Hi All

With all this talk about modern songs and processing on vocals I thought it may be interesting if we posted some of our isolated vocals and talked a little about what we did to achieve them. In this way we can all comment, compare and learn!

I'll start!

Here is an isolated vocal from my album in progress with Lebz.



I did the following:
1. Recorded using my Scarlett solo and Rhode NT3 condenser mic.
2. Fixed timing and tuning errors using Melodyne
3. Manually reduced breath noises on lead vocal.
4. Ran the lead vocal through Izotope Nectar (Folk solo enhancement preset)
5. Added a little delay to the already processed vocal.
6. Added a bit of "Old Rotary" to the already processed vocal
7. Did some parallel processing by mixing the processed vocal in with the raw (tuned) lead vocal.
8. The harmonies I didn't do anything except fix timing and tuning with Melodyne and remove all the breath noises.

Constructive feedback on this is appreciated.

And....lets hear yours....

That sounds good.

It can stand on it's own easily which I believe is the goal. Right?

Instruments are just the icing on the cake but this doesn't need them.

Many times it's tedious for me to listen to a-Capella singing.... not so with this this.

Very enjoyable.

Excellent! Love your vibrato, and those harmonies are wonderful!

You can hear the delay on this, would love to hear it with the rest of the track to see how it fits into the final mix.

What is "Old Rotary"?

Herb and Dave

Thanks for the comments. Herb YOU are the one who put me onto Melodyne and quite literally changed my life. I am forever in your debt!!

Dave "Old Rotary" is a kind of old speaker type effect. Floyd was saying that he thought that Ed Sheeran's vocal had it on. I just used a free trial plugin. I may purchase it.. Google PSP Lotary and you should find it if your are interested... Will post the final mix shortly...

Hi Joanne,

The best Leslie rotary speaker emulation that I have found is UVI's Rotary:

https://www.uvi.net/rotary.html

It lists for $79 USD but it does go on sale.

This is fully adjustable and has presets for both instruments and vocals.

YMMV

Interesting example Joanne...enjoyed reading what you did.

John Lennon asked the Beatles' engineer if he (John) could hang by his feet in the studio and twirl around - really. The notion was to pass by the mic on each revolution while singing (a vocal effect idea he had for Tomorrow Never Knows). The engineer, Geoff Emerick, more sensibly tried a Leslie rotary speaker (typically heard with a Hammond B3 organ) and thus the "rotary" vocal sound began.

FIFTY+ YEARS ago. Modern? Ha! What goes around comes around! Yeah...awful pun.

Bud

PS Geoff Emerick's book offers tremendous insight into their studio creativity. The Beatles would tell George Martin what they wanted but Geoff had to figure out how to do it.

I'm missing something here. Specifically the part I'm not clear about is how did Geoff mount John to the rotary speaker?




I actually like a good pun. Well played.








I hadn't heard of this. Very cool. They had some WILD productions. Thanks for the info!


Duct tape? Is that the answer to the rotary speaker mount?

Yeah, unfortunately Gorilla Tape had not made the scene.

Bud

On your example, I suspect removing the breathing may take a little out of it.
It's well done and will likely fit a mix well; they have their own space/sound. Breathing adds a little 'intimacy' which (in my head) I hear as the direction the song is heading.

^ It's interesting because when I started to follow your lead and create a vocal only track it was difficult to try to not hear the other parts (that I knew existed) in my head as I listened.
It will also be interesting to see how your actual full song fits into my 'preconceived impression' of the rest of the tracks after hearing the vocals.

I might post some stuff this weekend from bare bones production February album writing month songs.

I find Nectar 2’s Breath Controller an excellent tool. You can set the sensitivity to completely remove the breaths or to just reduce them to keep the intimacy. Just turn it on, set the sensitivity and forget about it. It is very, very accurate.

If appropriate to the thread I’ll post a demo on how effective it is using one of Janice’s vocals.

Bud

Interesting stuff coming out of this thread, especially all the history about the rotary speaker. If Floyd had not mentioned it in the Ed Sheeran thread I would never have known a thing about it. I still need to decide if it is worth purchasing or not

Bud, yes please post a sample of the breath control stuff from Nectar. I do tend to spend quite a bit of time manually reducing breath noises so it would be nice to short cut my work flow.

Scott: looking forward to hearing yours.

Mario, thanks for the link to the rotary speaker plug. I will check it out.

I will post the final mix of the song once this thread has run a bit (give others a chance to listen to the vocal only first).

Here are two short clips that will demonstrate the Izotope Breath Controller that is packaged with Nectar 2.

It's a very simple plug-in to remove or partially remove breath intake sounds. Basically just turn it on and set the sensitivity. For this demonstration I used more "removal" than I typically would. I like to leave a bit...we are humans after all

45s vocal clips - Janice

If interested, the fx are essentially what I've used for nearly 30 years on her vocals - mostly irrespective of genre. A little compression, a little reverb and two very slight eq tweaks. Now that I'm digital I add a little tape saturation. Some times on a double track I'll add a little delay to one track. That's it. I never do any vocal edits of any type. We typically do two takes and about 75% of the time she will prefer the first one. We only record about once every three weeks or so and it's typically a 20 minute session so I don't profess to be any kind of expert. When she says she's ready to record...she's ready! She will "live with" a song with her bluetooth earpiece around the house until ready. Janice has no interest in vocal editing and I'm not going to be so presumptuous as to try it and assume I can better what she says is a take that she likes I realize that practically everybody nowadays from the best singers to the average edit vocals so I certainly don't think our way is the "right" way to do it - it's just the way we do it.

