Lessons

Lesson Info

Vocal Tuning with Melodyne

The first thing I wanna touch on her there's there's a lot of different programs that tune vocals, but to me and what I've always used for the two major ones and the two that I really prefer our melody line and auto tune, and they really work pretty differently, and they both have their strength for different styles of vocals, which I'm going to display with these vocals, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about stuff that we didn't do that's good to you to use those for I'm also going to dive a little bit into creating harmonies with melody line and just some tips and tricks with both software's um, not sure that's actually a plural word that could be plural, but, uh, the other thing that goes hand in hand with those two programs is vocal line and that's, a program that automatically lines up one take to another. And so I'm going to I'm going to go through, and I'm basically just going to do this how I would in a session, and I really like for most main vocals, I really like melody line,...

because it gives me more control over time. I like its time compression and expansion algorithms better than any other program program I've used actually like it better than like actual time compression plug ins that just sounds really good it's interface is really good to make things sound natural without getting too tuned on dso that's what I use on main vocals and that's what I'm gonna use first on basically just going to run through how I'll set that up and tune tune these verse vocals luckily it won't take too long because alex did an excellent job and we've already compton if you missed that part we've taken all the best takes so this is like as good as we could do with our time and I think it's pretty good so the first thing I'm gonna do an address I guess is melody line comes in different forms but I use it in the session as a plug in I don't really like taking you it could be stand alone and I don't like taking the locals out, putting him in another program having to bounce the music or like running it through rewire I don't like dealing with that stuff, so I'm just going to run it in the session and I'm going to show you how I do that so make it the first insert here on the main vocal track is under other for some reason it's not actually under pitch because that's just how pro tools categorize that so we got melody in here it's in our task plugging a x if you're using protocols eleven it's not tdm one thing about melody is that it actually record your vocals into its own program that's being used as a plug in so you always want to be the first plug in because if you have a plug him before melody line it's goingto it's gonna bring that effect or anything in the melody I'm which kind of defeats the point of having a plugging, which is to be ableto manipulated it any time, so you always want to make sure melody line is your first plug in, so we opened it up in the mix window I'm gonna go back to the lead it went, no, I won't go back just a little bit here. I've noticed a couple times with melody line if I get too close to the way form when I'm bringing it in, it will make the timing of the very first hit or first vocal a little weird or like cut something off you don't want saw always get a little room I'm gonna go back like a bar here. So the first thing you do open it up and go toe algorithm just in case said it set as the fault and I want melodic because we're just tuning a melody regular vocals, this other other options air for generally non vocal you so select melodic transfer that's just gonna be the verse and another thing to keep in mind is and we talked about before, but I'm gonna bring it up again because you khun if you forget about this and then melody in all your vocals because melody is actually recording it in if you like miss and edit or there's like a breath that's chopped weird that's going to be in your melody line so then if you tune all that stuff, you're going to be like dang it now I have to go back and start over because of some stupid breath or some and there's ways to get around that that I'll show you to but just in general double check make sure everything's cross faded and you don't have any weird sounds so you don't have to go back and mess with your melody because even though it's a powerful program it can be really annoying to try to get little clips back in the melody so we're gonna do a great big chunk here the entire birth transfers engage I'm gonna press play to bring the audio we recorded the vocals that we come to recorded intothe down teo teo member while ah ah ah and as you get more advanced with it, you could do you could just you can put melody line on all your vocal tracks hit transfer on all of them and run them all at once you don't have to do them separate I'm just doing it separate so um you can kind of see where I'm at with things for some reason I don't have the grid in miliband and that's weird but so what you just heard is the un tuned vocal and it still sounds good but we want to make some adjustments um and so it comes in it doesn't tune automatically or anything it just gives you a visual representation of what was some and it actually what's cool about melody I'm does it give you these pitch points which make funny sounds when you touch trying to do that too much but uh it already cuts up basically the points in which it thinks you're going to want to tune the each word or each note it's not always perfect the first thing I always do is I look through it and I see before correcting anything where do I need to cut to make sure if I do a batch correction like I can select them all and say put this on pitch I want to make sure that everything is cut up correctly and that will make more sense once I do it here that way when I do that things don't get thrown even further out of tune in the wrong spots one thing I think it's just the contrasts on the screen but I can't actually see the lines I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and I'm gonna look at this and I'm gonna play it back and all your play controls are still the same as pro tools, so you're basically just playing pro tools back and looking at this new screen, which is melody the first tool I'm going to use is the one all the way to the