VOCAL CHAIN

Through my years of experience, I’ve found myself experimenting a lot with different vocal templates. What is the criteria for a clean-sounding vocal mix? I’ve been given the necessary educational tools to learn about engineering in extensive detail during my time at Sonic Arts Center (CCNY) as well as by working with industry professionals, and, of course, just countless hours of trial and error at my studio in New York City. As a producer, I came to a conclusion that each sound in my color palette has to be intentional. Mixing is like the color theory in design - if you mix red and blue, you get purple. Similarly, in engineering those colors are the audio processing units (compression, EQ, saturation, reverb, delay, tape emulators, and so on). Of course there is only so much plugins can do if the quality of the recorded audio is distorted, muffled, or has obvious dynamic pops. However, even then it’s possible to resurrect the performance with Izotope’s RX10 in some instances.

All professional artists have their own unique vocal chain that they use during real-time recordings and studio mixes. I’ve carefully crafted a selection of channel strip settings for lead vocal tracks that can be used universally on most timbres and musical genres. The tab below will direct you to download the zipped file, which contains three elements:

• a detailed user manual explaining the order and choice of plugins under “Vocal Chain Manual.pdf”;

• a “Presets” folder, which contains the vocal chain (“SophieFayVocalChain”), two effect sends presets (“SophieFayReverbSend” & “SophieFayDelay”), Auto-Tune settings for Antares (“SophieFayAntaresAutoTune”), and Fabfilter Pro-C 2 parallel compression plugin settings (“SophieFay_PCompFF”);

• for those who wish to download the Logic Pro X session file, you can find it under “SophieFay_VocalChainTemplate.”

Have fun playing around with the template & presets! :)