Bud

That Nectar did a nice job, clean and not intrusive.
Gotta love iZotope.

Here's one for fun (hopefully).
Verse vocals were doubled in real time (recorded Barry using two takes on separate tracks). This gave us 'almost' the effect we wanted, but he sang in tune with himself too much, as he could hear his first take while he sang his second.
So I ran slight tuning on one of them, which gave us more of what we wanted. Of course there is also reverb and EQ involved.
Chorus vocals are pretty much just EQ and reverb. Two tracks Barry, one me during choruses.
http://masteringmatters.com/stuff2/VoxSolod.mp3

End result when added to the mix:
http://masteringmatters.com/stuff2/Happy-Mel-2.mp3
This is circa 2010 or so, according to file dates.
Anyone remember OBTune?

Here's my first song from February Album Writing Month; very simple songs: two tracks, electric piano and 1 vocal track sang improvised.

Playlist on Soundcloud has the full two track song, then the vocal solo'ed with all processing, then the vocal dry.

This was the first song that I recorded using an old Electrovoice SRO RE11 microphone. These are not good mics in general.

As I tried it out, I really didn't care for the midrange bump it seems to have, but it does have a bit of a vintage sound to it. So I just left it.

Processing on the isolated vocal: A mono channel strip plugin that has a high pass filter, compression and some EQ (It's Mackie's mono channel strip plugin that came with Tracktion when Mackie owned Tracktion), on a send I have some pretty wet reverb.

https://soundcloud.com/rockstar_not/sets/scott-lake-vocal-isolation

Hey Bud, those are REALLY cool to hear

You will have to tell Janice that her vocal has a built in breath removal tool. She sings, and it takes my breath away! Seriously, what great tone! It always helps when you start with something that already sounds good.

Now, that being said, you really do a great job on your processing. Everything is sounding so good to me.

I am curious, and please excuse my ignorance, does the breath removal tool work as well for spoken word/voice-overs as well? I'm guessing so; but thought I would ask if you found that to be the case.

Thanks. Those two examples really showed how well it works.

Here is the first verse and chorus of Kingdom Now--vocal only.

https://soundcloud.com/david-snyder-mixing-lab/kingdom-now-vocal-snippet

A few things:

1.) I am singing rock and roll so I don't want it to be perfect. I don't cut and paste because to me that destroys the emotion. I have to keep re-recording until I get a take that maintains the emotional build from beginning to end or I don't like it.

2.) I cut out breaths in Audacity before I import to DAW if I am singing rock 'n' roll. If I am not singing rock 'n' roll I don't usually take as many breaths. Rock 'n' Roll can get noisy though.

3.) I am looking for a warm dynamic range of at least 13 and I don't want the vocals to go in to the red zone because that means the dynamics have been stripped. I want them in that green range where the vocal chords are still present and the timbre blends in with other instruments such as acoustic guitar.

See screenshot.

Here is the final, from the showcase.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=471810#Post471810

Also here is a link a did a few weeks ago I guess showing the complete effects rack that made this sound, including some tape saturation.

http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=472063&#Post472063

Rharv,

These sound really cool!

Bud and Janice,

Yeah I agree those were beautiful to listen to!

Really nice work Joanne.

Scott,

I love that sound man.



Nice work.

Here is one more from February Album Writing Month. This one has a bit more processing on it, comped from several takes as I was writing the lyrics as I was recording them. I should note that if I do a re-write of this, I need to knock it down a full step or two. The choruses are a strain!

Playlist is full mix, then isolated vocal, then dry vocal with no processing of any kind(EQ, compression, etc.)

https://soundcloud.com/rockstar_not/sets/scott-lake-in-the-morning-full

Very nice job. You sound great.

Rhav, Scott, David, Bud and Janice
Thank you so much for posting samples. Loads to absorb.......

Wow - that sounded amazing! I'm definitely going to have to check out some of these other submissions. Your voice is superbly crisp here. Thanks for sharing

I just posted a new song in the Showcase. Here is an isolated vocal sample from it... https://soundcloud.com/user-742389722/swamp-isolated-vocal-sample

This song features 11 different vocal tracks which can all be heard in this sample. I won't even attempt to go into all of the effects used but I do use Butch Vig Vocals VST on most of them as well as reverb, slap back delay and Softube saturation.

Thanks Sam. Loads of work in this. Do you sing all the different vocal tracks? and if so do you use something like Melodyne to line them all up so nicely?

I did sing all of the vocal tracks and do so on 99% of my songs. I don't use Melodyne. Ocasionally I will put a little auto tune if it is needed, but I did not use it on these vocals. I did have one phrase on the harmonies that was slightly off in timing. I manually moved in in my DAW so it would sound better.

Oh and BTW the vocal that you can't understand in the middle is actually the high harmony of the last phrase in the chorus reversed. It is the first time that I've used this effect in a song and I think it came out really cool sounding.