right and it's a cutting tool and it's so you can cut these regions or get rid of them like if you double click here, it'll get rid of it and you khun group two regions together. Nice thing I like about melody and especially the most updated version is that all your key commands worked within the plug in, which is super cool because a lot of plug ins, like undo and redo don't work and when you're editing vocals that's like the slowest thing to try to hit a back button in a forward but so that's great! So I wanted to be able to control these two parts separately, and I'm just gonna go through this real fast and you're going to see how I'm going to adjust this stuff, too, and I'm a tune this a little more than I normally would, but just so you can see what this is capable of, and again this line, uh, controls the pitch, so I'm cutting it up to make sure that one line isn't controlling. The wrong notes in the wrong way and you'll see it in action can also control the broader this way, which is really cool it's a little easier when you can see the note, I think, something I should explain maybe what I've been saying that I can't see is that there's a difference in the shades of gray? You see, you have, like f e d all the notes here on our screen, it's a little tough to distinguish that this is white and this is gray so normally there's a grid there that you can see, you know, even if I'm on this side, I know that that's the d sharp because or do I know? Yes, I know it's a little harder because I can't see the differentiate, maybe I'm blind anyway, so now I've cut everything up like I said, and I'm gonna go back too far side scroll gets out of control sometimes, and you can right click in melody too, which is cool. I'm going to select all which selects all my points go to this tool, which, uh not sure what it's called but it's the little selector to let you teo things up and down, but if you double click, it puts everything on pitch, so I'm not sure we saw that as long as everything's selected oops, I'm doing too many things, lungs, everything selected, and you have that tool double click it and they all go to the closest pitch that you had so sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad, so sure, I assume so. Obviously, some of that is more on key and some of it's a little awkward, and we can get in and just that teo with mel, dine on without you, you can hear the difference. Fortunately, alex is pretty on key, so we're actually throwing a couple of those mohr out of q than they are, so since that's happening, I'm gonna zoom in here, get real close attempt to see something I cannot currently, but I don't know if you saw there there's one line going through a note that's kind of angled, and if I want that note to slide, I want the slightly part of the notice slide, but I want the top to stay a little straighter and a little more on key in the beginning. So what you're hearing is it took this and it found it, but it put it up to high, so that beginning sound sharp. Theo, can you in the very beginning, so I see this little dip, and I'm gonna cut that. Because that part's already on key and right now I'm just going to ignore this because I don't want to mess up the slide too much take the part that got thrown a little off key double click it and bring it back down teo so long more natural it's not like weird peeking in the beginning, but also you get a little more full note and you could even just until in that and that's the cool thing about melody if you go to reset parameters under the pitch controls, you could just hit reset pitch and I'll put it back to how it was when you brought it in so there's a word that you just can't seem to make sounds better than it was before just you can go right back to it even if you made like thirty or forty moves efforts that's not an undo, it resets the pitch and you can actually do that with all all the parameters pitch modulation, pitch drift form and everything. Um and I'll get into these other tools here in a minute. I'm just going to get through a little bit of this, teo teo so down just that I'm cutting things up to not mess with this transitions and the slides because usually if you cut around the transition, you start to get weird weird sounds in the transitions don't sound right and since transitions aren't really pitch related anyways, you don't need to mess with that stuff so let's try to get the solid part tio on and I'm trying to tune this like really tune just to get just so you understand what you could do with this program? So another thing you see this it's kind of curved he could cut it up to mass until two man bring this down a little bit you also don't have to go directly on qi you can use this appear the scent meter and you can adjust that one cent at a time in a region and I want to bring that town I'm gonna go to this well curved the word mine so that's pretty good, but if you really want to get it on qi, you can use pitch drift, which actually if you I tend to think about this stuff at this point kind of graphically because I've seen it so many times, but if it's sliding down a little too much or sliding up and you don't and you want to keep the inflection without making it sound super to me, you can use this t sounds funny when you're using it it actually reshapes it a little bit and instead of flattening it out and making it like a really hard to note it shifts, I can do with this one to the o that's better seat itself it's like the tops a little flat on the bottom's all sharp on it and angles it like a just both parts of the note together so you don't have like one part really tuned one part's not so let me do all that computer stuff doesn't want to touch on that for a second and I'm sure I'll actually use it here in a minute but I would like to have a sound before so again you don't have to mess with everything so teo so like soul could have a little more a little more control in it and so you can use what's called the pitch modulation that actually just it acts more like auto tune for anyone whose every attitude and that just makes the whole thing more of a flatline tuned notes ah rein it in I ran all the way here any change? So I want to hear a little bit like that and I can always check it by resetting pitch modulation on going backto so teo well too