20 Tips On Mixing

12. Compress the vocals to make them sit nicely in the mix. Few vocalists can sing at a sufficiently even level to
be mixed successfully without compression. Softknee
compressors tend to be the least obtrusive, but if you
want the compression to add warmth and excitement to your sound, try an optocompressor
or a hardknee
model with a higher ratio setting than you'd normally use. Be aware that compression raises the background
noise (for every 1dB of gain reduction, the background noise in quiet passages will come up by 1dB), and
heavy compression can also exaggerate vocal sibilance.