Gaining Vocal Clarity In Your Mixes

After 15 years of recording and mixing, I see a lot of people falling into the same traps I did at the beginning...

Adding a lot of effects to their vocal tracks and smothering them with lots and lots of reverb...

And this is natural! When we start mixing music there is nothing better than trying out all of these effects, changing the sound of what was recorded, and just kind of going crazy with all the plugins we have.

But the truth is, when we add a lot of effects (specifically reverb) to our vocal track, this actually makes our mixes come across as amateur. Most listeners will notice the overabundance of reverb and hear that we are trying to hide behind this tool. 

And not just that, we also sacrifice the crispness that our vocal tracks should have. 

Of course we want ambient and "pretty" sounding vocals... But we can do this without overloading our tracks with too much verb. Check out the below video to see what I mean