EQ'ing out that "boxiness" on vocals?

[Mattayus]

I'm currently mixing a band with vocals that were less than well engineered, in that they sound like they were mic'd up in a cupboard, with no dampening - i.e. you can really hear that annoying chesty spacey-ness.

Is there anything that can be done about that with EQ? I'm doing my best but really struggling to completely kill it

 

[tempe]

Have you tried a multiband comp? Something similar to the sneap settings to kill low mid woof in guitars. If you've tried scooping some low mids with eq, thats probably about all you can do.

Sometimes the source is just a little shit!

Also if you have a pultec-esque EQ, try the boost / attentuation trick (boosting and cutting the same frequency equally) on the low frequency below the woofiness, due to the way the curves work, they cause a did below where you're boosting, this plus some multiband comp might give you a way to get rid of this without making it sound to thin.

 

[Seizure.]

250 alot of time... with me anyway...

 

[El_Gato]

That's what happens when mixing ITB lol

Seriously, no chance to track em again? Distorsion, old-radio effect and any agressive effect may turn a shitty tracking/vox into a listenable mask depending on the music. Now if they want clean, polished vocals, the only way is re-tracking because corrective EQ won't work. If you want to try, sweep the field from 350 Hz on with a gain boost till finding the boxy freq's and substract now and adjust Q with just a few dbs of reduction, repeat to see if there is another one. Maybe multiband comp but all of this suck anyway

This might be well recorded but the out-of-tune vox would have killed them radio stars if it wasn't because of the engineer I think.

 

[Mattayus]

Well I didn't track, as they're on the other side of the world Otherwise I'd suggest it in a heartbeat. I will explain to them though that a re-record is the only way to get it sounding "better". It's death metal, growling etc, so I thought it would be easy, but it's proving difficult. I've tried the sweeping EQ, was the first thing that came to me, so I will try multi-comp.

 

[DaveBlack]

This shit is the worst. Seriously, I have so much trouble when vocals come to me sounding like this. The recording doesn't have too much in one area, it actually has too little. So I find that carefully boosting somewhere else with a somewhat narrow q helps balance it a little. At least enough to where it's usable.

Someone probably just said that though

 

[RandomOne]

any samples?

 

[C_F_H_13]

Hmmmm interesting.

Only suggestions I could make would be:

1. Notch out as much of the boxiness as you can.

2. Once you've pushed that as far as you can, mult the vocal off to a couple of tracks. HP the shit out of one of them till that boxiness is gone (as far as you have to go). Then do the same to the other but boost a ton of top end on it, and compress the shit out of it. Once you do this you'll probably hear all kinds of awful peaks and rings in the top end too, so go back to the original file and do some notching in the top end too.

3. Blend all three back together and hopefully it'll sound decent.....

 

[Mattayus]

That's an interesting idea man I'll try it.

Funnily enough I'm finding the boxiness more in the top on this occasion than in the usual suspects. Almost like the boxiness is in the reflections rather than the initial audio making it even more difficult to pinpoint. So far I've had the most success by boosting the shit out of the 1k (which just seems odd but.. whatever, if it works it works) and cutting around the 2-4k range. Still can't quite shake it though. I guess once it's in there it's in there for good. Time to notify the band I guess!