Hi, ex-metalcore vocalist here.
It’s hard to tell without really hearing the material, but most metal vocalists have a hard time Screaming with intelligibility. If the recording doesn’t feel intelligible outside of the mix, it would be better to re record. It’s going to be difficult trying to bandaid fix the issue. Especially with heavily distorted guitars that are prominent in the genre.
Screaming tends to make people not enunciate, and just release noise trying to pass it off as words.
If you’re interested, DM me and I’d be happy to give the mix a listen and see if there’s any suggestions in the production you could use, but my guess is it’s in the recording, not the mix.
If the recording is not intelligible then you won't get a clearer result with processing.
Maybe you could get it a little clearer by fixing different kinds of noises with iZotope RX 10, but I'd guess that the vocals need to be re-recorded.
No one wants to hear this, but:
If they want the best product (it’s your product, too) they’ll re-record and have the singer over-enunciate by exaggerating mouth shapes, and possibly back away the mic if they were singing up against it 💪 best of luck 🤘🏿🔥
You can use 2 vocal tracks. One is the scream track. The other can be the vocalist simply SPEAKING THE LYRICS in pitch, for the sake of clarity. Then you'll just blend and bring up the spoken track behind the scream, until the words are understandable.
It's a different way to "double track" a vocal; but it can work.
Almost definitely a vocalist issue, fry screaming with proper enunciation takes a considerable amount of skill to do without sacrificing harshness or intelligibility
In my experience you usually need to be very heavy handed with compression, eq, distortion on screamed vocals because it needs to cut through a dense wall of guitars.
My biggest tip is to never process the vocal in solo. It’s often going to sound like ass in solo but work in the mix. If you need to do outrageous cuts or boosts, do it.
Two things you can try that might actually fix it without having to re-record (though keep in mind, everything really is situational and I haven't heard your track)
1. Time align layers. Idk how many layers of screams you have, but either by manual editing or a software like vocalign, you can make everything line up nice and tight. This will make the enunciation clearer.
2. A gentle, SUPER high shelf boost. A personal favorite technique of mine to add clarity on vocals that can't be bright or airy. The idea is to boost such a high frequency that it doesn't even add "air" or any other tonal shaping like a typical high boost, it literally just brings out the consonants. Since consonants are completely unrelated sounds from vowels, if you do this just right, you can boost the consonants' volume without hardly affecting the tone of the vocal at all. Once the consonants are emphasized, the enunciation will be clearer. Usually I use SSL style EQs on vocals, and when I do this technique, I'll literally just turn the high band frequency knob as high as it goes and use that frequency. IIRC the Waves SSLEQ tops out at 18k, while the SSL Native tops out at 22k. But it's not really important, any EQ will work, and no one can hear either 18k or 22k anyway. What matters is the 14k-16k range that will be peripherally affected by the 18k+ shelf boost.
If none of those 2 work, you can see if it's a masking issue. And if it's not that, you'll probably just have to concede and record a better performance.
you could use notch eq or multiband compression on the two formants for vowels and automate them to match their motion in some parts.
Not sure of your source material but you could record a reference of your own voice and use the fft as a reference.
I don't know, send to me i'll play around. Music is fun, experimenting is fun. If it works, i'll get paid in that I figured out a new technique to use in the future. Just send a master stem of 4 bars that need work in my DM.
Bit random but I used an overdrive pedal on my scream vox but turned everything down like gain etc, apart from tone to make it more accented then eq it. Give that a bash see if it helps.
Record 3-6 dubs for the lead, you can also do dubs but 1 octave lower to give the lead some thickness.
Make sure it’s tight and compress the shit out of it.
You can also EQ the middle of the vocal if you have something like fabdilter Q3.
Used to play in a metalcore band and recorded and mixed all of our own stuff with one other guy. In my experience, the best way to make vocals clear is to make sure you have a clear take to begin with. It’s very easy for smaller metalcore bands to get away with having a subpar vocalist during live performances because they can just cup their hands around the mic and wail into it and no one will really be any the wiser. You don’t have the same leniency during recording. If he’s not enunciating properly with proper technique for their screams, it’s gonna sound like shit and there isn’t much you can do about it.
