How to make a bad vocal good Crank my pitch up
While there are many fun ways to morph, twist and chop your vocals into a huge range of sonic shapes, what about the most straightforward of aims – simply making an out-of-tune vocal not just passable, but stellar?
For many years, since the advent of recorded music, those lacking natural singing prowess would have to work extra hard to lay down their vocal takes – recording again and again until their caterwauling had been strenuously slotted into tonal alignment. The controversial appearance of Antares Auto-Tune in 1997 not only salvaged time back from end-of-theirtether producers and panicking, self-doubting vocalists, but opened up a whole new window on how the human voice can be worked with, irrespective of natural ability.
Here in 2022, there’s no shame if you can’t quite reach the high notes, you’re struggling with intonation or just not able to flawlessly imitate the confident character of the stars. As long as you’ve got a clean vocal take (from an audio POV at least), software from the likes of Celemony, Synchro Arts, Soundtoys and Waves can grant us the means to mould a sparkling vocal from even the most atonal of takes.
Wrangling the raw material
Before we delve into how software can help, it’s worth stating from the outset that even the best vocalist on earth can sound utterly soulless recording with inadequate gear. While your tone, pitch and frequency can be shifted after the fact, it’s critical to make sure that the clarity of the vocal recording is as clean as possible. Capturing your vocal, with a mind to working on the take further in software, needs to entail making sure the recording space is as acoustically ‘dead’ as possible. We want to limit reverb at this stage (as it’s uncontrollable when hard-baked into the recording). Positioning your microphone at the right distance from your mouth for the general volume of the type of vocal track you’re laying down is also a top priority – if you’re going to be belting out a raucous rock track, you’ll want to keep some space between your mouth and the grill, while closer-mic’ed vocals are more malleable for softer-toned genres. Keeping tabs on your input gain, and avoiding hitting the red is even more essential than usual when you’re recording your vocal with a mind to using it as the raw material for software processing.
There’s a whole lot more nuanced considerations when vocal recording of course, though that would be worthy of an entirely separate feature. We’re going to assume then, that your vocal take has been captured as spotlessly as possible, in an acoustically suitable environment. For those lacking the ‘X-factor’, here’s where the nitty gritty begins.
Ever since Antares Auto-Tune’s launch nearly 25 years ago, we’ve seen a wide-range of software that not only provides the means to hard-snap to a key, but also facilitates gradual, precision
“In 2022, there’s no shame if you can’t reach the high notes or flawlessly imitate the stars”
tuning. This is an essential thing to note: AutoTune in a technical sense is the automation of pitch correction, while pitch correction software as a whole can enable you to adjust the sharpness, or flatness, of your note to the required position. The more regimented global application Auto-Tune has ceased to be regarded as a route to perfecting duff vocals, and instead has now morphed in the minds of many into a creative tool that engenders the type of vocal experimentation that we hear in the likes of tracks by Billie Eilish, Akon, Stormzy and Radiohead.
Celemony’s Melodyne 5 is widely hailed as one of the most essential pitch-correcting powerhouses. Melodyne requires you to import the sections of the stem that you wish to edit (or, as one long vocal take). Detecting the notes within the audio, Melodyne displays a series of red and orange blobs – representing the chromatic area, snapped to a grid of keys, with your vocal information rendered as a line within. This visualisation allows us to see just how badly out of tune we are.
Using Melodyne’s ‘Main’ tool, you’re able to manually heighten and lower the pitch at those specific points that need attention. Better than that, any out-of-time sections, or inconsistent note-holding can be snapped to the grid, or dragged to fit the length of time you wish it to be held for. While you may imagine that the end result will be a clunky mess, Melodyne is renowned for not showing these joins.
While Melodyne is often put on a pro’s pedestal, and is now integrated within the architecture of Pro Tools (in its ‘Essential’ iteration), this same principle can be sampled by using Logic’s Flex Pitch or Cubase’s VariAudio. Flex Pitch can be used as either a global ‘up-tuner’, or a manual pitch correction chisel. VariAudios’ approach is reminiscent of Melodyne. Both allow deep editing controls, such as the adjustment of the amount of pitch variation within the stem, manipulating the levels of vibrato present, and such factors as aligning how far your general pitch is naturally drifting away from where it should be.
With tools such as these, it’s now no longer an impossibility to gradually carve your vocal into something that resembles something delivered by a vocal powerhouse.