Mastering Garageband Tracks

Getting your Vocals sounding ‘just right’ is perhaps the most important part of your mixing job. Before diving in and trying out some EQ settings, it’s important to remember how much effect the way your Vocals were recorded has on their sound. For example, recording Vocals with a Condenser microphone will result in more top end frequencies being present in the recorded audio than if recorded with a Dynamic microphone. The quality of your recording method plays a big part too – Vocals recorded using the built in microphone on your Mac will sound very different from vocals recorded through a studio quality XLR microphone. Cyanogenmod 9 for allwinner a10 devices 2. That being said, there is one frequency area you will need to look at regardless of how your Vocals were recorded – the low end. Specifically, anything under 125Hz can – in my opinion – be chucked completely. Down here is where your Kick Drum and Bass frequencies reside – all that you’ll find in the 20 – 125 Hz range of your vocal track is some gnarly sounding hum and irrelevant audio debris.

Get rid of it! Speaking of getting rid of it, i’ve always found that lowering the volume of ( or ‘cutting’) of unwanted frequencies gives more natural and clean sounding results than increasing the volume of (or ‘boosting’) frequencies that sound good. At the risk of contradicting myself, boosting some frequencies is perfectly fine, as long as it’s the exception, rather than the rule! Most other instruments and tracks will have useable frequencies between the 20Hz and 5kHz range, so there will be a lot of different sounds competing to ‘stand out’ from the rest. Make sure your Vocals sit comfortably among everything else that’s going on by creating a wee frequency section just for them (I like the 2kHz to 4kHz range personally). If you keep this in mind when you EQ all your other tracks, even cutting in the ‘Vocals only’ frequency range you’ve created, you’ll find it much easier to keep them at the forefront of your mix! More so than any other instrument type covered in this guide, EQing Vocals require you to adapt to particular circumstances.

Master Your Track, Instantly. An online audio mastering engine that's easy to use, fast, and sounds incredible. Made by Grammy winning engineers. Upload your track below and hear it now for free.

There is no one 100% perfect Vocal setting – the best I can do is give you a rough guide to start from – the rest will be up to you! First,‘ roll off’ all frequencies under 100Hz – this is all rumbly nonsense at this range anyway and besides – you really want to keep the 20Hz – 80-100Hz area clear for your Kick Drum and Bass. Use the Red Hi-Pass cutoff EQ point in GarageBand’s built in EQ window (Get there by opening Smart Controls and clicking on the ‘EQ’ tab) Have a listen back to your Vocal track once you’ve done this and you’ll hear that you’ve lost a lot of boomy low end sound, making it clearer in the mix already! Right next door to our Hi-Pass cut is a small frequency range that can really hold back your Vocals from standing out in your mix. Cutting by 2db – 6db in the 125Hz – 250Hz range will reduce that ‘muddy’, ‘muffled’ sound that will sometimes make your recording sound less than stellar.

This won’t always be the case though and be careful you don’t make your Vocals sound too ‘thin’ here. Next up, we need to get a bit creative. You need to ‘scan’ through the frequencies using one of the EQ points, the purpose of which is to identify any ugly or nasty sounding frequencies in your recording. Literally drag the EQ point up as far as it will go, play back your Vocal track (using the Cycle region on a section will eliminate the need to keep starting and stopping) and drag the point from the 100Hz mark up to the 8kHz point and back again. Take your time to pinpoint any harsh or ugly sounds – chances are you’ll find them right where I did, slap bang between the 500Hz and 1kHz region. Cutting by around 2db-6db here helps remove that cheap, boomy sound as well as some unneeded mids.