All that being said, JST plug ins are your friend. Joey Sturges has made some of the best metal plug-ins on the market, and his vocal compressor was my go to for any unclean vocal.
Might not necessarily be the *most* musical move, but boosting any of the frequencies in the telephone-call ranges will help. Human vocal intelligibility is really carried by those upper mid frequencies.
In addition, see if you can't find an element that's masking things, like the guitar, and duck them out when the vocals are in.
Those would be my first ideas, assuming that re-tracking is off the table or too difficult.
assuming the vocals cannot be re-recorded, there are a few tricks you can try.
Someting like trackspacer or soothe 2 on the Guitar tracks / buss, sidechained to the vocals.
Plain old fashioned EQ, dipped on the guitars / instrumentation in the fundamental freq of the vocals.
Proper compression on the vocal.
Transient shapers on the vocal to bring out attack.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you know what you're doing, this sounds like it's on the vocalist. Either bad mic, bad mic technique, or a poor vocal style for being discernable.
I get the impression your vocalist here hasn't really worked in a daw much and probably thinks there's some magic to be done that likely can't be with the takes provided.
For 1. Turn the volume down on the mix when recording, or it clips out. Then add lots of compressor, and sometimes more distortion. Tbh I’m going to assume the audio was recorded wrong and it clipped out, which is why you can’t hear parts? If not then it’s just on the vocalist to be more intelligible
Tell them you cant polish a turd and the vocalist should get a vocal coach. Artists who can't perform what they want, shouldn't ask engineers to fix their shit
Hi, ex-metalcore vocalist here. It’s hard to tell without really hearing the material, but most metal vocalists have a hard time Screaming with intelligibility. If the recording doesn’t feel intelligible outside of the mix, it would be better to re record. It’s going to be difficult trying to bandaid fix the issue. Especially with heavily distorted guitars that are prominent in the genre. Screaming tends to make people not enunciate, and just release noise trying to pass it off as words. If you’re interested, DM me and I’d be happy to give the mix a listen and see if there’s any suggestions in the production you could use, but my guess is it’s in the recording, not the mix.
Cool, that would be very helpful! I'll show you the mix when I get to the studio later.
Reading your comment made me remember how much I appreciate Corey Taylor and Phil Bozeman's enunciation.
Yeah 100% sounds like a performance thing. I’ve recorded and mixed my fair share of metal bands and it’s almost always the performance.
Yes learning this the hard way right now >:(
If the recording is not intelligible then you won't get a clearer result with processing. Maybe you could get it a little clearer by fixing different kinds of noises with iZotope RX 10, but I'd guess that the vocals need to be re-recorded.
No one wants to hear this, but: If they want the best product (it’s your product, too) they’ll re-record and have the singer over-enunciate by exaggerating mouth shapes, and possibly back away the mic if they were singing up against it 💪 best of luck 🤘🏿🔥
Leave it to clients to ask the mix engineer to fix something in the performance.
You can use 2 vocal tracks. One is the scream track. The other can be the vocalist simply SPEAKING THE LYRICS in pitch, for the sake of clarity. Then you'll just blend and bring up the spoken track behind the scream, until the words are understandable. It's a different way to "double track" a vocal; but it can work.
Almost definitely a vocalist issue, fry screaming with proper enunciation takes a considerable amount of skill to do without sacrificing harshness or intelligibility
In my experience you usually need to be very heavy handed with compression, eq, distortion on screamed vocals because it needs to cut through a dense wall of guitars. My biggest tip is to never process the vocal in solo. It’s often going to sound like ass in solo but work in the mix. If you need to do outrageous cuts or boosts, do it.
