Topic: Boosting vocals in a recording

[framesaver]

I've got a couple of tapes from people where the vocal is pretty low in the mix in relation to the guitars, seeming mostly due to dodgy sound engineering at the venue. Is there a good way of bringing up the vocals more? I know this is tricky as a lot of guitar shares frequencies with the vocal, but is there a compression method or something that might help?

[jpschust]

compression wont help you with this as much as eq... try a little bit of a rise in the eq from the mid highs up to the highs and just see what you get.  with a 2 track recording its difficult to do.  

[Scooter]

You can try some multiband compression on the mids\mid highs and see if that helps.  You never know, some times it works, some times it don't...  It may work out that it will bring the gtrs down a bit, and the vox out front a tad.

[drumminj]

I would actually think that there will be too much overlap of the vocals and guitars in the same frequencies to do this all that effectively.  Of course, that depends if it's a male or female singer, etc. etc.  I'd vote EQ as the way to do it, though.  Rather than compress out other frequencies, you're probably going to want to boost the core frequencies of the vocals...(yes, I know that with EQ it's generally more about subtracting than adding)

some links to help:

http://www.recordingeq.com/EQ/req0900/primer.htm
http://www.ethanwiner.com/equalizers.html
http://www.trinitysoundcompany.com/eq.html
http://nightshift.net/freq.htm

J

[Chanher]

good replies, in my personal experience, every time I try something like this it seems that every recording, even same gear same venue, is simply very different when trying to do these things. sit down and mess with eq as much as you can, even if you fail at this particular tape, you learn a bunch for future tapes.

[drumminj]

Agreed.  You may not get exactly the results you want, but with each attempt, you get better at tweaking things and better learn which things to try to get the results you want.