Download VERIFIED Vocal Plugins For Fl Studio 20
Lorette Hanscom
iZotope Vocal Doubler is a free plug-in designed to enhance your vocal with a natural doubling effect, adding richness and depth. Our acclaimed doubling technology has been reimagined with a brand new interactive UI dedicated to helping you achieve a great double faster than ever.
Want to learn how to mix vocals? Get essential vocal mixing tips in this round up of our most popular tutorials. Learn how to process vocals, make vocals cut through a mix, learn all about vocal doubling, and more.
After you're happy with the initial tracking, the best plugins for vocals will enhance a great recording. In some cases, purpose-made remedial plugins can improve a bad recording, but we recommend striving for the best front-end recording possible for truly professional results.
For surgical and highly creative vocal composition in the mix, Melodyne is at the top of its game. What's even better, most edits are almost always inaudible and natural-sounding thanks to the ever-improving Melodyne algorithms. Version 5 is a huge step forward for an already established industry standard.
The idea is, instead of making one compressor work really hard, you apply a more subtle compression spread over two plugins. The result sounds really up-front in the mix, with each syllable and nuance standing out clearly over the most complex and dense of compositions.
A common problem when mixing vocals is excessive sibilance. Put simply, these are irritating and prominent 's' and 't' sounds that quickly distract the listener and destroy an otherwise balanced and pleasing mix.
This dense, natural reverb works particularly well on a sparse mix to add real depth, timeless character, and impact to your vocals. Listen for yourself below and you'll hear how it's one of the best plugins for vocals if you love classic, natural reverb.
The user interface is highly intuitive, making it simple for even the most fresh-faced mix engineer or home recording musicians to dial in a great vocal based on four core algorithms: Compression, Gate, Harmonics and Air.
The plugins we've selected are frequently touted as the best in the business. They regularly make it into the signal chain for our productions here at Headliner, and I can personally vouch for the quality of each plugin.
Ultimately, it depends on what you're trying to achieve and the style of production, so instead of choosing your vocal plugins based purely on recommendation, make sure you try them out yourself and listen critically.
As a general rule, any gain-stage plugins, such as saturation plugins, for example, are best placed right at the front. These plugins emulate the effects of a tube preamp as though it were in the front-end of our signal chain during recording.
Next, it pays to apply any deductive EQ before the signal reaches further plugins. This allows us to remove any unwanted excessive resonances or low-end that might drive other plugins unnecessarily hard (particularly compressors).
With the deductive EQ applied, we can add compression to the chain. A nice trick here is to use two compressors (as mentioned earlier in the article). Rather than having one compressor work really hard, we can use two compressors with a light touch to create a vocal that sounds very up-front in the mix.
A note on compression: Purist engineers will insist that too much compression will destroy the life of your vocal. To help avoid this issue, some mix engineers will apply automation to a vocal track before any plugin processing. This method helps to even out volume levels in a more transparent way compared to compression.
With the dynamic levels sitting nicely in the mix, now is a good time to add EQ enhancement. By applying additive EQ at this stage, we can avoid driving the compressor too hard with any boosted frequencies earlier in the signal chain. This is where we can add shimmer and sparkle to a vocal without worrying about changing the behavior of a compressor.
Next up: De-Esser plugins. It makes sense to add a De-Esser after any other tonal or dynamic processing, as it removes a lot of the guesswork from the process. In other words, we don't have to worry about any EQ or compressor plugins bringing those harsh sibilant frequencies back up in the mix if we position this stage at the end of the insert chain.
In the end, this order that I suggest is just one opinion on how to effectively construct a vocal processing chain. As a producer, you will develop your own techniques and tricks of the trade over time as your style and approach develop.
Before I caved and subscribed to MusicPutty yesterday, I used Waves Tune RT in Cubasis 3. I tried Bleass Voices for autotuning, but it's "okay" at best (it's better at creating backing vocal harmonies from a single recording). With MusicPutty, you can import a clean vocal recording and just tune it all by hand. Very intuitive interface that's easier to use than Vocal Tune Studio.
The Auto-Tune effect is probably the biggest decider when it comes to vocal processing. This is the slightly synthetic and quantised vocal sound that has been a chart staple in many dance and rap genres since Cher made the effect famous in the song Believe in 1998. As well-trodden and arguably worn out this effect is, you can't deny its continued popularity, and those predicting its demise have been many and all mistaken over the last couple of decades. With that in mind, then, an 'Auto-Tune' like plugin is a good tool to have in your armoury and at least four of our options will deliver it, from the simple AlterBoy right up to the one that started it all, Auto-Tune Pro.
If singing is important to your songs and recordings then there are plenty of software plugins available to assist your recording and editing endeavours. The best vocal plugins are many and varied and can be used to help make great vocal recordings, or turn bad takes into recordings that can be used in any mix.
Vocal processing plugins include general mix plugins for adding EQ solidity and sparkle to male or female vocals, or classic, colourful compression for a vintage vibe. For vocalists with tuning issues or for that contemporary 'Auto-tune' effect, there are automatic tuning plugins to help your vocalist hit the right notes or recreate the classic Cher-like jumping effect. Finally there are more esoteric and bespoke vocal processors that focus on specific tasks like de-essing or double-tracking.
If you have tuning issues or want that 'Auto-tune' effect then there are a couple of clear contenders, the most obvious being the daddy of them all, Auto-Tune Pro. It's managed to stay ahead of the rest by heaping in some wonderful and easy to implement features, over and above that classic vocal effect, and has almost become the 'Hoover' of plugins along the way. That said, if you want the quick, down and dirty version then Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy impresses us with its simplistic but beautiful approach to not only Auto-Tune style effects, but brilliant male to female and female to male formant editing and more.
Soothe is an automatic dynamic frequency editor, and designed to remove harshness from instrumental and vocal recordings. It uses spectral processing to detect unpleasant resonances, and dynamically attenuates them via numerous level-sensitive notch filters. You might think this sounds like an EQ, but the band nodes control the reduction sensitivity dynamically within their specific frequency ranges. If you raise a node on screen, it will notch out the resonances within that band more profoundly as the volume increases.
VocAlign is a long-established market-leading tool that adjusts the timing of an audio file (Dub) so it matches that of a source (Guide). It works well with any audio and is used for many music and post-production tasks. However it is particularly in demand for vocals and speech, where accurate pitch and timing alignment can be crucial. VocAlign Ultra sits between the affordable but basic VocAlign Project and Synchro Arts' flagship processor, Revoice Pro 4.
If there's one plugin that comes up more often than any other in our producer interviews as an all-time favourite, it's Soundtoys' Little AlterBoy. This simple but cheap plugin only boasts a few controls but can deliver wide-ranging results on any audio, but is specifically aimed at vocals for both pitch and format editing.
The Formant option can, again very naturally, sweep a male vocal into a female, or vice versa. It's pretty incredible to hear it in operation because one of AlterBoy's main attractions is the fact that it does it with no nonsense, one dial with all the science bits hidden away. It just gets on with it, with brilliant results.
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