Mixing Warm and Thick Vocals
with Saturation

Vocals benefit from that good old warm analog sound. Since everything is pretty much digital (in home studios anyway) the recorded signal isn’t gaining any musical analog distortion in the process. This is where mixing vocals with saturation plugins come into picture.

In this video you’ll learn how to use saturation plugins to give vocals warmth, thickness, color and even perceived loudness:

Saturation can give you that analog warmth that otherwise is missing from the home studio recordings. In addition, it can color, fatten and glue tracks together in a musical way. You can also create musical distorted vocal effects with it.

In this video I’m using Decapitator from Soundtoys, Kramer Tape from Waves and the built in Tape Delay plugin in Logic Pro X. All of these work beautifully for vocal saturation purposes.

There’s also plenty of good quality free saturation plugins out there. Here’s a list of few great ones to try out:

Saturation Knob
SGA1566 
Voxengo Tube Amp
IVGI – saturation & distortion
PhreePhuzz

Although the plugins might be different looking and with different knobs and adjustments, the basic functions and purpose remains the same. Try to use saturation the next time when you’re mixing vocals. Use it subtly to give vocals just a bit of warmth and thickness or crank it up to really distort the vocal track.

I usually apply saturation after EQ, compression and de-essing. In case you want to learn how to use these three, check out the earlier video here.

If you want to learn more about saturation, read this post.

Hopefully you found this video helpful. If there’s anything you want me to cover in the future videos let me know. Send me an email or leave a comment below. Ask if there’s anything unclear or if I left something out. Cheers!

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