The attack time needs to be fast because a vocal can have parts that are percussive and the noise gate will open late and the word or 1st alphabet of a phrase wont be audible and that will reduce the clarity of the vocal. For this to work well, I use an expander instead of a noise gate because it is a lot gradual and it makes it easy to get the right envelope settings (attack and release). Most controls found on a gate are similar to the ones on a normal compressor such as the threshold, attack, release and some have a range as well as a ratio parameter.Ī gate with most, if not all, controls will help make this dynamic processing a lot smoother as compared to a simple gate that mutes the sound completely. The use of gates during vocal mixing is to eliminate background noise in parts where the vocalist doesn’t sing/rap.

Most gates mute the signal completely while some allow you to set the compression to be just partial. Gate Processing TipsĪ gate processor mutes signals with low volume and it only modifies the RMS level of a signal. Tip – There’s no right or wrong way for producing great audio mixes, use the rules as a guide and always trust your instinct. Once that’s done the next thing is to put all thoughts into practice. Now the 1st thing I do is listen to the vocals and try to get a rough picture of the final results in my mind. Once you’re certain that you have a good recording that is ready for mixing then you’ve won half of the battle. So make sure your vocal recording is proper. What you need to know is that if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out.

The key to getting the right vocal mix is to make sure you get it right from the source. I’m not going to cover anything related to recording as I’m going to make a post about that in the next coming days. That means this post is going to be very long so grab a cup of coffee, tea, wine or whatever you prefer and be comfortable. This is a concise guide so it doesn’t matter what you’re using and if you have problems applying the knowledge then spend some time learning your software or plugins.Īs you may know I did a short post about mixing vocals in 4 easy steps and this time I want to give you something that is more detailed and help you learn how to make vocals stand out in a mix. You could be mixing vocals in Pro Tools, FL Studio, Garageband, Cubase 5, Studio One or using any plugins whether Waves, UAD or stock plugins. Before we get started, I have to make it clear that this tutorial will work with whatever DAW you’re using.

Mixing rap vocals in fl studio