I guess the number one question I get from production newbies is how to get the voice track to pop without going through a lot of arduous ducking and dodging. The number two question is how to “fatten” the VO to make it sound huge, without obliterating the music and effects. Well, the two are more closely linked than you might think. Getting the voice to pop first is key to making it “phat.” This gets into the nuts and bolts of voiceover processing. Let’s make your vocals pop first. By far, the easiest thing is to use EQ. Assuming that all your levels have been ”normalized,” pumping up the high end of the vocal will make it pop almost immediately, without ducking the music. I use a setting
I have to begin this little word salad with a caveat: I’m a Pro Tools kinda guy. I’ve tried all the others and they all have their selling points. For a long time I chafed at the fact that PT had to bounce in real time, unlike others who could zip through a bounce in mere seconds. But other systems didn’t have a lot of the features I loved most about PT. Eventually, Pro Tools designers saw the light and now you can bounce a file or session in computer time, meaning in seconds, rather than minutes. Other platforms have also started to adopt some of the features that have always been there in PT, like bussing. This is largely a function of the platform’s origins. Pro Tools was designed by musi
