When do you Low pass vocals?

Same, never.

Always. Typically at the very front of the vocal chain. I have the Dangerous Bax LPF on my vocal bus too for good measure. Makes for a way smoother top end... regardless of recording quality, processing or style. Always an obvious improvement.

Rarely unless I'm going for a certain effect. Even then I'll usually choose a mix that fits the sound I'm going for first. So easy to do in the mix.

I do, and on other stuff as well. But I have to be super careful, as I can’t really hear up there anymore. Very easy to suck the life out of things.

Cheers,
Geoff

All the time.

LPF on distorted rock vocals almost always. LPF on BG vocals if you want to place them further back and any vocals in general you want to verb out or soak with delay and push back in the mix. LPF and HPF are your front to back controls.

If you ever use CLA Vocals, there's a gentle low pass built in, along with a high pass and slight low mid cut. I have a Q-Clone snapshot of it that I use sometimes when I want that starting point without the noise from the actual plug-in.

Otherwise, I do a lot of my vocal recordings with dynamic mics as of late and don't feel the need to have the low pass there because the mics are rolled off enough already. With a bright condenser, maybe?

Now all that said, there is a specific 60s sound you can get by setting a low-pass fairly low and boosting into it, but that's a special effect as much as anything else. It's an imitation of that 47/67/RCA Ribbon vocal sound on those classic 60s recordings where there's not much going on above 5k. Like many things of that nature, it's a loose imitation at best. (Oh, and all of this is at the mixing stage, never at the tracking stage.)

Super helpful on some bgvs

I do the same with mine. Gets super creamy!

Ok, maybe not fair. But more likely a shelf doing something if needed. Always trying to pick the right mic so it comes in with the proper context in the first place. If it’s distorted, that’s probably in parallel so that might be, but not the clean part. BGV’s…they’re supposed to stand further back and that takes care of it….right?

I only ever low pass with linear phase for that exact reason

I never low pass vocals on the way in. I may low pass if I'm looking for an effect in mixing, but normally never. Honestly, at 63, I can't hear above 18K so I leave the top end alone.
On a completely odd side note; I think mixes have become much brighter over the years because the guys mixing it are losing the top end of their hearing. They push it. I would bet CLA has some severly limited hearing. Of course, our brains can make up for what we are not actually hearing, but I do think that the age of many mixing engineers plays a part in bright mixes. ok.... I'm done. Just a random thought. :-)


Oh, one more thing:
I had a plugin reverb thast I used back around 2010. It was Virsyn Reflect. It was good at the time but one of their version releases had a bug and it oscillated at 18KHZ. I never noticed it until someone's daughter (12) heard it and flipped out on the sound. Sure enough, I put something like SPAN on it and could easily see that it was oscillating near nyquist. Man... I wish I had that hearing still.


I DO HPF almost all vocals during mixing. Never during tracking.