Every Song On Earth Should Use This Vocal Mixing Trick

This is how the biggest songs in the world fit the vocal and instrumental together, like puzzle pieces. I've mixed hundreds of tracks this year, and I've used this technique in every single one, and I bet you'll start using it in every track too. With any mix, there's going to be a huge problem.

The left window is the frequency spectrum of the instrumental and the right is of the vocals. At any moment in time, If we layer the vocal on top of the instrumental, you can see they're fighting for space. It's like if I play a note on a piano, then the same note with a bell, then play them together.

Then the bell sound gets kind of lost. That's exactly what's happening with the vocal and instrumental and this fight for space. It's happening 44,000 times every second.

That's why EQing the instrumental doesn't really solve the problem to make space for the vocals because the frequencies are constantly changing. So here's the solution. Everything in this project that isn't a vocal I have running into this instrumental bus.

Now I'll find my lead vocal track. I want the instrumental bus that I made to be able to hear that vocal, and I've already mixed this vocal, so I'll send it after all of the effects to a new bus. I'll put that in pre fader mode and turn it to zero decibels.

That might look advanced, but all I've basically done is make a copy of the processed vocal, but I'm going to change the output of this copy to no output. Now, when I hit play, no sound comes out, the audio is going into that bus and then hitting a dead end. We're going to use that ghost audio to affect the instrumental.

So I'll go back to that instrumental bus and I'll add this plugin Soothe. Now, this isn't an ad for Soothe at all. I just find it's the best way to do this trick.

But if I were to do an ad, it would be for my new mixing course that just dropped at bigzcourses. com. I show my entire mixing process and mix two songs from scratch.

It's expensive, but it's really in depth. It's for people looking to invest in their music careers. If it's not for you, it's all good.

Just keep watching all the free stuff that I put out. Anyway, back to the video. I'm sure most of you guys know this plugin.

It's like a dynamic EQ that reacts to the level of audio like this, but it can be much more precise. So I'm going to side chain it to that vocal bus we set up before, which was bus 26. Then I'm going to adjust some of the settings here.

Now, the instrumental can listen to the vocals. I'll show you what I mean by clicking this delta button here. That sounds so weird, but I wanted to show you that because we're going to do the exact opposite.

We're going to carve out that space from the instrumental. So 44,000 times every second This thing is changing the tone of the instrumental based on what the vocal is doing. So now if we take a snapshot of the frequency spectrum, they're going to fit together more like puzzle pieces, but we want this effect to be a little more subtle.

I like carving out around two or three decibels of space, so it sounds more natural. Thanks for watching. Peace.