To mix vocals, start with a clean recording and even out its volume. Then cut the low rumble below about 100 Hz with EQ, compress until every word is easy to hear, and tame the harsh S sounds. Finally, put reverb and delay on their own tracks so they duck while the singer sings, and let the vocal push the beat down a little, so it sits inside the song instead of on top of it.

That’s Max’s order, and it works in any DAW (the program you make music in). Below, you’ll learn how to mix vocals step by step with his settings, the six mistakes he says destroy vocal mixes, and a real screenshot for each move. If you mix in FL Studio, his exact stock-plugin chain is in our guide to mixing vocals in FL Studio with stock plugins.

How to mix vocals: the order, step by step

Here’s the order Max follows. Each step makes the next one easier, so don’t skip ahead to the fun part with the reverb.

1. Record it well. A clean, even recording makes every step after it easier.
2. Even out the volume, so every line reaches your effects at a similar level.
3. EQ: cut the rumble and shape the body of the voice.
4. Compress until every word is equally clear.
5. Tame harsh S sounds with a de-esser.
6. Add reverb and delay on their own tracks, and make them duck under the voice.
7. Make the vocal sit in the mix by letting it turn the music down a little while it plays.

Max’s free YouTube course squeezes most of this into one word, V.O.C.A.L.: volume automation, optimize with EQ, compression, attenuate harshness, and layer with effects. Attenuate just means turn down. The sections below follow that same order.

Start with a good recording

Max puts it simply: “gold in equals gold out.” No plugin can add detail that the mic never caught, so the recording matters more than any trick further down this page.

Every microphone colors your voice a little, almost like a built-in EQ. Condenser mics sound brighter than dynamic mics right out of the box, but Max says that’s not the real problem, because you can always turn the highs up or down later. The real problem is distance. The closer you sing, the more low end the mic picks up, which is called the proximity effect. Stand too far away and the low end never gets recorded, so boosting it later only brings up mud and noise.

His fix is easy. Stay about a fist’s width away from the mic, put a pop filter in front of it, and keep the same distance for the whole take. Record in the quietest room you have. In his free course, Max says even a closet works.

Record a few takes even when one feels perfect, and record the voice dry, with no effects, so you can still change everything later. For gear, see our pick of the best microphones for singing and our vocal recording tips.

Even out the volume before you add any effect

This is the first of the six mistakes in the video above. When a singer moves closer to the mic, the vocal gets louder. When they lean back, it drops. Your compressor and every other effect react to how loud the vocal is, so an uneven vocal gets uneven treatment. The loud lines get crushed and the quiet ones barely get touched.

There are two ways to fix it. A vocal rider plugin rides the level for you, and Max calls the one from Waves the most popular. By hand, you draw a volume envelope, a line that raises the quiet parts and lowers the loud ones until the vocal looks even.

In FL Studio, click the vocal’s waveform and choose Edit sample to open it in Edison. Switch to the volume envelope, right-click to add points, and drag them up where the singer gets quiet (1). In his free course, Max raises the quiet parts by about 3 dB at most.

Drag the result back into the playlist when it sounds even. Edison opens on the Master track, so remove it from there once you’re done.

Set the input level (gain staging)

Mistake number four is close to this one: the vocal goes into your effects too quiet. Compressors and saturation (a plugin that adds warm distortion) behave differently depending on how loud the sound coming in is. Max points out that some saturation plugins act one way from 0 to 50% and another way from 50 to 100%. A quiet vocal makes you crank them. That can bring up noise.

So normalize the vocal, or simply turn it up, before it hits your plugins. That matters most when you use a preset, because the compressor in a preset needs a healthy level to work with. In FL Studio, open the clip’s channel settings and turn on Normalize (1), or raise the VOL knob (2).

Should you tune the vocal?

Only if it needs it. Do it before the rest of the chain. Gentle pitch correction pulls notes onto the right pitch and suits pop and EDM. The obvious robotic auto-tune sound is an effect, and it suits rap and live shows. A free tool is enough to start. Max’s free course uses Graillon 2, with its smoothing set to 10 ms. At 1 ms it sounds robotic, and around 20 ms it sounds soft.

Our guide on how to tune vocals like a pro walks through it, and here are the best free autotune plugins and free pitch shifting plugins if you need one.

How to EQ vocals

EQ, short for equalizer, turns certain frequencies up or down. Low frequencies are the deep rumble in a sound, and high ones are its hiss and air. The second mistake in Max’s video is putting the same EQ curve on every vocal. The usual curve cuts the lows and lifts the highs. Both moves make sense. The part that changes from voice to voice is the body in between.

Start with a low cut (1), also called a high-pass filter, which removes everything below a point. Max keeps it around 100 Hz. Leave the lows in and the voice sounds like a voiceover or a podcast. Push the cut too high and the main vocal goes thin, which is fine for backing vocals and ad-libs but not for your lead. Many producers also lift the highs a little (2), because pro vocals are rich in highs and most home recordings aren’t.

