Workshop: Powerful Hip-Hop-Vocals

1 Remove Unwanted Noise
The odd breath noise can make a hip-hop track livelier; but, if they are too loud or contain nasty artifacts, they become unplea- santly noticeable after using a compressor at the end. Use the scalpel tool in FL Studio to eliminate all noise from the vocal track.

2 Surgical Intervention
Now we have to find unwanted frequencies.Open the Parametric EQ 2 and set the
BW value of each band to the left for a narrow band cut. Then increase the volume of the bands drastically and sweep them one-by-one through the frequency spectrum. Whenever you hear annoying frequencies, cut them.

3 Low Cut
In lower frequencies, there is often background noise such as footfalls. The vocal signal in the mix can also sound too bass-heavy. With all settings you should let the beat run along with the mix to create a good overall mix. In our case, we were able to get the vocals to sit with the instrumental by using a low cut at 136 Hz.

4 Boosts
Now that the vocal signal is noise-free, we need to bring the voice forward with the EQ. To do this, you should first cut frequencies around 2-3 kHz for other instrument groups because these frequencies are very important for speech intelligibility. For us, a rather narrow band frequency boost of the vocal at around 3.5 kHz was perfect to bring the voice forward.

5 Compressor
You can use a compressor to make the vocal signal more powerful. Reducing the dynamics can be an advantage for powerful hip-hop vocals. In our case, we used a compressor with a ratio of 4:1. The threshold was -27.3 dB. Attack and release should be relatively fast. Now increase the reduced level with make-up gain.

6 Secret Tip
In the first five steps, we brought our vocals to the front. Finally, we used Fruity Fast Distortion to make the vocals dirtier and livelier. We set the mix control to nine o‘clock and Pre to one o‘clock. The distortion gives the vocals more punch and power. Have fun recreating it!

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