Use a Ducker to Get Your Vocals (and your kick!) in the Pocket

Have you ever had to mix some really dense backing tracks that made it impossible to find a place for the vocal?

When I was working on building the mix for the Ringling Bros. Out Of This World tour I ran into exactly this problem. Not only did I have a very mid-range dense arrangement, but there was an equally dense sweetener track mixed in at the same volume. The musical director was asking for more sweetener and I was struggling to find a place for the main vocal. The vocal was fighting to be heard over everything else going on.

The solution: a ducker.

This is the first time I relied so heavily on a ducker to make the mix work, but it was pretty simple to set up. I simply inserted the ducker on the channels that were giving me the most trouble and set their sidechains to the main vocal. I set the reduction to as much as 5 dB, which would have been too much with that channel soloed, but you could hardly tell in the context of the entire mix and it was just the amount of help I needed to pull the whole thing together.

I used the same trick on the bass and the some of the low-end heavy synth patches to help with the kick as well.

This article Use a Ducker to Get Your Vocals (and your kick!) in the Pocket appeared first on Sound Design Live. Sign up for free updates here.

Loved this post? Try these:
Stop Turning up the Kick. Get More Bite Instead.
Help, I can’t hear the vocal! Waves Vocal Rider Plugin to the rescue.
Mixing Monitors from FOH: 17 lessons I learned from Grealy at Soulsound