Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Vocals with VocALign

Uh, things in melody, I wanna cover really quick. So, uh, it's like we're going back in time. Um all right, there's uh whenever I was talking yesterday about these air, just two short cuts, so I won't spend a lot of time on it. But it's really good to know about these. Where are we? Here. Okay, so whatever I'm doing my move, all this stuff around, whatever I'm doing choruses and stuff, I like to have a knock tive um, an octave below the main vocal. I said it kind of thicken up the main vocal and make it to sound bigger. So in melody line there's a kind of a quick way to make sure that those why, what I'm doing is I'm just loading this into melody in really quick so I can demonstrate that you never know. Okay, cool wait. Oh, that was open. Okay, sorry. We have so much to cover. I'm just trying to kind of get through here and there in the mid meantime, question from the chat room. Louise gallardo, I probably ruin that name. I'm sorry. Louise, can you ask andrew the compressor that appear...

s on all of your vocals in your pro tools session? Are those for the final results or just have control while you're headed? Uh I'm going to get into that in the last section of today which is mixing we're gonna talk about all the compressors that I do use for tracking and for mixing and and why stuff like that perfect yeah I'll get into that almost done here okay all right just basically want to demonstrate this technique so you have whenever you're in melody line and you have a knock tive it's going to look like this um and the best sound to me is when they really lock in together and they sound unified so what I do and melody line is I'll literally move the reference pitch up to the other one and if you actually go to let's say we want teo edit um the female vocal to the lower vocal which is his mind that's in there let me actually played tio you here we have different time timing there so uh what I would do is move mine up a za reference and sounds funny move mine up as a reference but we're not going to listen to it because what we're gonna do is over here there's a little uh guy or you just hit play selected and you can you only hear what you have selected self I click on mind taking it slow sounds funny but it's not for how it sounds this it's for the reference so uh I like the timing of the original vocal here that I did so I could just take hers where is stuff it's a lot it's quite quite different uh I'm just going quick the it would probably never be this extreme because you would in the studio you would be a little meticulous turning tracking but I just wanted to show you this so take it ah that that breath is weird whatever this is a super extreme case but anyway that's just a technique that I use a lot to keep the workflow going and do things quicker so uh I would just move that up in octave just so you can you know you have you have your reference right there in front of you anyway okay and then the second second thing in melody line that I want to talk about is something that we talked about during the break which is making harmonies with melody line uh I don't I'm not a fan of actually doing this technique I like to do real harmonies uh usually myself I'll do the harmonies for the band like if they can't figure it out or if they're having a hard time um because if you know the right ways to blend your voice with the lead singer you can really make it mesh well and nothing's going to stand out at all you're just going to enhance the sound of it so really quick just so we reset everything we're going to transfer these two tracks okay, so while that's loading in I just wantto say if you if you are gonna do these fake vocals the best way is not to just duplicate dooper uh make a duplicate of the original vocal but to actually seeing the vocal again so you have different nuances and you have it's actually in different vocal take because whenever you use the original vocal it's going toe make it sound like a weird demon or like like a weird eighties affect uh maybe you want that but whenever you want things that sound natural this's not the best that is not the best choice so we have to actual different takes and all you do is uh you know, we want to hear hear both of them uh so hey ah they want to make sure these all these notes eyes teo ah if you are going to do that and that's gonna be your final results you're gonna want to sing it again so it is a different take so you're not having your beautiful female vocal sound like an alien or demon is singing country song uh but if you are just maybe writing ah harmony and you want experiment maybe you can't think of you know what is the harmony for this part bringing into melody line moving around, figure it out sometimes you know, you just can't immediately think of what the harmony is and sometimes you'll do things that you never would have thought of even if you did have a harmony maybe you'll figure out a better one without even you know by accident sometimes so it's just a cool tool all right melody line uh for that particular thing is done uh I won't talk about vocal line because that's the next uh on our our checklist of things after we melody line and correct timing within melody line as we go then we'll send it back to pro tools a sze yu guys recall and then we vocalize so let me just demonstrate vocal line how many guys know about vocal in or no one vocal linus okay, cool alright um it is an invaluable tool for vocals if you are not going to buy anything else by melody line and focus so these are both plug ins to pro tools they wouldn't they wouldn't be a part of your dollar your digital audio workstation no, they don't they don't come with pro tools. So these are all things that should work with you know any any d a w great? Okay, so vocal line is when you're doing a bunch of vocals and you want them to sink together um and sound like one vocal, so I mean that's, that's all it is but that will save you so much time you do that a little bit of melody line but sometimes there's those tiny little differences that you hear and they stick out in the mix and you can either spend all day trying to figure it out and put it on or you can get this click through it and be complete so