Mixing Demo Vocals - Part 2
Lesson 14 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Mixing Demo Vocals - Part 2
Lesson 14 from: Music Production 101: Producing + Songwriting for BeginnersTomas George
Lessons
Introduction and What you're going to Learn
00:20 2Writing a Chord Progression
11:37 3Writing a Bass Part
10:19 4Building a Drum Beat
08:57 5Writing a Melody
17:15 6Arrangement - Part 1
14:23 7Arrangement - Part 2
19:06 8Vocal Demo Melodies
04:31Lesson Info
Mixing Demo Vocals - Part 2
Hi. In this video, we're gonna do a couple of things that are gonna help us tune the vocals. So again, these are just Thomas's uh self demo vocals, like he said, and like I said, he's gonna get a singer in at some point, but he just wanted to lay down some vocals himself, but I wanna show you what it can be like to tune vocals, especially in the case of a demo. If you're just sending this out to people, you know, it's not the full production version. It does help to make it sound as good as possible. OK. So in Logic Pro which is just what we happen to be using. We have a tool called Flex Pitch. Your digital audio workstation might have a tool like this. Uh Otherwise you can use something called melody or similar vocal tuning Softwares that are out there. There's quite a lot these days and they're very, very good. They just allow you to correct mistakes in the performance when it comes to the pitch of the notes that the vocalist is singing. Ok. So I'm just gonna get started. I'm gonna c...
lick on the flex marker here. And uh we have monophonic. Cool. So I'm just gonna switch over to flex pitch here. And what it's gonna do is analyze the pitch of the notes that Thomas sung or sang. OK. So it's analyzed the notes that Tom sang in the recording and I'm just gonna go in and just make some adjustments just to make the performance sound a bit better. So, as you can see here, we've got the different notes that you're saying kind of mapped out on the keyboard here. So let's have a look at any discrepancies, doesn't actually look that bad. Of course, we should bear in mind that the key that he's composed the song in is C major. So basically anything that is hit in a black note is probably not in tune with the song. So let's play well. So yeah, it's pretty off. He hit black notes quite often. So, um we've got a little bit of work to do, but I'm sure that we can get to a better result than we have now. So let's start with the first note. So what we're gonna do is try pulling it up to e where it should be, which is pretty cool. It just lets us do that. Ok. But there's some slight adjustment that we need to make as well in terms of a fine pitch. So I'm just gonna drag that middle one here. I just got it firmly on E so let's see what that sounds like fear that. Ok. I'm just gonna move this one up to e where it should be as well and then make an adjustment, fine pitch fear. So let's, wow. Ok. So I've made a few adjustments there, but as I go on, I realize there's actually got a lot of work to do. So sometimes it's just easier to select all of them right? Click on one of them and then set to perfect pitch. So that gets us off to a good start in terms of fine tuning the vocals, but it doesn't necessarily put the notes on the right key. OK? So what we need to do is quantize the notes to the scale that we are using, which in this case is C major. So I've selected all the notes and what I'm going to do now is switch the scale quantize to see and boom, it's moved all of the notes to the nearest notes on the scale. Those being the white notes as this is the C major scale. Let's have a listen back because it could have rounded off to the nearest note. But with a performance like this, it might have been so out of tuned that it's actually gone to the wrong note. So let's have a listen. Yeah, let's fly film. Cool. So that's kind of done the job again. It's not perfect. You can't ever hope to really get perfect when you start off with an imperfect performance or an imperfect recording, but you can make things better, not perfect, but you can make them better. OK. Cool. So what you can see here as well are these kind of squiggly lines where Thomas was quite clearly fluctuating in pitch, otherwise known as vibrato um in the performance. What you can do is you can actually reduce that here using one of these nodes here. So you see it says vibrato just underneath the note, we're just gonna decrease that there just to kind of smooth it out, see what that sounds like tonight. OK? So it's finding a balance sometimes cos it was obviously intentionally doing that to an extent, but sometimes you just need to fine tune it in post night film. OK? But I'm not gonna go through correcting everything that I see. I'd rather correct everything that I hear and so far I think we're doing. OK? Family limits. OK? So that seems to have cleared things up a bit in terms of the vocal recording. Another process that you can try is using a pitch correction plug in like the one we have here in Logic Pro which is called pitch correction. Your software might also have a pitch correction plug in. This is kind of the easier way to do it, but it doesn't necessarily give you like microscopic control of the notes like flex pitch or melody does. Um But there are other pitch correction plugins on the market like Andi's uh auto tune, which are one of the best ones out there, but they all roughly do the same job. Some of them just do it slightly better than others. Um So with this, we can choose a scale that we want to quantize to. So for example, for C major, we have to first switch to major scale and switch to C here and then it's just automatically correcting everything to the C major scale um which isn't really gonna have an effect because I've kind of already done that with flex pitch. So said, but we could say, for example, use this to switch it to something else. So maybe natural minor. So let's fly. I'm just gonna fasten the response here feel you can kind of hear those popular auto tune artifacts as well when I speed up the response feeling. So obviously, that's completely out of key because I've basically just forced it into a natural minor scale from ac major scale. But let's give you another example. So let's say, so let's say we just turn off all of the notes apart from G. So now it's only quantis those notes to G at different octaves on the scale. So kind of weird, but you can do lots of experimental stuff with it. But like I said, it can serve just as very quick, very easy uh correction without doing the hard work that I did in flex pitch. But like I said before, this is just a demo. You know, we're trying to make the best of something that isn't ideal in the first place. What's imperative for a professional finished product is that you get things professionally performed and professionally uh recorded, you can't save everything at the mix stage. But again, this is just Thomas's demo recording and if he wants to ship this out to labels and stuff like that, then this might be the best that he, that he has at the moment. So it can be worth doing the hard work in post to kind of correct or do your best to correct what is already a less than ideal recording. Hope the stuff in this video was useful and I'll see you in the next one.
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