essentially have isolated cutouts of the individual words and phrases. Then use your clip gain/volume automation to raise/lower your vocal cut pieces to balance the input level across the whole track. Then apply fade ins/outs to any of the portions you find necessary. For example, it's much more suitable to apply fade ins at the beginning of words that have a loud narrow spike in front of them in order to shrink and tame that spike.. than to compress the shit out of the entire vocal track as a way to deal with it. When you prep the vocal track well.. the compression and things you do afterwards will work far better when they're working on balanced input peaks because the gain reduction will be consistent and not jumping in and out sporadically = color morphing.

 

1) Some lowcut, general EQ and gentle HW compression (LA2A or LA3A) pre ADC/DAW.
2) I use Melodyne in the first DAW insert slot.
3) Then comes more lowcut, EQ, compression, EQ, parallel processing, sends, etc.

 

Last edited: Apr 10, 2017