How To Use Vocals When You're Producing

Depending on the genre of music that you make, you may want to include vocals and lyrics in your tracks.

Whether that's writing lyrics from scratch and singing yourself or using vocals snippets and adding them in certain parts of your track. Maybe you've found a vocal loop on Splice and you want to add it onto your melody.

However you plan to do it, here are some top tips on blending vocals into your track and getting the best out of every vocal sample that you use...

Wet or dry vocals
​Usually, when you download samples they're displayed as 'wet' or 'dry'. This relates to whether or not they have effects already added to them.

Dry vocals will sound raw, as if they've not not had anything done to them - no effects. Whereas wet vocals may sound like they've had reverb or another effect added to them.

When you add vocals into your mix, they should have at least some reverb applied. This helps the sound of the vocals to blend in and sit nicely with the rest of the mix. If you're using 'dry' vocal samples, it's a good idea to add a small amount of reverb onto them.

If the vocals you download are 'wet' this likely means that they will already have reverb or other effects applied. You can add this to you mix and in theory (depending on the genre you're going for) these vocals should blend in nicely with the other elements of your track.

Using layers

Very rarely do professional tracks with lyrics only use one vocal layer. They tend to be several layers of the same vocal sample with different effects applied to each one.

It's a good idea to choose your main vocal sample and have that playing in the centre (no panning), then duplicate this sample and have one version panned to the left and one panned to the right (slightly lower volume than the main version). This is how you can create a wider sounding vocal.

You can also adjust how the left and right vocal sample line up with the main (centered) sample. For example you could move these panned vocals slightly out of sync from the main sample to add a 'delay' type of effect.

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