In this video I’m showing you a pro secret to get those crispy, radio-sheen vocals in Logic Pro X—especially when you’ve got a mix ready or you’re working with a 2-track instrumental and you just need the vocal to cut through that slight bit more. The whole idea is simple: instead of turning the vocal up and wrecking your balance, I dynamically duck the specific frequencies in the instrumental that are masking the vocal. When the vocal comes in, the instrumental makes room. When the vocal stops, the instrumental kicks back in naturally. I route my instrumental to a bus and my vocals to a vocal bus, then I use FabFilter Pro-Q 3 on the instrumental bus with the vocal bus as an external sidechain. In Pro-Q 3’s analyzer you’ll literally see the red areas where frequencies are clashing. From there I use EQ Match, clean up the low end (because most of the time your low end is already sorted), delete anything under zero, and convert the remaining points to Dynamic. The key is keeping it subtle—tighten the Q so you don’t steal the body/soul of the beat, and keep the dynamic gain changes minor (I like around 3 dB). This is how you get vocals to breathe on top of the track without making the instrumental feel hollow.