Professional Radio Mixing

What Effects should i add on vocals......to give it that radio song sound......
My stuff sounds alright now but its missing something on the vocals to give that deeper impact like you would hear when they play a song on the radio...help me help me please.

ORIGINAL: Levi2122

What Effects should i add on vocals......to give it that radio song sound......
My stuff sounds alright now but its missing something on the vocals to give that deeper impact like you would hear when they play a song on the radio...help me help me please.

In most cases all you need to do is get the dynamics smoothed out so you can bring up the overall volume without harsh peaks or swamping the mix. Use the clip gain to reduce peaks and esses till you get it perfect, spend an hour on it if needed, you should not even have to use a compressor on the track if you get it right. Then add just a little reverb and be careful with the near reflections because they can cause lumps. If the vocal is thin use just a little delay to fatten it up. I like to bounce the delay to an audio track to blend with the reverbed vocal so I can automate it also. For example you might need the dealy on softer parts but bring it way down on the louder notes. You can also do this with plugin automation if you delay has that feature but it's just as easy to use a second track. You may also need to pull some lows out so it does not swamp the mix a little eq should do the trick.

In most cases my vocal tracks have EQ first then Reverb in the effects bin and a second fattining track of the output of a delay plugin only on the songs that need it. When you make the delay track set the effect to 100% wet so only the delayed signal is bounced. Then use the Track volume to automate the delay track or the clip gain if you have an effect on the delay track.

The beauty of the clip gain is that it's pre effects bin so you can use it to mute words, mute noise, shorten words, etc without stoping the reverb from decaying naturaly. I use them on almost every track to get the dynamics perfect. This lets the master compressor on the main bus do a much better job because it's not over triggering the threshold on peaks that should not be there.