The joys of vocal growl and vocal tuning

[HOOK]

What it sounds like.

 

What it looks like.  Same note...alternating octaves.  Been that way since the first vocal tuning software came out...and basically has always meant that I have to get it right without help most of the time.  🤣  

 

 

 

 

[Lord Tim]

This is the bane of my existence.

We do all kinds of stuff vocally, from super clean pop  or prog/power metal style vocals to bluesy grit, to extreme metal (pretty much all of those things in the one song HERE in fact). Opening up Melodyne and having it go "oh you're trying to do a polyphonic instrument?" when you've decided to tighten up a vocal line is the most heart-sinking feeling ever, then you redetect as monophonic and get what you're seeing there. 😑

I'm the same, I'll do comps first to get stuff in the ballpark and then run a final pass with Melodyne to catch any rogue stuff that is sticking out as weird then, rather than just  a blanket "fix this" pass. You get a better vocal that way anyway, I think.

What I've found though is if you are tuning a growl/scream/vocal fry section and it's flipping octaves or thinking it's sibilance, make sure you cut it between the breaks in the jumps first, then only select the stuff you know is the actual note rathe than the jump, and tune that. Then you can go back and decide manually if you need to adjust the rest, or it's a fool's errand - sometimes those notes just don't tune at all, and it's best to just leave them.

 

[T Boog]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

This is the bane of my existence

Bravo Tim. I had to give u a like just for using the word "bane". 👏

[HOOK]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

This is the bane of my existence.

We do all kinds of stuff vocally, from super clean pop  or prog/power metal style vocals to bluesy grit, to extreme metal (pretty much all of those things in the one song HERE in fact). Opening up Melodyne and having it go "oh you're trying to do a polyphonic instrument?" when you've decided to tighten up a vocal line is the most heart-sinking feeling ever, then you redetect as monophonic and get what you're seeing there. 😑

I'm the same, I'll do comps first to get stuff in the ballpark and then run a final pass with Melodyne to catch any rogue stuff that is sticking out as weird then, rather than just  a blanket "fix this" pass. You get a better vocal that way anyway, I think.

What I've found though is if you are tuning a growl/scream/vocal fry section and it's flipping octaves or thinking it's sibilance, make sure you cut it between the breaks in the jumps first, then only select the stuff you know is the actual note rathe than the jump, and tune that. Then you can go back and decide manually if you need to adjust the rest, or it's a fool's errand - sometimes those notes just don't tune at all, and it's best to just leave them.

 

I find that USUALLY rejoining that stuff won't fix it because the transitions become unnatural at the cuts.  Sometimes I get one I can use like that.  But mostly not.  I'm pretty much at the point where, if I see that octave jump and the very first auto try doesn't make me happy I just re-sing it.

I'll usually comp the first line and work it with Melodyne till I like it 100%.  Then I'll sing all the other doubles and harmony layers to that.  Generally I don't have to tune any of the layers, but will go back sometimes to see if I like it better with some, or all of those dialed in.

[Lord Tim]

Perfect is the enemy of great at the end of the day. Sometimes re-singing a vocal might not be as "perfect" as locking in the tuning, but the attitude really sells it, so I'm on board with that!

About the only time I really just suck it up is with backing vocals. I've hated out of tune harmony vocals since forever, so I'll lock those in fairly tight for the most part, and then do additional untuned takes over the top to make it sound natural and adjust the blend to find that natural balance between perfect and real. 

But yeah, leads... sometimes the best lead is something you just don't "fix" for sure!

[HOOK]

United is HUGE man.  Great job.

[Lord Tim]

Mixing the follow-up album literally right now. Kill me 😑  HAHA!

[John Bradley]

Yeah, you can get away with a lot on the backing vocals. Crushing them to on-grid pitch, shifting blobs more than a semitone up or down, etc. 

Things that’d sound completely fake and weird on a lead vocal, or in isolation, but mixed in with a couple extra backing vocal tracks plus the lead line and they glue together into something pleasant. 

Within reason, of course!

[John Bradley]

It’s also useful on occasion to take a lead line and slam it to on-pitch and on-time, and shift the blobs aroud a crazy amount (+/- 7 semitones?) in order to recompose the melody and make it more interesting.

Then resing a few more takes using that as a guide track before deleting it.

Also works for guitar solos and working out vocal harmonies.

Melodyne Studio is a very useful compositional tool, even if you need to rerecord the parts afterwards.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, absolutely. There's been a few times I've had a vocalist come in and do a "ehh OK???" take that was generally kind of pitchy, so we'd comp the best bits, tune it to hell and have it running while they re-sung it. The new vocal was generally HEAPS better, just having the original tuned one there as a confidence guide.

And yeah, arranging vocal harmonies too is super useful!

[John Vere]

Yes Melodyne is one of those tools I avoided for years and would just re sing out of pitch parts instead. Then they baited me with an upgrade so now I spent $100 I dang well better figure it out and start using it. That was 4 years ago and I'm still on the steep part of the hill. And I also upgraded all the way to Editor so I can now clean up guitar tracks too. 

I quickly learned not to overdue it. My pitch is actually always very close on a good day. So sometime all I do is use that note centering slider and clean up any artifacts. I always work with very short clips. I cut my vocal tracks into what is a line from the lyrics. 

It's when I record my own harmony parts I dig in and abuse Melodyne. I found I like the sound if I pull all the pitch lines almost flat as well as fix timing and the levels. 

I will play the harmony part on a synth and get that sounding the way I want it then I kill most of the mix and sing along with that. Sometimes this sounds good sometimes not. 

But I've developed a pretty quick workflow were I can fly through a whole song in a few hours. I assigned the Z key to open Melodyne editor and the X key renders it. Boy did that speed things up. 

[mettelus]

The human voice has a lot of harmonics in it, so it is often best to treat a single voice as "monophonic" to keep those overtones linked to each other. Melodyne's editing capabilities are powerful, but not always obvious, and some of them have nuances you need to see/work out to understand. When I want surgical control of the harmonics themselves, I default to using MCharacter for that task specifically. Some voices have an incredibly pronounce octave (which is why Melodyne can "jump" like that, the octave suddenly triggers "more prominent").

There was an old thread years ago on the old forums about composing with "only stock samples" and I found an old project late last year where I went in with that focus, but of course it drifted to samples only being a portion. I used vocal samples and added melisma to them with Melodyne. Those came out perfect, but I realized that level of editing/manipulation goes a tad beyond "just using them" (why I jacked the brakes on that project), so I tracked the artist down and she was cool with it. She made me chuckle when she had said, "Wow, what a nice gesture. No one has ever followed up with me like that before."