much so I'm actually going back I find that going past ninety percent or eighty percent right here on pitch modulation is a little too far certain words sometimes falsetto notes you can take it way further, but for me I'd rather find other ways to tune it tio go past might even bring this up a hair so so so s o k so that that sounds good to me this up and straighten it out a little bit so you know that's that's when uh that's another time that pitch drift comes in really handy and I said it to zero which I'll do a lot you just double click set up two zero and it just kind of brings in brings us down in this up so it sounds less like a dip and you can use pitch trip to control um vibrato which is really cool when you do uh as you can see, the vibrato is like leaning on the flat side even though it thinks it's in tune so use pitch drift and you're the high notes and a low notes of the abroad oh that's what that that's what that is when you see peaks and valleys like that and it gets its center so even though this might look off tune, it sounds on tune because it's an equal amount sharpened flat. So so and you could even if you wanted, but I think I like it cool trick about well brought up to something that no matter what tuning program we're using if you're tuning broad and you want to keep it really natural sounding but appear on pitch find that last note and if it's not on much more like natural that flows into the next note it's just little things like that that you can do if you don't want a vocal to sound super tune this is little tricks like that that uh rain things in so teo no not sure if I didn't like the way that sounds tuned so let's hear on tuned that's down smooth difference maybe that's down smooth it sounds like e there and I like it but it's kind of sounding tuned another thing you can do use the foreman tool here it's this little uh looks like a graphic cue or something and uh you khun sounds funny but you khun lower I honest informant is just kind of like the way it's modulating nose down down down I don't know if there's really any rule to it but you just kind of mess with a little bit and sometimes you can get it to sound more natural in this case I'm not totally sure so I'm gonna reset for months down sounds a little weird I don't really like it sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't teo tracks it down spread that's down spots down down that we wanted to keep sounding the broad away but I hear it fall flat just a little bit right here so I'm gonna just this bring it up down jot that down smooth down smooth down teo teo teo just always remember that when you tuning vocals you you still want to use your ears more than your eyes you get lost just trying to make everything look perfect and then you realize you just created a robot teo teo remember while faster teo no bring that remember remember remember while still shots you remember why teo remember ah shots I'm getting a little wobbly and I think that's because I cut it up too much so let's reset the pitch on that uncut address the actual problems that have blindly changing things to bring up this part looks a little flat ah flatness I'm hearing the part that goes up a little bit so bring that down wow on that's better but I still hear the transition of where I cut so there's this little tool if you get towards the end of any tuning bar region or whatever a little line with the angle comes up and that adjust these little transition marks if you can see there so you can go one way or the other depending on how the notes changed and kind of smooth those transitions out that you cut still you know it's just not anymore than it's supposed to sew covering up covering up your tracks making it sound good ah that slide got un exaggerated ah ah ah sometimes things are just better ah I see what was happening here he was dipping down a little bit tio that's part of the sound so just reset this way ah he's magnifying glass to human and out and I'm realizing that I just don't like the way any of this sounds automatically so gonna undo all this and then just focus on anything I don't like keeping losing that tool ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah now I kind of wish that it was lagging a little bit I feel like now that I've heard the chorus, I feel like it was a little longer and be cool so let's take the timing tool, which is this little guy and I've got this word selected and if I go here I could just pull that back and I don't not sure yet if I want the whole world pulled back like I just did that's cool let me try this though I can also just grab the end and I can pull just the end back to make it a hair longer sometimes ah now I'm realizing what I really wanted was here with slide a little later, so I nailed that but now the end doesn't fit with the flam, so let me bring it back just the very end ah, close it's close enough so that's basically how I would to universe problem might spend a little more time on it and get a little more over analytical but that's kind of all the basic tools of melody line real quick I'm gonna tune I'm just gonna listen to this course bringing in a melody in again select plug in transfer make sure algorithm set melodic ah, wait I already showed you how this stuff works, so I'm just going to do kind of a quick tune on it so everything else makes sense in context and this is how it would just mocks up not real fast again going and cut I'm actually going to hit a note at a time on this one I can already see things that I don't want to move and this song is different cause there's a lot of slides in the vocals so you don't want you know you don't want to change everything because you want that slide he feels still meld it does this sometimes just throws random notes an octave lower but it's usually when they're pushed you can hear like a little grit in his voice that's a melody in does if it's too much and you can't control auto tune is great with gritty vocals and that's something to get into but you can tune all kinds of yelling pretty vocals with auto tune and that's one of its strength over my way wait that works for me for now this is actually coming out I would probably go a little more nuts on it but or not not two more but just spend more time with it well, that actually brings up a great