Listen for the body. A singer who was close to the mic has lots of it, and one who stood far away has very little. Hip-hop usually wants more of it, so the voice feels right in front of the listener. So don’t copy a curve. Cut the lows, then try a little more or a little less body with the beat playing. Sometimes the recording is already balanced and leaving it flat is right. And if an artist sends you a vocal from another studio, they may already have used an EQ while recording.

Match your vocal to pro vocals with a reference

Max has a strong opinion on vocal EQ presets. In Max’s words, “while it works good for 50% of people it destroys the mix for the other half.” His answer is to compare your vocal with a reference instead.

His team built a noise file shaped like the average of many hit-song acapellas, which are vocals with no music. He compares his vocal against it in SPAN, a free analyzer plugin that draws a sound’s frequencies as a curve.

Put an EQ and then a compressor on the vocal first, because the reference was made from compressed vocals. Load SPAN, show the reference as an Underlay (1), set the display to an average, and match the two levels. Then EQ until your vocal’s curve (2) looks more like the reference. In Max’s example that meant a low cut, a lot more highs, and a small dip around 600 to 800 Hz.

It’s a guide, not a rule. Max reminds you that it’s only an average, and that you always EQ a vocal to fit your own beat. A vocal that sounds odd on its own can sound just right with the music.

Where do vocals sit in EQ?

Here’s a rough map of a voice. Every singer is a little different, so let your ears decide:

• Below about 100 Hz: rumble and noise. Cut it.
• The low mids, roughly 100 to 300 Hz: the body. More sounds close and full, too much sounds muddy.
• Around 600 to 800 Hz: can sound boxy. In Max’s example it was a little too loud.
• About 4 to 6 kHz, sometimes up to 7 to 10 kHz: harsh S sounds. That’s the de-esser’s job.
• The top end: air and shine. Pro vocals have plenty of it.

How to compress vocals without crushing them

Compression turns the loudest parts of a sound down, so the loud and quiet parts sit closer together. The threshold is the level where the compressor starts working, and the ratio is how hard it pushes down. Mistake number three is overdoing it, and Max says the ratio isn’t the real problem. The threshold is.

Max’s rule of thumb is to “set your threshold as low as the quietest word is in your lyrics.” Then every word stays easy to understand, and the loud accents stop stabbing your ears.

In FL Studio, Max uses Fruity Limiter switched to COMP mode (4). Lower THRES (1) to that quietest word, then set the RATIO (2). Start soft, around 2:1, or 3:1 to 4:1, and only go higher if it sounds better. He has nothing against heavy compression, as long as the threshold is set right.

Then check the attack (3), which is how fast the compressor grabs. Leaving it at 0 to 2 ms is fine most of the time. On rap vocals, Max likes to test a slower attack of 30 to 40 ms, which lets the start of each word cut through the mix a little better. If you can’t hear a difference, just go back to fast. There’s more on this in our guide to compressing vocals.

How to tame harsh S sounds

Compression brings up the sharp S and SH sounds in a voice, which are called sibilance. A de-esser turns down only those sounds. They usually live around 4 to 6 kHz, and sometimes higher, up to about 7 to 10 kHz.

FL Studio has no plugin called a de-esser, but Maximus comes with de-esser presets. Open its preset menu and pick De-esser narrow-band or De-esser split-band (1). Then lower the threshold a step at a time until the S sounds calm down. Don’t overdo it. Too much dulls the vocal. Our post on 5 easy ways to treat vocals in FL Studio has more fixes like this.

How to add reverb to vocals without washing them out

Reverb puts a voice in a space, like a room or a hall, and delay adds echoes. Together they give a vocal depth, and they’re also the easiest part to get wrong. “Reverb usually is something beginner producers overuse since it basically blurs the imperfections,” Max says. The words lose their edges. The mix turns to mush.

Start with the settings, whatever reverb you use. Turn the SIZE up (1), because Max finds that very small sizes ring with a strange echo on most vocals. Then set the decay, how long the reverb lasts (DEC, 2). Keep it short for rap, so the words don’t smear into each other, and longer for slow vocals.

To time it to your song, Max uses the reverb and delay calculator on our site. In his example, a whole bar came out to about 1.8 seconds, so each reverb tail faded right before the next busy line started.

Next is pre-delay (DELAY, 3), a short gap before the reverb starts. Max says a lot of people overlook it, and that no pre-delay sounds unnatural, because in a real room the sound has to hit a wall before it comes back to you. Anything under 50 ms sounds natural. He tried 50 ms, then a tempo-synced 58 ms, and if that starts to feel mushy, he halves it to about 28 ms.

Last comes the setting he calls the most important: the low cut (L.CUT, 4). It stops the reverb from muddying your low end. In a dense mix, Max pushes it as high as 1 kHz.

Put the reverb on its own track

This is mistake number five, the one Max calls the worst you can make: slapping the reverb straight onto the vocal. Put the reverb on a separate mixer track instead, and send the vocal to it.

