Great Vocals but Nasal, EQ Recommend??

The singer has a great voice except, he has a deviated septum, one nasal nostril is blocked, wondering how this can be rectified with EQ?

Says he might have an operation (out patient) to rectify this blocked passage, in the meantime, is there anything I can do plug in or EQ qwise to help him?

thanks

Maybe try recording him with a differnt mic position. Placing the mic either to the left or right of a singers mouth will allow you to locate their sweet spot. Every singer is differnt so you will have to experement and move the mic from side to side. Placing the mic above or below the mouth by as much as 1' or so allows you to tonal shape the vocal. You now can add or cut the amount of Head or Chest voice the mic picks up. Next is to experement with mic angle.

Try a 6 db cut at 2kHz or about 3 kHz with a medium Q width.

And tell him to lay off da coke:) Sorry,kidding

Also try BBE SonicMaximizer

ORIGINAL: djoni

Try a 6 db cut at 2kHz or about 3 kHz with a medium Q width.

Did he post the track?
How can you be so specific?
Am I missing something here?

I think he read this settings in some website and wrote it here...

ORIGINAL: djoni

Try a 6 db cut at 2kHz or about 3 kHz with a medium Q width.

Did he post the track?
How can you be so specific?
Am I missing something here?

those may or may not be the specific settings but it is going to require cuts and not boosts, and around that area! It may not get rid of the nasality completely but should reduce it significantly!


PS. but if it did not work it's a good starting point to give the original poster.

The singer has a great voice except, he has a deviated septum, one nasal nostril is blocked, wondering how this can be

ummm...... EQ won't be much help!

But, ya know what worked for Sonny Bono....?

Have the singer hook up with some chick, who will change into skimpy outfits every song.

Seriously tho... The singer needs to work on developing better technique. A blocked nasal passage isn't going to cause a nasally vocal....

Sometimes a ribbon mike can help.
Or, mike like you would for a banjo.. (just kidding here)

The best thing is for the singer to correct the problem.


Kind Regards!

Kevin

I respectfully disagree with pdarg , as a cut in the area he suggested (2-3K as a first response) could take out all the presence in the vocal, unless you are using a mic with a big bump in that area, freq. response-wise and you need to compensate.

It is hard to give advice without hearing your track, but generally the first place you go to compensate for the "nasal sound" is EQ around 900-950. Try in that area first. If you don't have a good spectrum analyzer (actually, even if you do), vary the Q a bit and the dB until it sounds good to you. Then check with someone else to see if in the process of tuning, you have convinced yourself that it sounds good.

If nobody else is available to check your work, rip a great vocal track from someone else, play in through media player or something, and A/B with your current track (that you just EQ'd) to bring perspective.

Best,

Mark

Edited for clariy

I agree. This is probably the best way to attack this. Performance, performance, performance!

Just in time for halloween - we have some serious thread necromancy.

How about Melodyne's formant tool? Would that do anything? For this 9 year old pre-Melodyne problem, that is. 

To me, "nasal" can mean two things:
1.  The singer sings through his nose.
2.  The singer's nose is blocked (cold, polyps, etc.)
 
It sounds as though we are talking about #2, which tends to make M and N sounds indistinct.
 
One rather radical solution (which may not be appropriate for the material) would be to EQ the voice as though you were going for a telephone voice, but then back-off a little.  This would mean cutting highs and lows significantly and leaving orboosting the middle.  That sounds counter-intuitive, but it might come across as a sound you are going for instead of a problem: that type of EQ makes everyone sound a little nasal (in the #2 sense).  Of course, you probably wouldn't want to get too extreme, and this may not work for the particular song.  This could sound good or horrible.
 
Side note: I find 1176 compression gives a little of that sound if pushed hard.