I have a song track which is a mixture of a voice and instruments. As I give it reverb effects, the voice gets overshadowed by instrumental sounds. I wonder if I could make only voices louder than background instrument sounds.
Are they different stems?
Unless they are separate tracks no.
Or something like iZotope RX 7
This will allow you to isolate certain frequency ranges and process them as separate tracks:
That’s a pretty expensive solution and there are plugins (audionamix I think) that attempt to demix elements by type, though I haven’t heard anything stellar in this regard. There are vocal isolators that work by flipping the phase too, but if you just want to raise the vox a little couldn’t you just place your mix on a track and send it to 2 different groups? One for the mix as a whole and the other for vox. Then you could apply your reverb to the mix group, and carve out your vox frequency band on the vox group with cuts on either side. Then you could raise it to taste and apply whatever other effects to help clarify it without the mix reverb.
I’ve got mb-7 but I would probably try it this way first.
Have you tried adding a compressor on the track? It will bring the highest peaks of your audio and lowest parts closer together. It will change how the mix sounds, but I guess that’s what you want.
The OP never claimed to be on a limited budget. And of course there are other, cheaper and more labor intensive options? But IMO this is one of the best ways to get this done.
Thanks for all you guys’ professional answers. I am trying out the compressor, and if I don’t get satisfactory result I will think about using a tool like BlueCatAudio.
+1, the new Music Rebalance feature beats anything I’ve ever heard before hands down. Try the free 30-day demo.
This looks really cool. Thanks for posting about it. Didn’t know it existed.
I’m surprised that everyone is jumping in with plugin and technology solutions to a problem which is likely due to a lack of mixing experience. This isnt meant to be critical of OP, we’ve all been there and are all still learning.
That said if this happened to me I would start looking at the basic balance of mix first. My guess is its very dense and some subtractive eq to sounds masking the vocal would help it to pop out.
I’d also ask how are you adding reverb, as an insert or via FX send. If you are doing it as insert what is the mix value of direct to fx, obviously at higher settings you’d be getting nothing but reverbed vocal which can be washed away in the mix.
Personally I rarely use reverb on insert and instead tend to use a send a Reverb FX Channel which allows me to always have direct vocal which helps cut thru while more accurately adding the amount of reverb that I want on top. Not to mention you can do cool things like set up a gate or expander on the fx channel so reverb only comes in when dynamics of vocal change.
That said +1 on reasonable use of the Vintage compressor plug with no more than 3-5 dB compression at peaks on vocal as well to give it some body to compete with other sounds.
We are of course assuming that the problem is a single recording with everything on one track:
(my emphasis)