The vocal (1) keeps its own chain, and the reverb lives on its own track (2). Turn the reverb fully wet, with no dry signal, because the dry vocal already plays on its own track. Now you can treat what goes into the reverb without touching the vocal. Max cuts the lows, cuts the highs where the S sounds live, and dips the muddy low mids, all before the reverb.

Make the reverb duck while the singer sings

Now for the move that makes it sound pro. Max calls it sidechained reverb, and he counts it among the most important parts of making a vocal sound great. Sidechaining means one sound controls another. Here, the dry vocal turns the reverb down while the singer sings, and the reverb opens up in the gaps between lines.

On the reverb track, add Fruity Limiter after the reverb and switch it to COMP (1). Right-click SIDECHAIN (2) and pick the vocal, so the vocal can control it. Lower THRES (3) and set the RATIO (4) somewhere between 4:1 and 8:1.

Go easy here. Max wants it to feel better, not sound obviously different. If you can hear the reverb pumping, raise the threshold or lower the ratio, and if it cuts in too hard between words, turn up the release (REL, 5). Some people use a dynamic EQ for this job. Max tried it, but to his ears plain compression sounds a bit better.

Add a delay the same way

Delay works best on its own track too. Send the vocal to a new mixer track, put the delay there, and take the dry signal out, so you only hear the echoes. An EQ before the delay helps in the same way it does on the reverb.

In Fruity Delay 3, set the TIME (1) with TEMPO SYNC on (2), so the echoes land on the beat, for example on quarter notes, eighth notes or triplets. Max likes Ping pong mode (3) with the delay panned to one side, so the echoes bounce left and right. Then route both the reverb and the delay through one more track with the sidechained limiter, so they both duck under the vocal. For the difference between the two effects, read reverb vs delay.

How to make vocals sit in the mix

This is the last of the six mistakes, and Max says it’s probably the most common one. Everything sounds good, but as Max puts it, “you just literally slap the vocal on top of the instrumental and called it a day.” The vocal and the beat never react to each other, so they sound like two separate recordings.

The fix is to let the vocal turn the music down a little whenever it plays. You do it with sidechaining again, this time on the instruments. If you have the beat as separate tracks, leave the drums out of it. With a finished two-track beat, you duck the whole thing, the way Max does in this short video:

First, send a copy of the processed vocal to its own mixer track. Max names it Signal. It only drives the sidechain, so it shouldn’t play through your speakers a second time.

The simple version: a compressor on the beat

Put Fruity Limiter on your instrument track or bus and switch it to COMP (1). Pick the vocal copy as its SIDECHAIN input (2), then lower THRES (3) until the music dips a little every time the vocal comes in. In his stock-plugin video, Max finds about 2 dB is plenty. The full routing, click by click, is step 9 of our FL Studio vocal mixing guide.

The better version: duck only the vocal’s frequencies

A plain compressor turns the whole beat down, bass and all. Ideally, only the part of the music that fights the voice should move. In the video above, Max does this with a multiband sidechain preset in Patcher, FL Studio’s tool for building your own effect chains.

Low Cut (1) and High Cut (2) set the range of frequencies the preset works on. Sidechain (3) sets how deep the music ducks, and Release (4) sets how fast it comes back. As the note on screen in his video says, a trick like this doesn’t make an obvious difference at first, but it makes a world of difference to the mix.

If you’d rather use a ready-made plugin, Max says the most common one for this job is Trackspacer. Sidechain it from the vocal and set it somewhere between 8 and 20%.

How loud should vocals be in a mix?

There’s no single number, because it depends on the song. In his free course, Max raises the vocal a little at a time until it sits slightly above the beat, never in big jumps. Every word should be easy to understand without the voice jumping out at you.

Always judge it with the whole song playing. Listeners never hear your vocal on its own, so a vocal that sounds perfect in solo can still be buried, or too loud, in the mix. A reference track helps too. Pick a song you love in the same style, flip between it and your mix, and compare how loud the voice sits.

Background vocals, doubles and ad-libs

Everything above is for the lead vocal, and the extra layers need less. Max points out that backing vocals and ad-libs don’t need the body a lead needs, so you can low cut them higher, which keeps them out of the lead’s way. Keep the lead in the middle of the stereo field, so it stays the focus.

For the details, read how to mix background vocals, why double tracking makes recordings fuller, how to mix rap vocals and our tips for mixing hip-hop and R&B vocals.

More vocal mixing guides

Every guide in our vocals series, grouped by topic:

• Mixing: Max’s full stock-plugin chain in FL Studio, how to compress vocals, ways to treat vocals in FL Studio, rap vocals, hip-hop and R&B vocals, background vocals and double tracking.
• Recording and gear: recording vocals like a pro and microphones for singers.
• Tuning and plugins: tuning vocals, free autotune plugins, free vocal plugins, Waves plugins for vocals, pitch shifting plugins and vocoder plugins.

Start with the order on this page, finish one song with it, and then go deeper on whichever step gave you the most trouble.

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