The eleventh Yuletide Trickster to wreak havoc on your home studio is Doorway Sniffer.

Don't shoot the messenger dear reader. I didn't make these names up.

Doorway Sniffer has an acute sense of smell and with his long nose he sniffs out the nasal frequencies of your vocal tracks, making them sound telephony and thin.

So when you get into your studio today, your vocals all sound harsh, nasally and thin. Nothing like the powerful and present vocals you had spent so much time working on the day before.

But then you remember the tricks from Expert Home Vocals that help you get those powerful vocal sounds back.

"Boosting 1 - 2 kHz sometimes works to bring out enough edge in the vocal, but beware of boosting too much because it might make the vocal too honky and nasal-sounding. If your vocalist sounds like they have a bit of a cold then cut around the 1 kHz area to get rid of it. Too much of a cut will sound worse than just having a cold so make sure you’re subtle about it."

In addition, you may sometimes encounter something called the lower-nasal area, which is the low-mid version of nasally sounding vocals. This sounds more like congestion than a cold and has a weird honkiness in the 300 - 400 Hz area that you can also try to get rid of.

And maybe...two smaller cuts in both areas will feel better than one big cut in either area. From there you can also try masking the frequency areas by boosting the frequencies directly above the frequencies you're trying to hide. Mask the 300 Hz congestion area with some weight from 500 Hz, and add some clarity or presence by boosting the vocals around 3 - 5 kHz.

There are all sorts of EQ tricks ready for your try out inside EQ Strategies - Your Ultimate Guide to EQ.

Tomorrow's Yuletide Trickster is straight out of a horror story. He's got a hook for a hand and he knows what you did last summer with your terrible snare drum.

But more on that...tomorrow.