Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Why your vocal disappears the moment the chorus hits, and how to keep it upfront without fader riding.
Your vocal sits perfectly in the verse, then the chorus arrives and it gets buried. It's not the vocal. The chorus brings in more tracks, and they're all sitting right on top of it.
Most people fix this by riding the fader or pushing the vocal unnaturally loud. There's a cleaner way. Send all your music to one bus, everything except the vocal. Put a compressor on that bus and side-chain it from the vocal.
Now every time the vocal comes in, the whole backing drops by a dB or two. You won't hear the ducking happening. You'll just hear the vocal sitting in its own pocket on top of the mix, exactly where it should be.
How do you keep your vocal upfront in big choruses? Drop it in the comments.
#mixing #vocalmixing #sidechain #mixingtips #musicproduction
Why your vocal disappears the moment the chorus hits, and how to keep it upfront without fader riding.
Your vocal sits perfectly in the verse, then the chorus arrives and it gets buried. It's not the vocal. The chorus brings in more tracks, and they're all sitting right on top of it.
Most people fix this by riding the fader or pushing the vocal unnaturally loud. There's a cleaner way. Send all your music to one bus, everything except the vocal. Put a compressor on that bus and side-chain it from the vocal.
Now every time the vocal comes in, the whole backing drops by a dB or two. You won't hear the ducking happening. You'll just hear the vocal sitting in its own pocket on top of the mix, exactly where it should be.
How do you keep your vocal upfront in big choruses? Drop it in the comments.
#mixing #vocalmixing #sidechain #mixingtips #musicproduction
