Vocals are killing me!

[Hirosashii]

Okay, so I've never been good at implementing vocals into my tracks and making them understandable. I have cheated before and used clips from the show, but those are already mixed/mastered/what-have-you to be understandable. I'm talking about for when I sing into a microphone and incorporate that vocal track into my song.

Whenever I do that, my voice is always drowned under the music, no matter how much EQing, compressing, and limiting I do (in addition to other effects depending on what the song's style calls for). Am I completely missing something? I would post what track I am specifically talking about, but I can't do that yet, so I'll post another song that I made that suffers the same problem:

http://soundcloud.com/hirosashii/discords-lament

Any ideas?

[Habanc]

Umm, do you pan your instruments right and left enough to make room for your vocals in the middle? It could be that.

[Versilaryan]

^ Make sure that if you do that, don't pan any of the basses. You won't notice it at all if the basses are panned, and it's just a recipe for all sorts of trouble if you have bass sounds in either ear canceling things out.

The solution to this problem is simple: Make the vocals louder! The reason you can't hear them is because everything else is overpowering them. If you can't, make everything else softer. That will solve the grand majority of your problems right away.

Three more things you can do, though. One, lower the delay's volume when the vocals are going. Having a delay there can really muddy things up and make it harder to hear the vocal line amidst all the echoes. Then, you can up the delay volume again at the ends of phrases to get that cool echo effect.

Two, when the vocals are going, cut some mids out of the background. If there's anything in particular that's contributing a lot to the lower-mids, cut out some mids with an EQ to let your vocals stand out more. Then, when the vocals are gone, you can just turn that EQ off. If you're having trouble hearing the consonants, lower the volume on the high things or just EQ them down a bit. It's mostly the cymbals and that sparkly synth that might be causing problems in that end.

And lastly, copy that vocal line in the louder moments and cut a few milliseconds of silence from the beginning (or sing it again, but making sure your consonants aren't as loud), maybe pitch shift it a cent or two up or down, then hard-pan that left. Do the same thing again, but hard-pan it right. Lower the volume on both until it's not immediately obvious that you did that. That will give more stereo image to your vocals and make them sound bigger.

You get the best effect by rerecording the vocals, though then you have the problem of singing as perfectly in-time with the original recording as possible. Not too much of a problem!

You could also probably lower some of the lower-mids and up some of the lower highs (meaning, not high enough to be in your s's and t's, but high enough to get a lot of that harmonic content up there) to help your vocals sound more pop-y and stand out a little more. That one's just speculation, though, so if it probably won't work.

Really cool song, by the way! I enjoyed it!

[Hirosashii]

Umm, do you pan your instruments right and left enough to make room for your vocals in the middle? It could be that.

DUH, me. Wow, I'm silly. When you isolate the vocals in a song, the vocals are always on the middle track. Of course I should pan things left and right. Doh...

Anywho, is there a suggested amount to pan instruments to the left and right - a threshold that I shouldn't go over? Or is it all just up to taste?

[guitarskills]

That really would be up to personal taste, but I happen to be extremely sensitive to panning, so I'm not willing to go over %20.