"Industry Standard" Vocals

As an audio engineer who records and mixes vocals for clients, I am the one responsible for the client's vocals to sound "industry standard" and "commercial ready" when the session or commission is done. The "industry" and "commercial" buzzwords all really mean one thing in my opinion - very overprocessed and unnatural vocals. To achieve the popular sound, you are effectively killing a lot of dynamics in the recording by compressing the audio to crazy amounts. Sure, everything sounds more dynamically leveled and louder, but it is at the cost of the natural sounds of how we sound in real life. Especially when we factor in other processes like dynamic eq, saturation, excitement, and the most obvious - autotune into the mix for the voice and we can sound more like robots or synthesizers than people. Overprocessed vocals definitely have their own space for artistic expression (take T.Pain or Cher for example), but I feel like it has become too much of a norm in the pop, R&B, and hiphop realm of the industry. I think what stops people from going back to a more naturally mixed voice is the insecurity of the artist & engineer that it would sound "unpolished" due to the years of the "industry standard over-compressed" vocals being normalized in a long span of time.

I have been listening to some acoustic songs like Session 32 by Summer Walker and it has been refreshing hearing raw vocals without all the "air" and compression. The song sounds intimate and gives more of a realistic setting for the listener to imagine themselves in - you can practically imagine Summer Walker singing the song to you in a bedroom. What the industry standard mixing does is create a very clean and polished unnatural sound all around in a barren dimension/environment. It definitely has a great polished sound which is why it's become the standard, but streaming platforms are saturated with these industry standard mixes. I'm not saying to not mix vocals and other instruments at all, I just think we should have more songs that don't process to the extent we normally do. We need more realistic covers or live performance versions of songs - we need to remind ourselves and appreciate what things sound like in the real world.