A simple way to make your vocal fit in the mix

Published: Tue, 06/22/21

Automation is one of the best ways to make your mix sound more exciting.

In fact, I put automation as the last part of any mix. Once you've got everything good and groovy you can use automation to do a lot of different things.

Volume automation.
Making effects come and go.
Making the mix breathe.

In short, automation is a really handy way of making things that sound nice together, play nice together.

But maybe automation isn't just something you leave until the end to check off to feel like your mix is done.

In fact, it's a great tool to use at any points during the mix when you hear something that should stand out more in the mix but you don't want to raise the overall volume of the entire track from start to finish.

Leaving automation until the end feels a bit backwards, especially if you can hear where it's necessary while you're doing your rough mix.

Take the vocals for instance.

Once you've got your mix nice and balanced with levels, the vocal does tend to jump in level depending on the loudness of the part, experience of the singer etc..

It can get a little frustrating.

You could fix this with compression, but if you want to start with the end in mind, how about manually editing the vocal so that each part sounds as loud as you think it should?

You might get a more natural vocal delivery because if you do it manually you're having an actual human being listen to the mix, not a compressor just listening to erratic volume changes in a track.

After automating, you'll have a nice and level voice that you can EQ and compress more accurately, without a sudden squash in compression in a few key moments.

A compressor can make a track sound good, but it's fundamentally an automatic level changer. If you take that part out, you free it up to do what it does best, make your vocal sound good.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Making the vocal sound terrific is only a small part of Step By Step Mixing, but it is one of the more important parts of mixing.

If you haven't got your copy yet, click this link to get started: