Add Attitude to Your Vocals

Producing vocals to stand out in the mix is never an easy process. Luckily, many vocal enhancement plugins emerged in the last decade, ranging from channel strips and equalizers to special processing units. Conventional Harmonic Exciter effects and Enhancers are capable tools for juicing the vocals. However, they are pretty infamous for their side effects. These range from listening fatigue to sound artifacts, and the results often sound harsh and artificial. Check out the following tutorial to learn how to add attitude to your vocals!  

Noveltech Vocal Enhancer

So, in the following tutorial, I will guide you through the Noveltech Vocal Enhancer interface and show you a few practical examples. For this tutorial, I have chosen an Eastern-influenced vocal line. It sounds a bit muddy, and I am sure that the mentioned plugin will help with that. So, we will start by adding a fresh instance of Noveltech Vocal Enhancer to the audio channel within the SoundBridge: DAW, which contains the vocal line.

 

Straightforward Interface

Upon opening the Noveltech Vocal Enhancer, we can see a simple-looking interface. There are not too many controls, and the engine is primarily concentrated on what it should be: the processing of the vocals. The IAF process behind the Noveltech Vocal Enhancer dynamically boosts the material's "desired" characteristics instead of statically boosting certain frequency areas like an EQ - or artificially adding harmonics like a conventional Enhancer. The processing results are way superior as IAF continually adapts to the source material. And the sound remains natural, even when applying more than a little.

The interface contains a couple of sections that I'll cover below.  

Processing Section

• Strong Processing button
• Focus Frequency: Sets the processing focus within the high and low filter settings. As Vocal Enhancer influences multiple frequencies, it is hard to label this with exact frequencies – look at the display for feedback on the ranges affected.
• Enhancement: This sets the amount of processing. Unlike conventional methods, there won't be any ear-fatigue, so if it sounds good, it is good!

Display Section

• Enhancement Meter: Meter displaying the amount of overall enhancement in real-time.
• Enhancement Display: FFT display, showing the amount of processing over the frequency range from 1 kHz to 20 kHz in real-time.
• Low/High Filter Borders & Resonance Parameters: These lines may be moved to narrow or widen the frequency range of the processed part of the signal. Moreover, setting them will not cut or affect the dry signal. The filter section below displays the exact settings.

These would be the two primary sections. Besides this, there is a dedicated filter, metering, and preset sections, which we will not cover in particular. Now, let's hear this awesome plugin in action. First, we will check how the unprocessed vocal sounds. Then we'll check out the processed vocal. Finally, listen to the context with other instruments in the compact arrangement I have previously made.

~ Vocal - Unprocessed

~Vocal -Processed

~Full mix