What is a vocal preset?
Great vocals are the most important element of any song.
If your vocal doesn’t grab your audience’s attention, your song is immediately at a major disadvantage when compared to other songs music fans have the opportunity to listen to.
Back in the early days of commercialized music, artists like Bob Dylan could get away with lackluster voices and impactful storytelling. In most industries, the formative years are the experimental and creative years. Those years allow for vast experimentation since there has not yet been a proven formula for success.
Those years for music have long passed. Now, major mainstream audiences will not tolerate mediocre vocals, even if it allows for great storytelling. If you are making pop music, rap music, r & b music or any other mainstream genre, you are expected to have great vocals every time. Otherwise, a mainstream audience will grow disinterested. The first time a listener hears a song they hear the melody, not the story. The story comes on listen 2 if an artist is lucky.
Therefore, in order to put your best foot forward and increase your songs chances of success, you must have excellent vocals.
So that brings us to the topic. What is a vocal preset?
A vocal preset is a pre-established audio channel strip setting designed to make your vocal sound like an intended reference.
To break this concept down a little, many vocalists use vocal presets to sound like specific music artists. For example, rappers may download Juice Wrld vocal presets or Gunna vocal presets so that they can sound like those rappers in their own music. A vocal preset gives rappers the opportunity to copy the same vocal effects utilized by their favorite rappers and apply them to their own voice.
Another benefit vocal presets offer is one for producers. Producers can download vocal presets and study the settings so that they can learn how to mix vocals themselves. A producer who downloads a vocal preset will have the opportunity to get a look under the hood for some of their favorite rappers vocals. They can see how much EQ was applied, how compression was applied and much more. This can be extremely useful for producers looking to learn fast and keep up with the fast changing music landscape. If you’re not constantly learning new tricks, you will fall behind. Vocal presets are a great resource for those producers looking to constantly refine their skills.
An additional benefit that vocal presets provide is instant gratification for vocalists. Usually when a vocalist gets in the studio they want to jump right in and get their ideas out. Slapping on a vocal preset gives them an opportunity to instantly get in the zone without messing with EQ, Compression and Reverb, practices that often kill the creative writing vibe. Vocal presets give artists the opportunity to bypass the friction of opening a new empty session and allow them the ability to instantly lay down their vocals.
A vocal preset will typically consist of different audio editing effects like; EQ, Compression, Reverb, Delay and Distortion. All of these effects in a vocal preset will come with predefined settings that a user can change but come set as a starting point and sound great right away so that a user doesn’t have to change anything if they do not want to.
The next question that you might have could be “How can I sound like an artist like Juice Wrld with a vocal preset if everyone’s voice is different?”
Vocal presets are not designed to make you turn into your favorite artist. They’re designed to make you sound like your own version of that artist. For example, with a Juice Wrld vocal preset you will still sound like yourself but you will now have the same vocal processing effects on your voice as Juice Wrld. You can make a song with a Juice Wrld vocal preset, borrow his vibe, and sound like yourself. Utilizing vocal presets allows you to achieve your own relevant style.
Vocal presets are quickly becoming the hottest go-to tool for artists and producers in the studio. The ability to jump right into being creative instead of fussing with knobs is powerful and enables artists to focus on what they’re good at, writing songs. The engineering aspect of music creation has always been a friction point for artists and producers wanting to do everything themselves.
Vocal presets are quickly becoming an essential tool through the consolidation of the traditional recording studio. If you’re looking to jump start your creative juices the next time you hit the studio, try this new tool.
