Monitor mix for vocals (with great plugins for free!)

. I will show you my standard vocal monitoring mix with VST effects in Reaper. Among monitor mixes, there’s a very special place for the vocal mix. That’s because singing is a bit different activity than eg. playing drums, keys or guitar. A singer needs to hear them in a proper way which is necessary to keep proper pitch and tone – they particularly sensitive to under- and overestimation or just mistakes.

We’ll set-up a monitor mix in Reaper which will be the basis for the final mix because the elements are similar and after we are done, they’re gonna need only some fine-tuning to sound properly. Let’s start by adding an audio track, turning the monitoring on, choosing the right input and arming this track.

Now we need to construct the effects chain. Those effects are to reinforce the sound, to make it more pleasant to our singer’s ear, to make it fatter, provide fullness, to make it flawless. This chain gets your vocal really wide so the monitoring in headphones is more natural (to prevent pitch and dynamic problems during singing). That’s really important because the better singer sounds in her headphones, the better she sings – so goes the better sounding record!  This composition of VST plugins is quite common for every recording so feel free to make your own preset-chain (or a few). I’ll try to be brief because you could tell literally anything about those effects including writing a book!

What we have hear is chain consisting of great freeware plugins that have been selected by me really carefully, this collection is really a bunch of things you need to have on your PC, serious. I’ve drawn the red arrows that show the signal flow in my monitor mix.

1. Compression – Density MKIII is used to squeeze the sound very firmly. For vocal monitoring I use strong compression with quite low threshold so there’s always more gain reduction than 3dB. Of course it doesn’t stay for the final mix but it usually makes recording easier.
2. BootEQ set to “analog-o-matic” preset that phattens the sound with warm low-mid boost and some lows. Finally it saturates my vocal tracks with some kind of vacuum tube simulation – I don’t care what it is but makes things sound juicier.
3. Ferox – saturation plugin that has to reproduce some magnetic tape units, maybe Studer and stuff. I’ve already used two stages of saturation. I do it purposely – the saturation helps me to deal with transients which may be too aggressive when I use a condenser microphone and all in all, saturating the track helps to bring out more great tone that is hidden in sustain of every note and to make sure I don’t get too loud in the headphones. Just like a compressor but in a rough, more organic, natural way. The two saturation stages let me do it in a less harsh manner.
4. Then we have Classic Delay from Kjaerhus audio. That’s freeware too but the company collapsed, unfortunately, and it’s hard to find a copy (though it’s possible). Delay is set very low, that is only to make monitoring sound fuller. (usually I use here a delay of a 1/8 or 1/4 note, depends on a song)
5. Two times I use Stereo Touch from Voxengo. It’s some kind of artificial stereo but don’t get discouraged – it sounds cool on most of audio material, is totally mono-compatibile and totally nothing wrong about it. I had to grow up to start using it, even though I had a copy on my PC for a few years. In my monitoring chain there are 2 instances of this Stereo Touch, both are very subtle. One is slightly expanding the panorama and the second has longer delay, wider stereo.
6. Finally, a Classic Reverb. It’s from Kjaerhus too. Really good and lightweight suite, those Kjaerhus Classic plugins. I recommend them for anything (monitoring underlined!) because they don’t use much of memory and are extremely responsive! Of course here you can use a SEND reverb as well.