Mixing Vocals at Home: How to Create a Professional Vocal Chain Using Free Plug-Ins

You’ve written a hit, recorded each instrument part and compiled your best vocal takes - now it’s time to glue it all together with a great mix. But how do you process your vocals so that they sound professional without spending thousands of pounds on outboard gear or even expensive plugins?

In this guide, I’ll show you how you can create a vocal chain using free plug-ins to create a professional vocal mix. I’ll include tuning, equalisation, de-essers, compression, saturation and reverb, with recommendations for great free plug-ins so that you can follow along without spending any money.

Before we get started building our vocal processing chain, there’s a few important things to note:

• This guide will help you to create a basic vocal mix, which you can use as a springboard to create the perfect sound for your song - it’s not a definitive guide and might require some adapting or experimentation. I’ll give you an outline of what each aspect of the vocal chain does for your vocal, so that you can decide how best to apply it to your song, genre and style.
• Mixing is a creative process, not just a technical one. This means that this guide is by no means a set of rules and that there isn’t a ‘right’ way of doing things. Whilst following the advice will help you to achieve a vocal sound that we generally accept as ‘good’, feel free to ignore any or all of it if you think that’s the best creative decision for your music.
• Mixing enhances vocals and helps you to get the best out of them, but if you want to have great sounding vocals at the end of the mix, you need a great recording to work with. Take the time to research and experiment with microphones, recording techniques and recording environments so that you have a strong recording to start with. This will mean you have the best results after following the advice in this article. If you'd like an extensive guide on recording great vocals at home, check out Joe Belham's article here.
  

Step 1: Tuning

It’s a controversial topic in the music industry, but vocal tuning and pitch correction (or AutoTune as it is often referred to) is an important part of processing vocals in many genres. Pitch correction isn’t conventional in all genres or styles, so you should consider how authentic you want your vocals to sound. In pop music, it’s common to heavily tune vocals so that they are perfectly in pitch, but most artists steer clear of anything that sounds too unnatural. In rap, grime and dance music, it is more common to have strong tuning that sounds highly artificial, while genres such as rock favour a more authentic, imperfect sound. There are also examples of tuning being used creatively, such as in Billie Eillish’s single ‘NDA’ and Cher’s ‘Believe’. The best way to work out how much pitch correction suits your song is to experiment with different levels to hear how they sound in context. Pay attention to the amount of tuning used in songs with vocals you like the sound of.

It’s important to note that, if you’re using vocal doubles/multiple layers of vocals, you should allow for some discrepancies in pitch. Multiple layers of vocals at exactly the same pitch will sound thin, so allow for a few cents of difference in each layer. Choirs sound so thick and textured because of the slight differences in the pitches being sung, which helps to fill the frequency spectrum.

I’d recommend checking out ‘Grallion 2 Free Edition’ by Auburn Sounds, because it’s a very versatile tuning plugin that can achieve both artificial and realistic sounding vocals. Its user-interface isn’t quite as intuitive as the industry-standard Antares AutoTune, but it’ll also save you a few hundred pounds. The pitch shifting features, paired with the pitch correction algorithm, can also create some interesting vocal effects that you might be able to use creatively in your work.

Step 2: EQ

There are many different approaches to EQ, and they will all likely be effective at achieving the sound you want, but there is one general rule to remember. Equalisation allows you to emphasise the ‘good’ frequencies in your vocal take and lessen the ‘bad’ ones - you can’t create anything new that wasn’t in your recording in the first place. This means that you should aim to get as close to your desired sound as possible when your singer is in front of the microphone, and just use the equalisation aspect of your vocal chain to enhance it. The majority of equalisation should be subtractive, meaning you’re taking away unwanted frequencies.

In 99% of cases, filtering out the low end will help to reduce any rumble that doesn’t add any value to the overall sound. Cutting everything below 80Hz is fairly standard practice for vocals, but you can experiment with bringing this closer to 100Hz for lighter, higher voices. If you have too much going on in the 100-300Hz range, your vocal will sound muddy. Making a cut here will help to improve clarity, but if your vocal is sounding thin a boost may help to add presence. If you have a sub-optimal recording environment, scanning the frequency spectrum for harsh, unpleasant sounds and then cutting them can be helpful. To add more clarity to your mix, add a wide boost in the 2-6kHz range.

Your DAW should have a stock EQ plugin that will be all that you need to make the changes I’ve suggested above. Where possible, opt for a graphic EQ as you’re able to be much more precise with the changes you make.

Step 3: De-esser

Too much sibilance can lead to a really uncomfortable listening experience, so adding a de-esser to your vocal chain is really important. This plugin combines an EQ and compressor, so it’s aptly placed between the two in our chain. Just find the frequency of the sibilance (looping a section of the vocal with a lot of sibilance will make doing this easier) and dial in the amount you’d like that frequency to be compressed. The usual rules of compression apply, so the threshold dictates how loud the sibilance can get before it is compressed, the attack determines how quickly the compression acts, etc.

