A client’s vocals wouldn’t sit with his backing track whatever he did with the volumes, so I showed him how to use EQ on the backing track to make room at the frequencies the vocal was using.
He had produced the backing track himself and sent it to a singer he’d met through an online freelance site, who recorded the vocals and sent them back. He had put reverb and compression on the vocals, because he’d learned on YouTube that it was a good technique, but they still didn’t sit right. When he adjusted the volumes, either the vocals overwhelmed the backing track or the backing track overwhelmed the vocals.
This is a classic problem in studio recording, and it’s one that is often solved at the mixing stage. A mix engineer would approach it not by changing the overall volumes but by changing the volume of particular frequencies. We needed to turn down the frequencies in the backing track that were clashing with the vocal, so I showed him how to do it.
Finding where the vocal sits
He was using Ableton Live, so we started by putting an EQ with a spectrum analyser on the vocal, though the same approach works in any DAW. The analyser showed the vocal sitting mainly around 300 Hz, with clear harmonic peaks at around 600 Hz and 1.2 kHz.
The singer had used a dynamic microphone, and the frequencies were quite sharp rather than spread evenly the way they might be on a condenser recording. I didn’t see that as a problem, but it gave the vocal a particular tone that we had to work with in the EQ settings.
Cutting the backing track
Next we put a second EQ on the backing track, a parametric EQ with two fairly tight cuts. With the Q we wanted a narrow dip, but not so narrow that it made no audible difference.
- 300 Hz: gain about -8 dB, Q about 5.
- 600 Hz: gain about -5 dB, Q about 5, to leave space for the vocal’s first harmonic.
Those two cuts made notches in the backing track exactly where the vocal was sitting.
After the cuts the backing track no longer overwhelmed the vocals, which meant we could balance the two with the faders.
We ended up raising the backing track and lowering the vocals, and both parts sat much more evenly together.
We used one EQ across the whole backing track submix, which is a rough and ready way of doing it. For more precise control you can put EQ on the individual elements of the backing track, such as the guitars, drums and piano, and set their levels separately.
I first learned this technique from David Gibson’s book The Art of Mixing. It has since been made into a video, also called The Art of Mixing, about an hour and a half long, which shows the mix visually with ovals labelled with the names of the instruments. If you search Google Images you’ll also find pictures that explain the idea. If your vocal problem is clicks rather than clashing frequencies, I’ve also written up a case where the plugin order in Logic was causing clicks on a compressed vocal.
When a vocal and a backing track won’t balance on the faders, look at where the vocal sits on an analyser and cut the backing track there.
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