Mix Tip - Getting creative with effects for mixing vocal breaths

Hey guys, David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com and theproaudiofiles.com. Super excited to be back making tutorials. We’ve got one today it’s gonna be kinda quick. But this is a creative touch that I gave the breaths for the artist Redimi2. And we just finished up his album. Go check that out on iTunes. Some incredible stuff there and I’m gonna hit play and then we’re gonna show you briefly what I did and hopefully it inspires you to maybe think outside the box with things like breaths or S’s or any of that kind of stuff. So here we go. [rap vocal mix] Pretty sweet, right? So very basically all I did was while I was going through and reducing the breaths with clip gain, I select them and kind of just drop those down. Little keyboard shortcut and make my way through this song to lower the breaths to a tolerable level I felt like creatively those breaths gave it a nice little pause in the track and who knows, he may have intended for me to do something like this. I have no idea. But the beauty of technology, Redimi2 speaks very little english and I speak absolutely no Spanish. So we use email and translation to communicate. We made it through a whole record like that. It’s absolutely incredible. But back to topic, I felt like creatively it could be something cool to do there, so I copied these breaths and a few more throughout the track down to their own track. Removed the lows from them, nothing fancy there. More on the FabFilter Pro-Q 2 in a minute, in another set of videos. But then i’ve got the Pro-C, shoutout to FabFilter on this one. Just hitting it with some compression. And if you were lucky enough to catch my post or any of the posts on the Plug & Mix bundle, they recently sold their bundle for — I think it was like 50 bucks for the entire batch — and I paid like $250 last year. So incredible plugins, not even just for the price. There are a couple of the plugs within their bundle that could sell for more than the whole bundle themselves. But enough about that. I pulled that open, dialed in the preset for, it looks like the basic preset and then I just tweaked it a little bit for the decay time and — actually I don’t even know if I touched it much. Moving on from that I’ve got the Plug & Mix Moody Filter. I did touch this one. Pulled the blend back a little bit and I liked what this was doing so let’s take a listen in solo to these breaths. [rap vocal breaths with effects] Nice. Just kind of a quick blast of verb, a little verb splash on just the breaths. And that was it, one more time in the track. You guys can see I was playing with those filters. Get creative. Sometimes I’ll throw Sansamp, love Sansamp, any kind of saturation plugins. Oneknob is great for that. But in this case I just kind of stopped at the third or fourth one and one more time let’s hear it in the track. [rap vocal with breath effects] Sweet, so I exaggerated it there at the end so you can hear it a little better. But man I hope that inspires you to get creative with breaths, S’s, anything that’s kind of random within the vocal or music and pull it to a new track, treat it with something different and give a little creative splash to it. So don’t forget: david@davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com, and the amazing theproaudiofiles.com and we’ll catch you guys on the next one.