Vocal masking: why the band buries your singer

You EQ’d the vocal in solo and it sounded great. Then the band came in and the vocal was gone. You could hear that someone was singing, but you couldn’t make out the words.

What you’re hearing is masking, the most common complaint we get from people mixing their own songs. The usual fix, more EQ on the vocal, usually doesn’t work.

What masking is

When two sounds share the same frequencies at roughly the same time, the louder one covers the quieter one. Your ear can’t separate them, so it hears the stronger one and loses detail in the other.

In a band mix, the competition is almost always in the same place. Words become understandable in roughly 1–4 kHz, where the consonants and the presence of the voice sit. Distorted guitars, a busy piano, synth pads and cymbals put a lot of energy into that same range. A rhythm guitar playing open chords through a crunchy amp can fill 1–3 kHz so completely that a vocal at the same loudness simply can’t be heard through it.

Masking also works across a range. A loud sound in one band partly covers quieter sounds just above it. That’s why a heavy low-mid build-up from five tracks can make a whole mix sound unclear, even though nothing in it is technically in the vocal’s range. We wrote about that build-up in How to fix a muddy mix.

Check the level before you touch the EQ

This is the part most tutorials skip. A lot of “masked” vocals are simply too quiet.

We measured how far below the band engineers put the lead vocal in 17 finished mixes. We compared the loudness of the band alone and of the vocal alone, over the passages where the singer actually sings:

• Rock, pop and metal: the band sits about 6.5 LU above the lead vocal.
• Electronic: about 4.7 LU.
• Acoustic: closer still. Mixroadie keeps an acoustic lead within 4 LU of the band.

You can check your own mix the same way. Mute the vocal and render the band over the first chorus. Then solo the vocal and render the same stretch. Read the integrated loudness of each with a free meter like Youlean Loudness Meter. If your band is 10 LU above the vocal in a rock song, no EQ move will make the words readable. The vocal needs to come up first.

Mixroadie runs this check across the main passage and four more spread through the song. If the vocal falls below the line, it raises the lead by the smallest amount that fixes it, at most 6 dB, and never by so much that its peaks would clip. If the vocal is only half a dB short, it leaves it alone. That’s close enough, and chasing it only makes the next mix pass move it again.

Then carve one space, in the right place

Once the level is right and the words are still smeared, EQ helps. Cut the instrument that’s competing and leave the vocal’s EQ where it is.

Some details matter here:

• Find where this vocal’s presence sits. It varies from singer to singer. Somewhere between 2 and 4 kHz, one region makes the words read. Put the guitar cut there, even if a chart says otherwise.
• Cut the instrument that’s actually in the way. With two guitars, the louder one in the balanced mix is usually the one covering the vocal. That isn’t always the one that was recorded louder. Mixroadie compares parts as they’ll sound in the balanced mix for this reason, and won’t cut a track that has nothing in the vocal’s range.
• Keep it modest. A 2–3 dB cut a little under an octave wide usually does it. If cuts from different steps pile up in the same spot, the guitar starts sounding hollow. We cap the combined cuts there at 6 dB.
• Leave the bass to the kick. Bass masking the kick is a different fight, settled at the kick’s own note.

To see which instruments have something in the vocal’s range in the first place, our free mixing cheat sheet lists the ranges of nine of them on one sheet.

Why we don’t duck the guitars under the vocal

A common suggestion is to sidechain the guitars to the vocal so they dip whenever the singer comes in. It can work with a plugin that ducks only one frequency band, triggered by another track. REAPER’s stock plugins can’t do that cleanly. Ducking the whole guitar thins the guitar out every time the vocal starts, and you can hear that. So Mixroadie doesn’t do it, and we’d suggest the static cut first if you’re mixing by hand too.

The masking source nobody suspects: backing vocals

Backing vocals sit in exactly the same range as the lead, with the same kind of voice, often the same singer. Stack four or five harmonies at a sensible level each, and together they can match the lead.

Engineers keep the whole stack together at least 5 dB below the lead. That figure is for the whole stack added together. Ten doubles at “quiet” add up. The lead’s own double-tracks are different: they count as part of the lead and move with it.

If your lead seems to lose definition only in the choruses, mute the backing vocals for one playthrough. If the lead suddenly reads, you’ve found the problem.