Mixing Rap Vocals with Frequency Dependent Sidechain Compression
[rap vocal]
Overall the vocal sounds pretty good but from time to time it’s sounding a little bit too nasally. There’s a little bit of a tone around the 1k zone that just pops out. But it pops out in a dynamic way. It’s either not too present at all or it’s just flying forward. So, a good way to address this is to grab a compressor and if it has something with a sidechain, you can EQ the sidechain to focus in on a certain frequency band.
So instead of the compressor reacting to the entire sound, it’s actually just reacting to a given frequency. This is not the same as multi-band compression. Multiband compression would only reduce that frequency. This is going to reduce the entire signal, but it’s only going to reduce this entire signal as a reaction to that specific frequency. In other words, here’s the signal in itself.
[female rap vocals]
Here’s what’s feeding the detector circuit of the compressor.
[rap vocal]
Here’s the result.
[rap]
So it’s not really EQ, it’s compression, but it’s compression that’s reacting to such a specific frequency, it almost acts like EQ. I’m not so sure I actually set the band right though.
[rap vocals]
Yeah I think I might like that better. I’d have to play with it for a bit, but anyway, that is a way of using frequency-dependent compression.
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