FL Studio Vocal Mixing

Welcome to the only article you will need to read to get ready to mix professional vocals as a beginner. This method of FL Studio Vocal Mixing works great for rap vocals but will work just fine for any other genre just make sure to use your ears to generate the same feeling you want in your reference track.

What is Vocal Mixing?

Vocal mixing is the process of setting up your recorded vocals on top of the beat/instrumental you have made/purchased earlier. The goal is not to let the beat or vocals overpower the track.

The goal is to cut the highs and lows that are unwanted, maintain the dynamic range, make sure the vocals sit on the beat and the right feel is being produced with respect to the genre. For example, for modern rap, you will need a good amount of delay, pitcher and reverb but for old school rap you might even want your vocals to be as dry as possible

Got it? now let’s mix these vocals

1. Have vocals in a separate bus

Make sure to have your vocals in a separate bus in the mixer chain. You will need to do this so you can make sure the effects we will add are only being added to your vocals and not anything else.

fl studio vocal mixing — FL Studio Vocal Mixing: Make sure to have vocals in a separate bus/channel in the mixer

The biggest mistake you will make while mixing: forcing your listeners to pay more attention than necessary to get to listen to the vocals or other elements of the song. While maintaining the presence of other things not related to vocals is done in mastering. In this instance, we will focus on the vocals only.

2. Level the vocals

Press Ctrl and select all the elements in your mixer chain. Decrease the volume by 5 to 7 dB down. This will give you room to bring up the volume of the vocals that are generally being overpowered by the beat!

Now it’s time for your to use your headphones/speakers and your ears and bring up the volume of vocals slowly. your ears will tell you when it’s too loud or too quiet you just need the sweet spot for now. Do not worry if it’s a little bit too loud or quiet it will get fixed later on. You just need a good starting point. Make sure to not exceed the initial 0db position.

3. Let’s do some subtraction/corrective EQ

In this method of EQ, we simply get rid of the frequencies in our vocals that we don’t want. The human hearing range is 20hz to 20,000 Hz anything below or beyond this is unwanted frequencies.

But remember it’s not just about the frequencies that are not in that range. Different elements will need to be subtracted that are within this range too depending on if it’s a kick, bass, vocal etc. Low frequencies we don’t need are called mud, higher frequencies we don’t need are called high ends

Remove mud

fl studio vocal mixing eq — FL Studio Vocal Mixing: Insert a high pass filter to remove mud

By moving it around you are getting rid of the unwanted frequencies make sure to listen to the track while you do so.

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Remove high ends

Now similarly, add a low pass filter to get rid of high ends. Move around the nob use your ears and keep the steep tight to not cut too much.

order steep fl — Make sure the order is steep enough so it does not cut too much

highs lows cut eq — You can see how the highs and lows are cut here

Remove resonance frequencies (that lie in the middle)

Whistling sounds, disrupting sounds, sound breaks all exist in the middle region of your vocals usually because most people will have a higher-pitched voice. You will use the leftover nobs, play the song keep your steep tight and find frequencies at the very top that you don’t need and bring them down using the panels on the right-hand side.

Do not bring frequencies down by hand u will cut too much. And when u do bring the nob down try not to exceed too much in most cases bring it down 2 to 4 dB.

Now use the leftover nobs and pick frequencies that u don’t want in the middle

Example of subtractive eq lows highs resonance frequencies cut

4. Compression time!

If you did your eq right your vocals already sound a lot better and louder and you must feel motivated. So let’s keep going

Compression is done to reduce the difference between the highs and lows of your vocals. The bigger the difference the more stress will be on the listeners ear the lesser the difference the more comfortable and enjoyable the experience for the listener is. So this dynamic range needs to be made as equal as possible.

fl studio compression — Set ratio and play with the threshold

You only have to worry about two features in the plugin ratio and threshold. You can set the ratio to whatever u want don’t make it too low or high, 3:8:1 is a good starting point.

All you are gonna do now is to move the threshold nob to the place where your vocals are not starting to lose volume. So listen to your song and move the threshold to an appropriate position. if your vocals have started to lose volume just right before that is where u will keep the threshold limit to. Most of your compression is done there. If the volume is too low increase the gain by just a little bit.

Gain is different than volume, as volume brings out all the frequencies, the gain will only bring out your filtered frequencies so do not overdo it.

gain nob fl studio — Increase the gain a bit, if volume is coming too low

5. Bring out that WaveShaper

After cutting the unwanted frequencies and fixing the dynamic range now it’s time to increase the wanted frequencies and give a boost to the vocals.

Do not overdo this, we are just adding some harmonics here.

6. Let’s do some Pitch Correction

If you are mixing old school or drill rap do not add any pitch correction as it is not required but if you are mixing modern rap or trap or for the most part any other genre that focuses on melody u are going to need this.

pitch correction vocal mixing — Insert the key, remove any notes that you might not have sung, adjust the speed

You will need to have some knowledge of music theory and the concept of pitch correction for this.

If you made the beat or you purchased the beat you must know the key it is in. Just insert that key here and adjust the Speed accordingly. You can remove notes within that key that u might not have sung so make use of that if at a lower speed pitch correction is too much.

Pro tip: you can use the pitcher plugin to change gender voices in your adlibs using the format option in the pitcher.

Pro tip2: You can delete the breathing voices by using the cutter tool in melodic rap this might make your song sound better. Just remember to consolidate the leftover cuts you want.

7. Additive EQ

Cut some more resonance frequencies that will appear after adding the effects above and then slightly increase the higher frequencies by a little to add more power to your vocals.

8. Add some Reverb

Do not add reverb on in the same bus you added all the other effects in. Create a separate bus for reverb and link your vocal bus to it. This is also called sidechaining. You do not want the dry and wet signal to fight before they reach the master that’s why we sidechain.

push dry all the way down, increase your low cut and high cut by a little bit (700hz each) and also give it a tad bit of pre-delay (40ms). When you add a bit of pre-delay it helps clean the vocals out a lot.

reverb settings — Your reverb values should look something like this before you start to adjust

adding reverb mix vocals — Now listen to the song and adjust the reverb by controlling the bus volume nob at the bottom as shown here

Don’t let your vocals echo too much! you just want that sweet reverb effect without the excessive echo.

Pro Tip: the more emotional the song is the more reverb you will add. You can also create an automation clip of the reverb and increase and decrease the amount you want in chorus, verses or more specific parts of your song.

9. Add some delay

Make another bus in the mixer call it delay and link your vocals sub to it as you did before with reverb.

add delay vocal mixing — Make another bus, add a delay plugin to it

Turn off-dry, reduce feedback level, set it as ping-pong and adjust cut-off. Your end goal is to make sure the dry signal and wet signal are almost in sync. You can recognize that by pausing and playing the song repetitively and hearing the delay that is produced when u stop the song. When they have just a slight difference it will sound good to the ears.

fl studio vocals delay — Now adjust how much delay you want while listening to the song

if you keep the delay at a controllable amount when your vocals transition from chorus to verse in that little gap you will hear the delay.

10. Newtone

This is not a part of vocal mixing but vocal processing. You will need to go into the different parts of your song, load them in Newtone and adjust the notes by dragging them up and down in order to put them in the right pitch or notes that are within your key.

Check out this article to learn more about Newtone.

For Hindi Speakers:

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