Tips and tricks – when the singer’s gone
In the heat of the recording moment, we sometimes want good results so much that we actually hear things differently to how they are, and can even completely miss things that normally – using our calm, analytical ears – would jump out a mile. This isn’t such a problem if the singer lives down the hall, but if you’ve had a session singer travel from the other end of the country and then leave, it can lead to disaster.
Experienced producers will keep a mental (or written) checklist of things to record. Typically, these would be high and low octaves of the vocal, basic harmonies, a soft version, a loud version, swearing substitutes, whispers and maybe some ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ here and there. If you find yourself in need of some of these but have no singer, an application like Melodyne can really save your short-sighted ass! Comping a duplicate vocal from the leftovers will give you a pretty good double track, not to mention a starting point for some artificial harmonies. Obviously, if you move things too far in terms of pitch and time the results can sound very twisted in isolation, but you should be able to get away with them in the context of a mix.
Corrective surgery
Even the best comp can still contain a few gremlins. We’ve talked about the importance of ‘vibe’, but some of your vibiest takes are actually more likely to be sonically contaminated, as the singer may have been more relaxed and thus more prone to rustling the lyric sheet or foottapping. All of these things can be exaggerated in the recording, along with high-frequency clicks and mouth noises. Most of the time you can zoom in on these in the audio editor and draw the visible spikes out of the waveform.
Mic pops are low-frequency bursts resulting from inadequately filtered plosive consonants – that is, ‘B’s and ‘P’s, and sometimes ‘Wh’s, too. Automating an EQ or the lowest frequency band of a multiband compressor can solve this if you’re lucky. In the case of external noises like planes, traffic or birds, a plugin like iZotope RX can help with spot repairs and noise reduction.
If you need to remove constant broadband noise (mains hum, for example), use something like Waves X-Noise. You’ll need an original section of the offending noise pre-compression, so you may have to revisit an unedited take to find this. All but the most expensive noise reduction software will remove a little air from a vocal, so maybe you can swap between the noise-reduced and natural versions, only using the former where the background noise would have been most exposed.