11 acapella mashup tips
Now you’ve learnt techniques for slicing, splicing and dicing your vocal samples, it’s time to top-up your knowledge with our 11 essential tips for crafty cuts and cheeky chops
01 JUST DUET
We often arrange contrasting vocal sounds snipped from a single acapella, or use processing to make one voice sound like many. What we don’t often see, however, is a producer sourcing vocal cuttings from recordings of two different vocalists – with contrasting voices. Combining snippets of, say, a dry documentary voiceover with a wailing diva is bound to create sonic diversity, although even picking two fairly similar vocal sources can work in a different way. If you really want to push the concept, try creating a duet using two sets of chopped vocals!
02 MIXED VOICE
Although you may think of an externally sourced vocal as ‘a sample’, it can still require the same mix work as a vocal you’ve recorded yourself. You can apply all the usual vocal mixing effects: compression, de-essing, and reverb/delay. If the vocal already has processing applied, you won’t be able to shape it as much because these mix decisions are essentially baked into the audio. Even so, a broad EQ – such as our own Premix CM or 6X-500 CM – could help balance the vocal with the rest of the mix, so it sounds like a part of your track rather than something that’s been slapped on top of it.
03 MICRO-FUN
If you’ve got the patience, zoom in way further than you normally would and cut a vocal phrase into many tiny slices. Spread the pieces out in time, and duplicate them to fill the gaps to create a crude granular pitchshifting effect. That’s very much the tip of a rather hefty sonic iceberg, though, as you can continue to arrange the slices on a micro level, crossfading, changing their order, adjusting levels, and applying the vocal chopping and processing tricks we’ve shown you already. In this age of instant glitch effects and on-tap granular processing, this kind of atomic-level manual editing is something of a lost art, but it gives you absolute control and is capable of truly insane results. Electronica icon BT is famous for this ‘stutter edit’ technique, and it’s long been a staple of IDM programming.
04 TOTAL TRANSFORMATION
No matter how pristinely produced the acapella you’re using, there’s nothing stopping you using the voice transformation techniques from our earlier tutorials to warp and disguise its true nature. Break out the vocoders, pitchshifters, tuners and have at it! Even just applied to the occasional word, treatments like these can put a real twist on your acapella work.
05 INSTANT GLITCH
If you don’t have the patience for those painstaking micro-editing tricks, but you love the sound of them, you’ll want to pick up an instant glitch effect plugin. One of the best is Stutter Edit by BT and iZotope, recreating Mr Transeau’s own approach but with direct MIDI control. Sugar Bytes’ Effectrix, meanwhile, remains a hugely popular option for easily adding rhythmic chaos to any sound source – it has a bunch of pattern-triggerable effects, but it’s the scratch-style looper and stutter effects that’ll trigger a chopping frenzy. Others worth trying are Ableton Live’s Beat Repeat, Illformed Glitch 2, Vengeance-Sound’s Glitch Bitch, our own Eurydice CM, and Sugar Bytes’ Looperator and Turnado.
You’ve probably reversed vocal lines before, or even singled out just the odd word in a phrase for the ol’ backwards treatment, but have you tried reversing a single syllable or vowel sound? Results vary depending on exactly what you choose to reverse but can vary from up-front and obvious to a ‘not quite natural’ effect that listeners won’t be able to put their finger on.