Vocal Processing??

[narrator]

Hey people, was given a vocal to use for a remix i'm working on at the moment, it's a proper verse chorus male vocal and was wondering if anyone here has some nice tips about processing vocals or some plugins to look out for for some cool effects etc..

would love to pull off the Gnarls Barkley, Burial or Fever Ray type effect, something processed sound but at the same time natural effect, that sort of thing.

cheers..

[deadly_habit]

melodyne and a seperate processing buss

[lowpass]

I've been using the built in autotuner in logic (pitch correction)

just wondering if anyone knows if melodyne, autotune etc are that much better? or am I just being shit with the pitchcorrection plugin

[deadly_habit]

I've been using the built in autotuner in logic (pitch correction)

just wondering if anyone knows if melodyne, autotune etc are that much better? or am I just being shit with the pitchcorrection plugin

melodyne especially now with dna is so worth it
autotune, meh been used and abused too much

[nitz]

Autotune?

[ill-esha]

Yeah, if you actually want a natural sound, go for Melodyne. It's absolutely amazing in its transparency yet accuracy.

Using reverb properly I think is the toughest thing ever. In school I learned, "get the reverb to the point you like, then dial it back 20%" because most people tend to overuse it. Of course stuff like Burial uses quite a lot more reverb. So I'd say don't be afraid of a lot of reverb as a stylistic choice, just don't blow your load if you want a really clean natural sound. A tip I learned actually from work is to use two or even three reverbs on send channels.. a small, medium and large space. Send small, different amounts to each to get different layers of reflections. The result sounds surprisingly natural.

In electronic music I end up using a lot of compression on vocals so that they still poke out over the heavy bass and all. So you might want to compress more, but use medium attack and release times and a ratio of about 4:1 for transparency.

[narrator]

Yeah, if you actually want a natural sound, go for Melodyne. It's absolutely amazing in its transparency yet accuracy.

Using reverb properly I think is the toughest thing ever. In school I learned, "get the reverb to the point you like, then dial it back 20%" because most people tend to overuse it. Of course stuff like Burial uses quite a lot more reverb. So I'd say don't be afraid of a lot of reverb as a stylistic choice, just don't blow your load if you want a really clean natural sound. A tip I learned actually from work is to use two or even three reverbs on send channels.. a small, medium and large space. Send small, different amounts to each to get different layers of reflections. The result sounds surprisingly natural.

In electronic music I end up using a lot of compression on vocals so that they still poke out over the heavy bass and all. So you might want to compress more, but use medium attack and release times and a ratio of about 4:1 for transparency.

cheers for the feedback..

i tend to do that with reverbs too. 2 or 3 and send them to various parts of my track. i was thinking about the amount of reverb too, dialling it back as you said seems to help as the other higher frequencies just seem to emphasize it too much.

i've really heavy amounts of compression to control the sibilance of the vocal as the bass is a heavy enough wobble. i might switch the desser compressor to a send and apply some back to the original dry signal maybe..

another thing i was messing with was pitching the vocal down by 5 semitones and layering it back under the original. anyone have much success with this type of thing or does it just muddy up the mix?

[tripaddict]

do not use autotune it'll make 50% of the general population hate your music lol

... tls_maximiser ... very light reverb and nowt else ... n make sure the vocal is sick dont use a weak vocal .... can ruin a good tune esp if you repeat the same sample over n over

[narcissus]

including me... autotune highlights everything that is wrong with the entertainment industry/hollywood today... too much focus on mechanical 'perfection' not enough focus on soul... for dubstep all you really need is some delay, maybe timestretch