In this week’s Audio Premium content, Björgvin Benediktsson teaches you five techniques for enhancing vocals. While the screenshots for this tutorial are taken in Logic Pro, the content is not Logic-centric and is equally useful and valuable in any software that deals with sequenced music.

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The vocal is the most important thing to a hit song. It encompasses the melody, rhythm and structure of a track. If you took the vocals out of some of your favorite tracks, they would probably become a repetitive mass of kick, snare and the four chord trick. It’s the vocal layered on top that gives the song soul and feel. That’s not to say that you should get away with recording a melody, putting it on top and then just leaving it. As mixing engineers we have to be aware that however soulful the lyrics and performance are, there are many mixing tricks we can do to push the envelope even further. What follows are a few mixing tricks to try on your vocal tracks. They may not work on every track, but these vocal mixing tips can give an interesting edge to your vocal recordings.

You have probably heard these effects before in some of your favorite tracks. Maybe you have wondered about how to recreate them. I’m going to shed some light on some vocal tricks used in modern recordings, from simple delay effects to robotic vocoding.

Here’s the kind of music you’ll be able to create once you harness the knowledge inside:

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Table of Contents

• 1. The Megaphone Effect
• 2. 100 ms Delay Effect
• 3. Creepy Whisper Effect
• 4. Advanced Artificial Double Tracking
• 5. The Vocoder Effect
• Conclusion

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