Vocal Plugins

[mak_anil]

I'm just getting started with mixing and I'm looking for recommendations on must-have paid vocal plugins. What are the essential plugins you'd suggest for vocal tuning, EQ, compression, saturation, de-essing, reverb, and delay?

[yzcoruhT]

Use your stock plugins, if your DAW has any.

[cryophonik]

My current go-to plugins for vocals are:

Noiseworks Voice Assist Pro - saves me literally hours of time cleaning up and leveling out vocal takes, and it has one of the best de-essers and breath controllers I've ever used. Expensive ($299, cheaper versions available), but worth every penny IMO for the time it saves.

For pitch correction, Melodyne is pretty much the industry standard, but I've been using and preferring Vovious, which is designed specifically for vocals and gives me much more natural results.

Finally, my go-to for vocal channel strip is Nuro XVox Pro. It's a very flexible vocal-based channel strip with dynamics, EQ, reverb, delay, tape saturation, enhancer, etc. that are also included as standalone plugins.

[billinder33]

Agreed with the Noiseworks Voice Assist Pro and the Melodyne (not tried Vovious yet, but it looks great).

For vocal compression I love the Relab 175. So smooth. It's a big CPU guzzler, but according to reports not quite as bad on M-series Mac vs PC/Intel.

A lot of pricy stuff here. Keep an eye out for some July 4th deals!!

[TheMaestro]

Get the Waves Vocal Production bundle on sale. All you need.

[t.o.t.s.]

my currently VO chain:
Pro-Q4
Standard Gate
Pure Level
Pro-C3
Re-Esser

My vocal chain:
Pro-Q4
Standard Gate
UADx LA2A (silver)
Re-Esser

[cryophonik]

A lot of pricy stuff here.

Yeah, some of this is pretty pricy and tbh I thought Voice Assist Pro was overpriced at first. But, once you consider the cost of buying a separate plugin(s) (e.g., gate and compression, a vocal level rider, something that reduces background noise, room sounds/reflections, fans/air vents, and rumbling as transparently as VA does, restores low end, removes plosives, plus the de-esser and de-breather), you realize how quickly that can all add up to $299. But, VA is one of those plugins where the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. It's an ARA plugin so it works in conjunction with your DAW and once it runs its process, you end up with a very clean vocal take that is really easy and intuitive to edit (although it rarely needs much beyond some minor tweaks IME). And it runs its process literally in 10s of seconds, not the hour +/- I'd spend doing all of that manually for each lead vocal track. As someone who has over 100 tracks featuring vocals and spent too much of my life editing them, VA is a miracle worker.

On a side note, I've been using it for some wedding videos I captured during a recent wedding photo gig and the audio was almost unusable (used the cameras' onboard mics), but VA came to the rescue (along with dxRevive) and it made 90% of the audio sound like it was recorded using a close mic'ing techniques. Yeah, I'm a raging fanboy now.

[billinder33]

A lot of pricy stuff here.

Yeah, some of this is pretty pricy and tbh I thought Voice Assist Pro was overpriced at first. But, once you consider the cost of buying a separate plugin(s) (e.g., gate and compression, a vocal level rider, something that reduces background noise, room sounds/reflections, fans/air vents, and rumbling as transparently as VA does, restores low end, removes plosives, plus the de-esser and de-breather), you realize how quickly that can all add up to $299. But, VA is one of those plugins where the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. It's an ARA plugin so it works in conjunction with your DAW and once it runs its process, you end up with a very clean vocal take that is really easy and intuitive to edit (although it rarely needs much beyond some minor tweaks IME). And it runs its process literally in 10s of seconds, not the hour +/- I'd spend doing all of that manually for each lead vocal track. As someone who has over 100 tracks featuring vocals and spent too much of my life editing them, VA is a miracle worker.

On a side note, I've been using it for some wedding videos I captured during a recent wedding photo gig and the audio was almost unusable (used the cameras' onboard mics), but VA came to the rescue (along with dxRevive) and it made 90% of the audio sound like it was recorded using a close mic'ing techniques. Yeah, I'm a raging fanboy now.

I often work with vocal stems that are drowning in verb and other issues, the de-verb/de-noise (Clean) algo in VA is really good. It's probably the best de-esser on the market as well.