Garageband Vocal Presets Download By kabdulitttu1972 Follow You can open the Sound Library from the Sound browser, the Live Loops browser, and from instruments that have additional sounds available for download. To open the Sound Library, your device must be connected to the Internet. 1) With your vocal track high-lighted, go into Garageband’s smart controls and select “Compressor” from the plug-ins menu. 2) Bring up the Compressor. 3) Then, go into the pre-sets and choose “Studio Vocal.” Make sure it’s turned on.

Garageband Vocal Presets Download Free
Mixing Vocals Using Garageband Presets - YouTube
Garageband Vocal Presets
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Mixing vocals is an artform on its own that takes a bit of practice to do well, however, there are a few things one can do right away that will make a world of difference. Garageband is a great introduction to the world of music production and vocal mixing, because many of the tactics and dynamics processors are the same, they just have fewer parameters and are therefore less confusing for the beginner.

Nevertheless, there are a few things one can do to mix their vocals in Garageband. So what are they, and how should you go about it?

To mix vocals in Garageband:
1) Turn on the noise-gate
2) Use the compressor’s “Studio Vocals” preset
3) Use the Channel EQ’s preset, “Natural Vocal”
4) Add reverb
5) Adjust the volume so they fit in the mix
6) Pan the vocal tracks if there is more than one
7) Apply pitch correction

What I just outlined above is a simple guide on how to get your vocals to sound much better quickly, however, how you mix your vocals is going to depend on many different factors, including the singer, the microphone they used, the genre of music, the room they sang in, etc. With that said, many of the principles will remain the principle regardless of the vocal performance.

1) Apply The Noise Gate

Starting from the beginning of the aforementioned list I just laid out, the best thing to do first, in my opinion, is to apply a noise gate.

Typically, there will be a ton of background noise when clients send you their music, whether it’s the very light sound of a TV going in the background, someone talking, breathing, or an old grumbling air conditioning system.

You can see the Noise Gate in the plug-in section of the Smart Controls beneath the workspace.

I find that, when using a noise gate on vocals, you don’t want to set it too aggressively, otherwise you’ll squeeze out other transients and sounds you may want.

Moreover, if you’ve set the noise gate too high, it’ll eliminate sustain in notes, for instance, if you’ve tracked a guitar solo and there’s a moment where you hold a bend, the noise gate will mute the ending of the note, rather than let it drone out gently.

Truthfully, this is a rule you can use for pretty much every instance of the noise gate.

The last time I used one, I set it to around -49 dBs.

To see what you’ve done, you can hit the “Solo” button to see how much of a difference this makes in the vocals. It’ll eliminate pretty much all of the undesired noise in the background (more on eliminating background noise in my tutorial).

It might be tempting to simply go through every vocal track and set up a noise gate around -49dBs, but the truth is that the attention to detail, and caring for each track individually, as well as how it relates to the whole mix, is the way to make a song sound really good.

2) Apply Compression

The beautiful thing about Garageband and even Logic Pro X are the surprisingly useful presets.

The stock presets that come with the software work pretty well, or if they’re not great right off the bat, they work as a solid jumping-off point.

Now, in case you’re new to compression, you can read about it in my article here, but essentially, compression is lowering the volume of the loud sounds and increasing the volume of the quiet sounds.

The tool can be very useful, but also damaging if used too much.

Threshold – the point, in dB, at which the compressor starts working
Ratio – how hard the compressor is actually working
Attack – how fast the compressor is
Gain (makeup gain) – a gain knob that compensates for the volume loss as a consequence of compression.

If you’re a beginner to the compressor, it’s a good move to use some of the presets.

In my case, I’ll use the “Studio Vocal” preset, and any other changes I’ll just make to it manually. As I mentioned above, the presets are a great jumping-off point, so any changes you want to make you can ever-so-gently dial them in.

When making changes to the compressor, it’s always best to go a little bit by a little bit. Assuming you’re new, you can see what it sounds like when each parameter is cranked to the max.

The “Gain” and the “Ratio” knobs are without a doubt the most significant because the gain essentially increases the total volume of the track, or in more proper terminology, it increases the strength of the entire signal.

The ratio, on the other hand, is how much the compressor is compressing. It’s how hard it’s actually working.

For instance, a ratio of 3:1, means that whenever the signal exceeds the threshold by 3dB, the compressor will drop it down to just 1dB outside of the threshold.

(I really can’t stress enough that if this sounds foreign to you, head over to the compressor article I linked above. I did my best to explain everything as best as I could with diagrams and pictures as well).

The “Attack” knob is one that I don’t actually use that much. I might change it a little bit, depending on the instrument.

For instance, the “attack” setting is useful if you decide to apply a compressor on a hi-hat for instance, because the hi-hat has fast transients, so you need to increase the attack time in order for the compressor to actually be fast enough to compress them.

The attack is less useful for vocals because vocals aren’t “fast,” they’re drawn out and slow.

Think about it.

When a drummer hits a hi-hat, the sound blasts through the room very fast, in comparison to the sound of someone’s voice, which is drawn out and slow.

The “Attack” knob is, essentially, the control you turn to when you’re switching to alternative instruments. You may turn up the “Attack” when compressing a snare, for example.

Experiment with Garageband’s many presets, until you’ve figured out how to go about using it. It really just takes time.

3) Use Subtractive EQ

Now, we’ll move on to Subtractive EQ. In case you don’t know what this means, it’s a technique which means that, if we want to increase certain frequencies, what we do is we take away from other competing frequencies.

For instance, if the vocals aren’t loud enough, maybe the drums and the guitar are too loud. Turn down the guitar and the drums and see if the vocals now sit better in the mix.

This is a principal used all throughout this discipline, from my understanding of it.

Garageband Vocal Presets Download Free

Regarding how this relates to the EQ, however, when EQing a sound, if there’s not enough high-end, perhaps there is too much low end and it’s drowning out the high-end?

Experiment with decreasing the low-end if you want the high-end to shine. Like the compressor, it’s best to try out some of Garageband’s presets and see what sounds good.

Each preset has a name that clearly states its purpose, and once you’ve found one that you like, you can make some very minor changes to really optimize the sound.

Changing the EQ of vocals is highly specific because it really depends on the person’s voice.

Someone like Jim Morrison, for instance, probably doesn’t need a boost in the low-end, because his voice is already so low. On the opposite side, Ariana Grande likely doesn’t need a boost in higher frequencies.

Listen closely to the singing and decide, “what needs to be eliminated here?” “How could this sound better?”

In the picture that you can see below, you’ll notice there are no boosts anywhere in the Channel EQ. I’ve dropped EQs instead, this is what’s called subtractive EQ because I’ve actually boosted