How To — vocal production

TL;DR AI vocals have three tells: digital wobble on sustained notes, stiff breath-free phrasing, and metallic sibilance. Fix them with Melodyne pitch drift cleanup, a layered real breath track, and aggressive de-essing. Then stack one real vocal layer underneath if you can. That single real layer changes everything. Suno v5 and Udio sound better than ever. They still have tells. If you listen to 50 AI-generated songs in a row, you start hearing the same artifacts: an odd plastic-y quality on long notes, phrases that land a hair too perfectly, sibilance that sounds slightly metallic. This guide walks through exactly...

TL;DR De-essing is compression on a narrow frequency band. Target 5 to 9kHz for most vocals. Threshold should only catch the harshest S sounds, not every sibilant. Use 3 to 6dB of reduction. Split-band mode beats broadband every time. And fix the mic/performance first if you can. A great vocal with harsh sibilance sounds painful on headphones, amateur on earbuds, and unusable on small speakers. De-essing is the fix. Done right, the listener never notices it happened. Done wrong, the vocal loses life and every "s" sounds like a whispered "th." This guide walks through what de-essing actually is, the...

TL;DR Plate reverb for most pop and rock vocals. Hall for ballads. Room for rap and intimate vocals. Set pre-delay between 20 and 60ms so the vocal stays upfront. High-pass the reverb return at 300Hz, low-pass at 8kHz. Keep decay shorter than you think (1.2 to 2.5 seconds). Reverb is the difference between a vocal that sits on top of the mix and one that feels like part of the record. Get it right and the vocal breathes. Get it wrong and everything turns to mud, the vocal loses intelligibility, and the mix collapses in a small room. This guide...

TL;DR Use Autotune for real-time correction and the rapper/pop effect. Use Melodyne for surgical, natural-sounding tuning note by note. Set your key first. Keep retune speed at 20 to 40 for natural, 0 to 10 for the T-Pain sound. Always fix timing before you tune. Every vocal needs some level of tuning. Even the best vocalists go slightly flat or sharp on long notes, runs, or the ends of phrases. Tuning is not cheating. It is mixing. The question is which tool to reach for and how hard to push it. This guide walks you through the three tools that...