To check that you’ve selected the correct frequency, watch the light or level metre in the plugin and make sure that the de-esser is only being activated when you’d like for it to be. Listen through the recording to ensure it still sounds natural, but with less harsh sibilance. It’s worth making a note of the settings you use (or saving it as a preset within the plugin) if you’re working with a voice that you’ll likely be mixing again in the future, as this will allow you to get to the right settings faster.

The Tonmann De-esser has a clean, easy-to-use interface that can do everything we need it to, and you can download it for free. I find the stock de-esser in Logic Pro to be more than capable though, so you may not need a third-party plugin for this stage of the vocal processing.

Step 4: Compressor

Dynamic consistency is key to giving your vocals presence within the mix, so it’s important to add compression to your vocal chain. I’ve placed the compressor here as an example, but it is common practice to use multiple compressors spread throughout the processing chain. It is also recommended that you do some gain automation (before any of your plugins are reached), to create dynamic consistency and then just use your compressor to thicken the sound and to help it to cut through the mix.

Take the time to ensure you thoroughly understand what the threshold, ratio, attack time and release time do before experimenting with compression. Then, set your ratio to 3:1 and lower your threshold until you’re getting around 10db of gain reduction (use your make-up gain to recover any lost volume after compression). From here, experiment with your attack and release until you get your desired sound. If you think you need to reduce your dynamic variance further, increase your ratio or add an additional compressor elsewhere in the chain.

Every DAW will feature a compression plugin, and I’d highly recommend learning to use it before searching for alternative plugins. If you’re struggling to get your desired sound with the compressor that comes with your DAW, the problem is probably with the settings you’re using, rather than the plugin itself. It takes time to learn, but once you master compression it’ll make a huge difference to how present your vocals feel in the mix.

Step 5: Saturation

Traditionally, saturation wasn’t something that most producers intentionally added to their processing chains, but rather a natural consequence of the distortion that happened when audio was passed through multiple pieces of analog gear. It creates warmth and harmonics, and will help our vocals to stand out in the mix.

There are a mixture of different types of saturation and there are lots of varying opinions regarding where in our vocal processing chain it belongs. My go to is tape saturation, which (in a digital context) mimics the saturation that would come from pushing too much analog signal onto a magnetic tape. If you’re recording without a dedicated microphone preamp, you may wish to experiment with placing saturation at the start of your vocal chain (even before tuning) to mimic the warmth that would come from having analog processing between your microphone and audio interface.

There are countless free saturation plugins, and you will likely find that (with the right settings and a bit of knowledge about the effect you’re trying to achieve) you can re-use your compression plugin, or use a distortion plugin you already have. That said, I’m a big fan of the BPB Saturator made by Bedroom Producers Blog, because it’s got plenty of versatility when it comes to tube and tape saturation, and the built-in filters can come in handy. It’s also a really light-weight plugin, so it won’t slow you down if your computer isn’t particularly powerful.

Step 6: Reverb and Delay

At the start of this article, I stated that mixing is a creative process and that each of these recommendations is just a starting point for you to build on. Of all the components in this vocal chain, that statement applies the most to reverb and delay, because they’re entirely dependent on the style of your song, the instrumentation you’re using, the voice you’re processing and your recording environment. A vocal with no reverb could sound too dry and not blend into the song well, but a vocal with too much reverb could get lost in the mix and start to lose its presence.

I’d recommend using three buses when experimenting with reverb so that you can easily sculpt the sound you want. On these buses, you should add a short reverb to one, a long reverb to another and a delay to the other. Start by introducing the delay - you’ll quickly work out if it’s the right sound for your track. It’s most suited to music with higher energy and faster vocals that would get washed out by too much reverb. Then you can consider introducing the short reverb to make your vocal sound more full and/or the long reverb to give it more presence within the wider context of the track.

You could also try using an extra EQ to remove some mid/low frequencies if your reverb is making your track muddy, or experiment with sending multiple vocals or even instruments to the same reverb bus, which will help to glue your track together and make it sound like they’re echoing around the same room.

Without a doubt, every producer should at least experiment with Valhalla Supermassive for its long reverbs and echos, but also for shorter reverb sounds. It comes with a bunch of carefully crafted presets and modes, so there will definitely be something to suit your taste.

And there you have it, a complete vocal processing chain that doesn’t cost you anything. It mirrors the work of expensive outboard gear, but can all be done within your DAW. Always remember that everything in this guide is a recommendation and that you should always trust your ears over anything else when it comes to mixing.