this is t iss ah is ah so this is gonna be a great example I know from experience um this is where all your breaths and your edits that we're the same come in and hand it to the rescue to save your you know save time because if you have breaths in one take and you don't have breasts in the other take vocal line is going to read those breaths and maybe match a word to the breath instead of matching the breaths to the breath so if you are having a hard time of it vocal line that could be something so all you do we have to vocals here I mean this toe work with right now so but this will be pretty obvious so let's listen to that let's listen to that one more time tio is teo it's almost like there's a delay on one it sounds like so all you do uh if you're going to use vocal line you click on guide up here and then select the vocal that you want to use as the guide the correct vocal. And then you hit dub for the one that is not correct. And you capture again and then he hit spot. So, andrew, is that essentially a kind of a master slave relationship? Like which one you want it to be, you know change too, right? Right. The first one is like the master and the second one's a slave. So I like tio hopes. But this is different than pc. Okay, so I like to switch back and forth. You can see with the changes here, I could make this bigger easily so you can see what moves here. So after I do what I always just do ah, undo redo really quick. Just so I can see that nothing changed dramatically. If something's like shifting way over it's, probably wrong. So I just like to do that as a quick reference to make sure that everything is fine. Now, in my expert opinion, this turned out fine. So let's, listen to it. See if I was right. Take it. Ah, because you may see is this they go? Ah. So instead of spending all day trying to figure out those tiny little things and how to fix him yeah, that is the shortcut of all shortcuts there. Seems like you could really tell a lot of that difference in the constants on dh where those pieces don't line up I mean, you can hearing of words yet like hard words teas and peas and all that stuff those are I mean now because he is just so much I hear someone that doesn't use it bothers me so that um and sometimes you want so we have like, a super doubled sound right now uh sometimes you want a little bit of that and you want to sound natural so you don't want to like the chorus on it because chorus kind of sounds, you know, like chorus and it's usually pretty obvious so that's why I like to do riel doubles so what I would do is I would go through all these steps um and when you do these corrections in melody line uh it gets you closer but it's not perfect and that's why this was so easy to do because we got really close and then this just locked it in together. So um what I would do is normally let's let's pretend that we didn't vocalize it and you turn it down, you'll still tell that there's another vocal and you also hear that it's off beat of the other vocal so it so it stands out pretty bad so let's actually demonstrate that so I'll turn this down take it slow because you think I mean that's that's you know eight decibels quieter and you can clearly hear all those problems but as soon as your vocal line it and have it together it really blends in and almost creates ah I don't know a different type of effect because it's so locked together tio so because you mrs this they go ah so when you hear that you think is that two vocals you know it's so tight it's like I think I hear another vocal is that just a defect or what is that so any time I do analogue this's how I do it so this completes all the steps to finishing editing a vocal that of singing this is where it's finished uh editing wise and I would go through and do this to all the vocals we have some uh extreme just looks like it wait a minute today we want men teo so uh just vocal line specifically just a little tip um just little tip with the vocal line it works better when you kind of do sections like this so if you could roll the dice you could try to do the whole phrase at once but when there's empty spaces like this vocal and kind of gets weird and uh things shift over like a dramatic amount so I like to just go one section at a time so it's capture this and uh capture that we weren't meant to be we weren't meant to be the so if you do melody in it and you maybe hear a pitch change faster than the other one and you want to fix that I would probably bring that into melody line if it's like a really big problem um but that's that's not a really common case but that that may happen to you and that is the solution that is the best solution yes question from neil's boar are there any options for pitching timing corrections if you don't have melody line or like a cheaper there are children's but melody line is the absolute best you know want to recommend any cheaper plug ins I mean there's cheaper versions of melody line uh I mean I think they even have one that's like ninety nine bucks uh it's just yeah you could get freedom moses so there's options out there yeah okay uh but melody line absolutely hints down sounds the best and the workflow is very very see things other ones I've tried other ones and they kind of get the job done but like if you're looking for the best and that's what this class is for you know that's that's what you're that's what you're going to get so anyway uh this first verse actually uh we just want this one vocal so there's probably not a reason to go through and melody line all these here anyway uh, obviously went to use it when you have several vocals. Uh, see, oh, yeah, vocal line is not good to see you to stretch words. Don't don't rely on this to stretch words. The method that I showed you with, uh, melody line is the best thing to use, not vocal line. Andrew there's. One more question in from appropriate question from the internet here. Alex ass is wondering if local and will work just as well on screaming vocals as it will on. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and we'll get into that actually, perfect. Um, now, uh, I have a tip here, compile a template vocal, and I'll show you how to do that. Actually, I think I'm going to use the next such session to show you how to do that technique.