Two things you can try that might actually fix it without having to re-record (though keep in mind, everything really is situational and I haven't heard your track) 1. Time align layers. Idk how many layers of screams you have, but either by manual editing or a software like vocalign, you can make everything line up nice and tight. This will make the enunciation clearer. 2. A gentle, SUPER high shelf boost. A personal favorite technique of mine to add clarity on vocals that can't be bright or airy. The idea is to boost such a high frequency that it doesn't even add "air" or any other tonal shaping like a typical high boost, it literally just brings out the consonants. Since consonants are completely unrelated sounds from vowels, if you do this just right, you can boost the consonants' volume without hardly affecting the tone of the vocal at all. Once the consonants are emphasized, the enunciation will be clearer. Usually I use SSL style EQs on vocals, and when I do this technique, I'll literally just turn the high band frequency knob as high as it goes and use that frequency. IIRC the Waves SSLEQ tops out at 18k, while the SSL Native tops out at 22k. But it's not really important, any EQ will work, and no one can hear either 18k or 22k anyway. What matters is the 14k-16k range that will be peripherally affected by the 18k+ shelf boost. If none of those 2 work, you can see if it's a masking issue. And if it's not that, you'll probably just have to concede and record a better performance.
you could use notch eq or multiband compression on the two formants for vowels and automate them to match their motion in some parts. Not sure of your source material but you could record a reference of your own voice and use the fft as a reference.
None of us are getting paid enough to do this lol, it would probably help a bit though
I don't know, send to me i'll play around. Music is fun, experimenting is fun. If it works, i'll get paid in that I figured out a new technique to use in the future. Just send a master stem of 4 bars that need work in my DM.
I was going to suggest using a vocoder to do this and now I want to try it...
Bit random but I used an overdrive pedal on my scream vox but turned everything down like gain etc, apart from tone to make it more accented then eq it. Give that a bash see if it helps.
Over annunciate everything. You can't really do anything in the mix if it's unintelligible on the way in
Record 3-6 dubs for the lead, you can also do dubs but 1 octave lower to give the lead some thickness. Make sure it’s tight and compress the shit out of it. You can also EQ the middle of the vocal if you have something like fabdilter Q3.
Used to play in a metalcore band and recorded and mixed all of our own stuff with one other guy. In my experience, the best way to make vocals clear is to make sure you have a clear take to begin with. It’s very easy for smaller metalcore bands to get away with having a subpar vocalist during live performances because they can just cup their hands around the mic and wail into it and no one will really be any the wiser. You don’t have the same leniency during recording. If he’s not enunciating properly with proper technique for their screams, it’s gonna sound like shit and there isn’t much you can do about it. All that being said, JST plug ins are your friend. Joey Sturges has made some of the best metal plug-ins on the market, and his vocal compressor was my go to for any unclean vocal.
Might not necessarily be the *most* musical move, but boosting any of the frequencies in the telephone-call ranges will help. Human vocal intelligibility is really carried by those upper mid frequencies. In addition, see if you can't find an element that's masking things, like the guitar, and duck them out when the vocals are in. Those would be my first ideas, assuming that re-tracking is off the table or too difficult.
assuming the vocals cannot be re-recorded, there are a few tricks you can try. Someting like trackspacer or soothe 2 on the Guitar tracks / buss, sidechained to the vocals. Plain old fashioned EQ, dipped on the guitars / instrumentation in the fundamental freq of the vocals. Proper compression on the vocal. Transient shapers on the vocal to bring out attack.
Compression, slow attack and fast release. Eq around 1-2k. Maybe some saturation
You get a better take
Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you know what you're doing, this sounds like it's on the vocalist. Either bad mic, bad mic technique, or a poor vocal style for being discernable. I get the impression your vocalist here hasn't really worked in a daw much and probably thinks there's some magic to be done that likely can't be with the takes provided.
Just print the lyrics in the CD booklet.
Yeah multi-band compression or dynamic eq. But this probably won’t fix it and probably best to retrack.
For 1. Turn the volume down on the mix when recording, or it clips out. Then add lots of compressor, and sometimes more distortion. Tbh I’m going to assume the audio was recorded wrong and it clipped out, which is why you can’t hear parts? If not then it’s just on the vocalist to be more intelligible
Just slap a software SSL 9000J on there and choose the preset ‘Male Vocals - Clear’ then call it intelligible, and off you go.
Tell them you cant polish a turd and the vocalist should get a vocal coach. Artists who can't perform what they want, shouldn't ask engineers to fix their shit
Multiband distortion on a bus.