How to REALLY Clean Vocals in Your Mixes: 5 Tips

Dec 30, 2020 | 551,421 Views

Hiss. Background noise. Plosive thumps. Exaggerated breathing. Sibilance. These common issues can ruin a great vocal take. Learn how to deal with them to get a super-clean vocal production.

Recording pure vocal takes free of unwanted noise isn't always simple. Loud headphone monitor mixes spilling into the recording; vocalists singing too close to the microphone capsule – these are just two examples of innocent engineering oversights that can result in annoying noise and artifacts in a recording.

If left untreated, these problems can cause problems later in the mix and threaten the quality of your production.

This tutorial shows how you can get rid of these problems quickly, using the C1 compressor/gate, DeBreath, F6 Dynamic EQ, R-Vox, and other vocal plugins.

You’ll learn how to:

00:37 Remove unflattering mouth artifacts between melody lines
03:52 Control and reduce the level of breaths
05:05 Attenuate harsh-sounding sibilance
06:48 Remove low-end plosive thumps
08:33 Eliminate low-level hiss

To fully appreciate these examples, we recommend you watch this video with a decent set of studio headphones or monitors. Some of the examples have subtle details which you may miss if you listen through tablet and smartphone speakers.

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