Live Mixing Vocal Compression

Because humans are expert listeners any small unnatural sounding volume jump or dip will be noticeable and detract from the power of the melody and lyrics.

Live mixing vocal compression.

Compressing a lead vocal isn t always easy but avoiding these mistakes will help you mix vocals that sound modern and musical. Many bloggers will tell you what the perfect vocal compression settings are. Lead vocals in pop and mainstream music are the centre point of the mix. And i don t want to mislead you.

If you must use compression we recommend trying a ratio no higher than 3 1 for live use along with shorter release attack times. Let me state up front that there s no single setting you can use for every vocal track. Your vocals should sound 100x better than they did before especially if you followed all of the other vocal mixing steps mainly equalization first. At this point you re done.

But the truth is it s not that easy. In a live setting try dialing back the compression settings if you re using compression at all on your vocal channel and instead use the volume fader to control how the vocals sit in the mix. It evens out the often erratic levels that a singer can produce and tames transients that can cause digital distortion. I wish i could do that too.

If you want to learn more about using compression on vocals and further improve your mixes you can read my in depth guide to vocal compression and also download my free vocal compression cheat sheet below. To achieve subtle natural sounding compression on your vocal it s best to use multiple compressors throughout the mixing process this is called serial compression. There is no one size fits all formula to vocal compression. Compression settings for lead vocals should be as natural sounding as possible.

Rather than using one heavy compressor with a 10 1 ratio that s applying 10 db of gain reduction it s better to use multiple compressors that each chip away at the. Some recording engineers think compression is a must for vocals.