It happens; sometimes you end up recording noise into your vocal parts. There are a lot of reasons why this may happen. Often times you will not even realize there are noisey vocal parts until you get into another room. Unfortunately, current vocal production is very fickle about these kinds of mistakes.

So let’s start off with why this can occur. It is very simple. The good and bad thing about how our brain works is that it adapts. Our brain is actually wired with what some call as “novelty detector neurons”. These neurons have been found to quickly stop firing if a sound is repeated. So, if you are sitting in the same control room everyday, and there is an HVAC noise in that room… your brain is most likely not detecting it anymore. Infact even if you’re working in the same room for a short period of time, your brain will start to ignore the surrounding sounds. That is where noise removal comes in.

The most basic process of noise removal is to put a gate on the vocal part. This does a great job of eliminating all noise that is below a threshold. There are also often settings where you can also adjust the amount of attenuation. For me personally, I like to have a little bit of life in my vocal tracks. So I’m often not completely attenuating below the threshold, but I will frequently leave a little bit of life sneak past the gate.

Gates can work very well when the noise is either covered up by the vocalist, or not present when there is singing. However, there are times when you want to catch some of the breath from the singer, or when there are quiet parts that have some room noise in them. That is when you need to analyze and remove room noise. This is a similar process to using a gate, but it utilizes frequency bands. The first step is to make sure you have a good sample of the noise that needs to be eliminated. Then analyze that noise and start to adjust your threshold. What happens is the frequencies that match what was analyzed start to get eliminated. So, you are essentially eliminating the noise that was analyzed… however, there is a catch.

Remember that you are technically not removing a noise, but you are removing frequencies… that’s right… some of those frequencies are also associated with the audio you are going to want to keep. Just like with many audio techniques, it may be best to have a light touch with multiple stages instead of one heavy handed approach. The best thing to do is to make a little adjustment and listen. If you are getting what you want, then keep going; if you are getting artifacts, then it is time to split the work between a couple different processes.  

Layered vocal harmony parts are some of the coolest, and sometimes difficult, parts of audio production. Although an experienced singer will often come up with their own vocal harmony parts… sometimes it is up to the producer to create harmony parts. Here are some considerations to creating that harmony line.

The first thing that needs to be considered is… what is the expectation. When I was first getting started with vocal harmonizing I was right out of music theory class, and everything had to be perfect 4 part harmony… Then I realized sometimes Pop Punk songs don’t need 4 part harmony;) I is great to know how to make vocoder sounding tracks, 3-4 part harmony tracks, and all kinds of other cool tricks… but the most important thing to know, is what the expectation is. From there, you can now get to work.

Many times the first reaction is to put a plugin on the main vocal line, change the pitch by an interval, and call it a day. Although there are some styles of music where this works… it really doesn’t make for musical harmony parts. With the idea that most of the time we are working to create singable harmony parts, it is important to create harmony lines that are… singable. There are many different programs that will allow you to write in melody lines. I personally have been using Melodyne since around 2007 and I absolutely love it. Although I am not always creating perfect 3-4 part harmonies, I do see the importance of having contrary motion with harmony lines and avoiding parallel 5ths. These are some very usable music theory techniques. If you are writing in harmony parts from a single melody track, it may help you to think outside the parallel lines.

You may also want to consider how much you are harmonizing. You really don’t need every single word to be harmonized. In fact, the harmonies really loose their importance if they are over done. I typically try to find the parts of the song that need emphasis or a difference in vibe for my harmony parts. Again, if you just place a generic plugin that doubles the vocal line at an interval for the entire song… it’s going to get boring.

Finally, when you double the exact same audio part there are other issues besides just pitch. It is really important to pay attention to the phasing issues that happens when you have the exact same audio signal, twice. If you are not familiar with phasing issues with doubled signals, then you have some more to look up. However, to keep in the scope of this short post, it is important to make sure the harmonic structure of the harmonized parts are altered. Without changing the harmonic structure of the harmony the tracks may cancel each other out… this will start to make them sound smaller instead of bigger together.  

Lead vocals is often considered to be the most important part of production. This is because, next to drums, the lead vocals is what people listen for and identify with. But what do you do when the vocal performance is sub-par… or a little out of tune? With current audio production, folks really expect to hear a tuned vocal that sounds amazing. If your production doesn’t meet these standards, then most people will not even finish their first listen.

When getting ready to tune vocals, the first consideration has to be about what is expected from the genre. A hard tuned vocal performance where you can hear artifacts would be completely out of place for a jazz performance… likewise, a lot of hiphop productions look for hard tuning. So the first consideration is to know what your client is looking for (client being either the artist for engineers or listener for self-producers). You can have the most amazing production… but if it doesn’t fit the genre… then you’re out of luck.  

“Hit the nail on the head”. I’ve done a lot of woodworking and that is always the advice my Grandpa gave me. I think this is great advice for vocal production too. Regardless of what genre you are producing for… hitting the target notes is priority #1. If there was a test to know if a vocal take should be redone… this would be it. There are other considerations, such as scoop and vibrato, to consider, but the median (or overall sound) of the note should be right on target.  

Now as simple as that seems… there is always a certain amount of grey area. There are some genres where the singer scoops into the note, or there is a lot of vibrato. Scooping the notes happens when the singer slides their notes into each other. Such as going from the A to the C# and back to the A in the above picture. This is where knowing your genre is key… This happens to come from a vocalist in the country genre, where we don’t want to “Hear” any vocal tuning. So for this vocal take we left the scoops in and really focused on just hitting the target notes. This can be tricky if you have little experience or a sub-par vocal tuning program, but it is an essential part of vocal production.  

The above image also ends with a nice sounding vibrato part. You can see the vibrato on the last A note that is sung. It is important to know if vibrato is something that should be kept in or squashed. I’ve worked with some singers who had too much vibrato and we took the vibrato out and I’ve worked with some singers who have no vibrato and we had to add some in. either way knowing the expectation is the most important part of tuning vocals… so make sure you know what your target is.

Welcome to Vocal month. This month we are not only having a vocal promotion, but the blogs will also dive into some vocal production techniques. Vocals is often considered THE most important part of production, next to drums. Stay tuned, this month we will dive into; lead vocal tuning1, duplicate harmony parts, and vocal room noise removal.