thread of vocal engineering tips

"If I turn it down, it gets lost, if I turn it up it just juts out horribly in the mix."

try automating the volume so the vocal ebbs and flows with the musical arrangement. do the same with the reverb send so that at certain points of the song the vocals sound wetter than in others. should help them pop out a bit, and that way you won't potentially fuck up the dynamics with a master comp

presumably you've done this already, but make sure that there isn't any frequency masking or clashing from instruments in a similar frequency range to your voice. whatever daw you're using should have a spectrum analyzer to check with, then use an eq to cut accordingly. be careful not to boost any vocal freqs too much

Thanks folks, will try out a few if these