Recently...Well a few weeks ago, I had a call from and acquaintance. He had a friend who wanted to record an Irish song in reggae style (He is Jamaican) Thinking he would be a musician and a quick enough job (no money offered of course) I said yes, sure I would do it for the experience of working in a style I know little about as a player.

Turned out this chap could not sing, could not play and I would have to do everything and try and get some kind of vocal out of him. BiaB of course was my first port of call. Fields of Athenry was the song and a quick hunt of the interwebs found me a midi file that while sounding like the worst home organ in the world was well played and would work as a base for BiaB to pull out the chords and arrangement from.

Then to apply a song style...Not finding one that worked for me I went hunting again RealTracks Set 102: Uptempo Reggae (RT102-A) seemed to fit the bill so I bought and downloaded it, after some playing around I got something that seemed to work.

Into Logic Pro X it went, some tweaking and FX went on and time to record vocals...First stage took no more than a couple of hours, vocals were going to take a lot longer and work Melodyne to the max.

I had to change everything he was doing, the way he was standing in front of the mic, how he was singing, persuade hime to actually learn the song so he could give me three almost identical takes to work with. After several weeks I realised we had got as far as we were going to get, the dude did his best and worked hard but still could not hold a note without wavering or it being actually in tune...

Anyway Melodyne worked it's magic, I created harmonies out of the melodies he sang, pulled things as far in tune as I could, smoothed out the vocal wobbles and ended up with something he was delighted with.

So I post a link to it, mostly for the great job BiaB did of providing a great backing track, only the guitar was played by me as I wanted a little more movement than the stock guitar provided. It's not a great track, but man it's miles away from where we started thanks to computer trickery from BiaB, Logic and some great plugins and of course that saver of poor vocalists Melodyne.
https://soundcloud.com/los-cajones/athenry-final

Mac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)3.6 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9, 40 GB Ram. OS Catalina 10.15.7 Logic Pro 10.6.1 BIAB Everything Pack. A&H QU16. Roland Integra 7.