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Bad Phone Vocal Recordings: How To Fix in the Mix

Jul 28, 2024 | 6,030 Views

Turn that phone voice recording into mix-ready gold. Don’t let quality issues stop you!

Improving the sound quality of a vocal take recorded on a phone is more common than you may think. The moment inspiration strikes, most artists use their phones as an instant audio scrapbook, capturing fresh ideas for lyrics, melodies and hooks on the fly. These recordings often capture way more than just the creative idea - they also tend to have an emotion, energy, or spark that's hard to recreate later. Sadly, phone recordings also tend to pick up a lot of background noise and room echo as well. If you've got a phone recording of your voice that's not recorded great, but you want to use it in your mix, what should you do?

By using Waves Clarity Vx and Clarity DeReverb by Waves, Esthy shows you how to reduce natural room ambience and clean out unwanted background noise in a phone recording of a vocal. You'll see later in the video how she adds some additional processing to make this newly cleaned vocal sound more production ready with multiband compression, de-essing and reverb.

Video Chapters:

  • 0:00: Introduction
  • 0:43: Removing background noise
  • 1:15: Reducing unwanted room ambience
  • 1:41: Add additional tone and shape
  • 4:32: Final before and after example

Check out Waves Creative Access Ultimate to get instant access to the plugins featured in this video along with every plugin Waves has to offer.

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