How to Make Rawstyle Vocals

I open the raw vocal in Edison and zoom in on a part that should be silent. Click acquire noise threshold, select the whole sample and gate the noise. Then drag the new vocal into your playlist, set it at the right BPM and remove the little noise clicks in between.

Then a few plugins. An EQ to remove the sub, not the bass, because male vocals have more bass. A compressor with the threshold just under where the vocal hits, so around minus 14 if it hits around minus 12, with the ratio at 4. OTT with the depth and the downwards compression pulled down until it doesn't sound too multiband compressed. A de-esser is optional. Then the parametric EQ again to remove the sub and reduce the bands that are really spiky.

First things first, add a sub cut again. You want to remove the sub before you add any effects. Imagine you put distortion on it and you didn't cut the sub. Then this sub will mud up the whole mix.

Then pitch it down a little bit, not too much. For really dark cinematic vocals you might put it down like four, but that doesn't sound good to me here. I'd say around 120 cents, on E2 speech. Once you've done that, the power of the vocal goes away a little bit. I get it back with a little bit of distortion from WaveShaper, then a compressor to get it back to normal levels.

Little AlterBoy is a formant shifting plugin. FL Studio has them as well, but Little AlterBoy is really good. Instead of just adding it, I create a vocal chain in Patcher. It's a really underutilized plugin and it's really, really good. Everybody should use it.

First a normal chain from FL Studio to FL Studio. That's just the dry signal. I want a demon sounding vocal, so it needs to play at a few different pitches. The signal goes to an EQ, so the formant shifting happens at a certain frequency range, and that EQ gets split into two Little AlterBoys. I put one three down and the other one up. Then Fruity Stereo Shaper to make it wide on the ears. That's much doper than if you just add the effect. It was a little bit too muffled, so I enhance the chain with OTT.

The final thing is reverb and delay buses. On the reverb channel, put the reverb at 100 wet. Here that's ValhallaRoom. Then add Fruity Limiter, go to the compression section, sidechain it to the vocal and bring down the threshold. As long as the vocal is playing, the reverb won't open up. When the vocal is done playing, it opens. It was too sudden, so I opened up the release. Then I EQ the reverb to make it a little bit less muddy.

The delay channel gets the exact same thing. I open EchoBoy with the Spaced Space Echo preset, make it really wide, turn down the feedback a little bit and the mix goes to 100. Low cut up, high cut up, then the limiter sidechained the same way.