ROG made some interesting points.

On multi-tracking the vocals..... phrasing is very, very important. In addition to the consonants, those pesky "s's" will trip you up every time because they will be clearly heard even with the part -16dB down in the mix.

There's a song on my website called MISSING PERSON. http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=11962059 It was never posted here because nothing in it is PG related and it's totally, 100% live acoustic instruments. Have a listen. It has about 12 vocal tracks in it for the 2 singers. One of the tricks I used to make the phrasing as close as possible without a bunch of overdubs and recording after the fact, was to use envelopes to pull down and hide that ending "s" or something else that stuck out. The one that was "right" stayed, the out of sync other was pulled down and no one knew the difference when listening.

Melodyne....yes, yes, and yes...... you can use it to easily correct the phrasing in a vocal part.


A really great example is still on the User Showcase. The song Joanne and I are working on...FOOLS ERRAND. In that song, we both sang on the chorus together. We're not professionals at nailing the phrasing that was mentioned above so, while most of it was pretty freaking close to perfect, there were parts that were not. Just one thing out of the phrase groove makes the entire thing sound like an elementary school choral group. However, rather that going back to JC or me recording it again and changing the phrasing in all the parts to match..... can't sing it one way in one chorus and another in a different one..... I simply used the timing tool in ME to move her parts as needed to line up more closely with what I had sung. Job done quickly.

In another section.... the bridge.... where she sang, "Half a million......" she came in on a pitch way lower than the part that I sang on the next line. In reality, both parts needed to be the same.... it is a bridge..... and it needed the higher pitch for the energy it imparted. For that correction, I used the ME pitch tool and simply moved her notes (I think 6 in all) up to where they needed to be to match the part I sang on the second section of the bridge. After it was moved, I listened carefully to that part to ensure no audible artifacts and there were none that were evident. If there had been artifacts, I would have asked her to record the part again with the higher melody. ME fixed it perfectly in 60 seconds.

I don't use, or haven't used, to this point the 4 tracks ROG mentioned per voice.... perhaps I will work with that on the next one I do. To this point I have done 3. Main lead in the center and 2 others on the sides and lower.... harmonies have been doubled. The inherent danger one must be aware of when using any close duplicate tracks, no matter how they are panned or what level they set in the mix..... is what he referred to as the "natural phasing" ...or comb filtering that results from the complex phase (speaking mathematically now) relationships of the audio waves interacting.... you get cancellation and addition at varying phase angles and the results can be quite unpleasing to the ear. I'll just leave it at that on that topic for now.... that could easily be an entirely new topic for discussion in itself.

Anyway... that's my 2 cents for this morning.

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www.herbhartley.com
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