The #1 Audio Engineering Membership For Turning Your Mixes Into Professional Songs
Limited Seats
How to Tame a Shrill Vocal
Sometimes, a mix is only as good as its vocal. When it comes to a shrill lead vocal, if left unchecked, it can make the track unlistenable and undo all the hard work put into a production. That’s why it’s so crucial to tame harsh frequencies in the lead vocal track.
As for most issues that you’ll come across in mixing, there is a solution.
Follow These 4 Steps to Quickly and Effectively Tame Your Vocal
Step 1: Solo your lead vocal and view your frequency analyzer. Using this analyzer you can easily see which frequencies, the “ess” sound is occupying.
Notice the increased amplitude between 5kHz. and 10kHz.
Step 2: Using your go-to equalizer, attenuate those frequencies, using a Q that covers only those frequencies. You don’t want to turn down frequencies that aren’t harsh, or present in the “ess” sound.
Use the EQ to turn down the same frequencies you noticed in Step 1
Step 3: Use a “Deesser” plugin so that the “ess” frequencies are compressed whenever sung. Pull down the threshold until roughly 6dB is being compressed. To much and the sound of the compression will become noticeable.
Reduce the threshold like a regular compressor
After these 3 steps, your vocal should be controlled. If you want to go one step farther you can use some advanced audio knowledge and implement the “masking effect.” The masking effect is when one set of frequencies, overpowers and covers or masks, a similar or identical set of frequencies. You can use this effect creatively to further blend the “ess” sound into your mix.
Step 4: Place an equalizer on your mix - one without the lead vocal. Using this equalizer amplify the same frequencies you attenuated in your vocal track. These amplified frequencies will in turn mask the same frequency range in the vocal track.
Using the Masking Effect to cover up shrill frequencies in the vocal
Conclusion:
Taming a vocal isn’t too difficult, but is often avoided, or made an afterthought during the mixing process. By following the simple steps listed above, you’ve handled a problem most engineers ignore. Listen to all aspects of your mix. They’re all important, deserve attention, and contribute to the overall listenability of your mix.
How Do You Tame A Shrill Vocal?
So, Why A Membership?
Let’s face it — trying to create professional mixes without the correct knowledge, tools, services, and network is like playing a concert with a broken instrument to an audience of no one.
That’s where the Sage Audio membership comes in — the membership gives you everything you need to create professional mixes consistently.
The membership is the secret to your success — it’s the difference between the 1,929,999,999 of poor-sounding mixes and the .00000002% of mixes that make people say 'WOW!"
There are 7 unique value-points included in your Sage Audio membership.
Let’s go over each one so you can decide if the membership is right for you.
1. Sage Audio University
SAU Flagship Mixing Course: 23-video in-depth mixing course that reveals the little-known secrets of mixing and matches the needs of the new music industry.
SAU Flagship Mastering Course: 19-video in-depth modern mastering course that dives into every nuance of making professional-sounding masters.
SAU Pre-Mastering Course: Concise pre-mastering course that details the latest industry standards for preparing your mixes for mastering.
SAU is designed for every experience level, ranging from budding mixing engineers to advanced engineers. The techniques and concepts taught can be applied to any DAW to create industry-leading mixes without expensive software or plugins - and free plugin alternatives are suggested throughout each course.
Each SAU course includes Start-to-Finish session walkthrough lessons for multiple genres so you can follow along with your preferred genre.
SAU Certification Document, which can be downloaded and showcased on your website and social channels.
The Sage Audio private 1-on-1 Mentorship gives you direct access to us for advanced mixing feedback, in-depth discussions, and customized guidance that's tailored to your specific needs.
Unlimited private access to us for advanced mixing feedback, where we provide detailed suggestions for improvement.
Unlimited private access to us for in-depth discussions to help you improve every aspect of your mixes and masters.
Customized guidance that’s tailored specifically to your needs.
Fast communication so you can improve your skills quickly.
Unlimited professional mixing feedback directly from us so you can consistently improve your skills and create professional mixes.
Mixing feedback is invaluable, and the Sage Audio membership gives you continual direct access to us for real-world feedback so you can improve every aspect of each of your mixes while you're in the process of mixing.
50 free mastered songs per year with your own dedicated professional mastering engineer so you can get all your mixes sounding like professional songs.
You get your own dedicated Sage Audio mastering engineer to create custom masters that are specific to you and sound exactly how you want.
Unlimited revisions with your dedicated mastering engineer. As a standard of our service, we are not happy until you are happy with the sound of your masters.
All masters are delivered as commercial, industry-standard high-resolution 24-bit HD WAV masters so they will sound clean and clear on every platform.
The Sage Audio community is a tight-knit community of passionate audio engineers who can provide you with additional real-world mixing feedback, meaningful discussions, networking, collaborations, and more.
Access 700+ in-depth Sage Audio mixing and mastering videos - curated and organized into categories so you can easily take a deep dive into all aspects of audio engineering with thousands of hours of concise, expertly crafted Sage Audio videos to continually improve your skills at your own pace.
