Alex, professionally known as BeatsByA, is one of the most prominent Audio Engineers in the German rap music scene. He has worked for countless big artists from Germany, including RAF Camora, Ufo361, Yung Hurn, Bonez MC, Capital Bra and many others.
We sat down with Alex, asking a simple question: What's the default Vocal Chain you go to when working with new artists?
As usual with these types of posts, everything shown here should just be a reference! You should always consider your client's voice, the recording environment, the microphone used, etc. when deciding what plugins to use on a vocal. Also, don't forget to set your levels right before ever touching a single plugin!
iZotope's RX series has been a staple in audio restoration for years. Whenever there's something "wrong" with a vocal, RX is a great place to start. Alex explains that he likes using RX's De-Click and De-Plosive features to remove annoying mouth noises from dry recordings.
"Sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn't work at all" - that's what Alex has to say about Ozone's Clarity Module. Ozone is well-known as a Mastering tool, but this new module added in Ozone 11 can also be used as an Insert effect to balance out the frequency spectrum in a clean way. As usual with these tools, overdoing it can lead to your vocal sounding muddy and all kinds of artefacts appearing. When it does what it's supposed to, however, Clarity can be great to balance out vocals. In our interview, Alex specifically mentioned using the "Smooth Shine" preset often.
FabFilter Pro-Q is (almost) everybody's favorite EQ because of its very fine surgical bands, and Alex is no different. In this stage in the mixing process, he uses Pro-Q to shelf down the lower mids as well as narrowly turning down harsh frequencies in the highs.
Being the first compression step in Alex's vocal chain, this SSL Channel Strip's compression module is used with a fast attack to catch peaks in the signal, usually while doing less than 3db of gain reduction.
This one is pretty straightforward: FabFilter's signature de-esser is used to - you guessed it - tame sibilances.
This is where the vocal really gets its tone: Acustica's Ruby EQ is known for its faithful vacuum-tube sound. Depending on the vocal signal, Alex uses Ruby to boost high frequencies for improved clarity. He also does a high cut at ~28kHz so the sound won't get too harsh.
Waves' C6 is a classic: a powerful combination of dynamics processing and EQ with many different capabilities. In this case, Alex uses it to narrowly turn down some bands and clean up the signal.
Like most professional audio engineers, Alex uses several compression steps in his vocal processing chain. This one gets intense, though: In Midnight, the signal really gets glued together, using slow attack and release settings.
Now that the heavy lifting has been done, it's time to put some creative effects on top of your FX chain! Valhalla's Space Modulator is a FREE flanger plugin that sounds great. Don't overdo it, though: Alex recommends setting the mix knob somewhere between 3 and 10 percent.
No mix is complete without a little bit of tasteful tube saturation, and this is where Taupe comes in. Branded by Acustica as "the past, present, and future of tape plugins", Taupe is one of the most versatile tube plugins money can buy.
Lastly, Alex creates a room for the vocals to sit in. IK Multimedia's emulation of the iconic Sunset Sound Studio adds a subtle amount of reverb to any signal.
You can find Alex here:
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