Recording Effects for Home Recording

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Jesus Cardoso, and I’m going to explain to you how to use a few of the basic effects during a production or a mixing. First of all, I have this vocal track it has been doubled. Doubled means that it has been recorded twice doing the exact same thing. This is how it sounds. Okay, that’s my good friend Hannah singing in Czech. Now, I want to add a little depth to that, so I’m going to put some delay. You can also add reverb, which is basically recreating the space of like a church or some performance or rehearsal area that has a lot of reverberation and all these reflections of sound going up and down. Check this out; this is a little echo. It has the repetitions going up and down. Sounds pretty cool. That’s what this little guide does here. This is called the line 6 echo farm. Pretty cool little gadget; it’s basically a recreation of some old delay units in the past, the vintage stuff. Here, I can control the speed, the amount of repeats, and how much do I want it in the mix. It can very deep like this, or it can very little, which is the way that I leave it. Now, another cool effect to have is the equalizer. Equalizer controls the different frequencies. It basically lets me cut whatever I don’t want or enhance all the frequencies that I do like. In this case, what we can see here in the graph is that I’m taking all the frequencies in the low end or the bass out of the vocal, and I’m actually accentuating all the highs of the microphone. Once we put it in, it sounds much more brilliant and pierces better through the mix. Finally, we have this little guy here; it’s called the compressor. What the compressor does is remove all the dynamics in the music that we don’t want. So basically, we control the ratio here and we can see graphically that we’re removing all the peaks in the music. This effect is good to get an overall smoothness of the take. It’s very good in vocals, because that way we can actually make them work a lot better through the mix without having all these ups and downs that a vocal naturally has. These are the basic sets of effects. "