SLATIN

Multiband processing ALWAYS comes with issues! But sometimes, those flaws can become a staple of a certain style or genre. 🧨

Applied on vocals, the crossover points smear the phase of the vocal, and that artifact is part of the sound we associate with “finished” pop records. 🎚️

Our ears have been trained by decades of pop music vocal chains with multiband compressors. When a loud, upfront pop vocal skips multi-band compression, something feels off. The track reads as unpolished, even when every other element is dialed in. The phase smearing isn’t a flaw to engineer around in this context. It’s a sonic fingerprint of the genre.

So before you chase a cleaner signal path on a pop vocal, ask what your reference tracks are doing. Most hit records you pull up will have a multi-band compressor on the lead vocal, somewhere around 95% of the time.

But as usual, trust your ear… you are not obligated to use anything that you don’t like! 👍