question from cluster tone before you move on how do you know when to stop doing pitch correction? I mean we're not running the risk of making things sound unnatural what imperfections do fix and which do you leave? It's it's all opinion it's whatever sounds good to you on and that's why you noticed I was like fixing everything and then something sound a little too tune so I just you just undo it and don't be afraid to go backwards just cause he did something doesn't mean you can't undo it and I like to listen to both I'll go back and you could just mute melody it's cooler with it off just leave that part ofthe um it's it's totally up to you thank you it's kind of genre dependent too some sometimes you know you're doing like e m or something and you want the vocals to sound justus cynthia's everything else just tune everything to a flatline um or wherever you want that's not how you have to do edie um but you know, if you want locals to sound like a synthesizer oh uh wasn't meant to be a disa doll wasn't meant to be a disavowal no just just saying if you want to be shared circa nineteen ninety eight just flatline set a better this who knows I don't even know if it's this just something that happened so now I'm gonna explain how once I have my melody lines and it and I'm totally happy with them I'm gonna create a new track here and I'm just going to record it in because I don't want to deal with melody line anymore it's gonna make another track set this volume zero, turn off all my other plug ins real fast make the input on the new track us along output on the melody in track bus one that was recorded in I'll call this chorus vote tune so that I've got my main vocal for the verse in the course and I might I would probably the same with the verse, but I'm I'm not going to waste time with that right now, so I'm just going to meet this track make it an active that way I could go back and use my melody later and there's different ways to organize that I'm not going to go too deep into that that's totally to you, but I am gonna take my sons and inserts and put them on this new track and my little extra compressor plugging for now, so now we've got a lead vocal that doesn't sound like a chorus to me um so what I'm gonna do create three more tracks here and I'm going appropriately call them chorus boake one one copy and paste that uh when you make a bunch of new tracks and pro tools pretty cool when your label in you don't have toe click on every single one just hit next copy this would be called chorus vocal one dubbed two and the third track chorus vocal one three and you could call these uh you know, if you want a panam you called vocal dub senator vocal double left vocal right or c l and r um either way works let's go back to those other vocals that we tracked we're gonna track them down here so that was this's fromthe last segment so if you miss that these air vocals that were actually tracked live by alex there takes that we didn't use is the main vocal, but they're definitely good enough to use as a vocal double so I have those since I'm on that I'll hide it since I'm on that I'm gonna do the same with the harmony because I want this course to sound huge I'm gonna make three new tracks with harmony because we tracked for and I have one currently car color harmony one copy next up to next doug three so now I call that twelve that's wrong message there and then I'm gonna go to the other playlists that I had for harmony's drag these down now I have four lead vocal tracks and four of the low harmonies that we recorded and this is how we're going to get the locals to sound big in the chorus I'm just going to get rid of some of this noise here we got people in the street yeah, but how do you know when you want teo double something or how many times you should double it or where you should double it? It all has to do with the dynamic you want to create if you want the locals to be wide do three tracks if you want the locals to be and pan the two lower volume two ones if you want the locals to be wide but also chorus e in the center do for do one of them and I'm about to show you this too, but I might as well go over do the main one in the center then you have a double in the center which kind of course is out the main vocal which courses like the doubled sound the kind of acquiree modulated sound and you can have the two on the sides a lot of times for me either person's already established their voice on the recording as the kind of voice that gets doubled or isn't certain voices like frog your voices or voices that are more full in the low end you double because they'll phase out and they'll get a little a little brighter and a little more interesting go voice to sound a little bland if a voice has a lot of character and he wanted to sound personal, don't double it, but in like a verse you know or a bridge again, it's one of those things that is just it's how you want it to sound there's really no rule of thumb other than the result of doubling when you want it or don't, but in general, for me either decide versus air all almost always single or just doubled and then courses air, always quad tract or triple tracked. Sometimes I'll even go further with that do like eight of each. Itjust depends. I'll show you a quick way to tidy all that stuff up here. So now that I've kind of clean those up a little and go in just to keep it easy, having to cut out the center noise, I failed them all the same I neglected to do there and as you can see, none of the tracks lineup completely because we didn't track him his doubles. I'm actually doing this because I want to be efficient with the vocals we tracked and since we tracked a bunch of main vocals in order to find the best one. I can use all those others that were great takes. But they weren't the perfect take as a double instead of wasting more time and going back and tracking more doubles, which, if you need to go back and do it, that's totally fine. I just do it this way when I can, because it saves time. A double doesn't need to be, you know, the world's greatest take, because no one will ever know. So you have these, but since they weren't tracked his doubles, they don't necessarily lineup, or, if you are tracking, it is a double and the person's not nailing the timing that's totally fine.