How to Process Lead Vocals

The first step is the melody. You want the vocal exactly how you want it, so I use Melodyne. Load it in, Ctrl A, then pitch center. It moves every note exactly to the center of the pitch. Then I go over each and every note and see if the melody sounds right.

If a part is a little bit too wobbly, I select the notes and change the pitch modulation or the pitch drift. You can separate notes, and Alt and left click moves a note up and down if you want to change the melody. Then I export it as a WAV file and put it into my project.

The second step is gating noise. Open up your sample, Ctrl A, normalize. Go in between the vocals, where you can see the noise. Select it, acquire noise threshold, then disable the selection so it selects the whole sample, and gate noise. That's it.

Be careful you don't take too much. Then it leaves spaces and stutters in between, and when you boost it with a lot of distortion it comes up and sounds bad. So I go into the empty spaces and make sure every empty space is actually empty. Then I render it as a WAV file.

The third step is processing. First I remove the bass. Then I add Auto-Tune. More Auto-Tune, yes, because it's better. Take the scale, usually minor, and go into the key. Free Fall is in E minor, so I put it at E minor.

You don't want it to be really yodely. You want it to be clean, so I put Flex-Tune at like 60.

Then compression. Read the threshold, find out where it's hitting, put the threshold there and the ratio at 4. It pulls everything back to the threshold you set. Then OTT. It's free, get it, it's a dope multiband compressor. I set the depth and change the downwards compression. Those are the two knobs you really need to know.

Then a limiter to remove the spikes, and a de-esser. Look for that range and remove it. If your plugin has a preset, put it on a dope one. Then I remove the bass again and pull down frequencies I don't like because they're too loud. Re-render, and that's the third step.