Hey there Yunkers. Just a quick post to try out a tutorial format I plan on doing some time in the future.

So my previous post demonstrates quite colourfully how somebody with a terrible voice - me - can be made to sound great using a few tweaks of technology. Britney Spears, T-Pain, they all do it. Some do it just to add some flavour or fix a couple of errors, others use it to completely transform their identity, like 3 inches of make-up.

So where do we start? Well, here is the completely raw, awful, embarassing choral recording that I made earlier:

And here you can see the original 5 tracks of my vocals (And the reference track above for tempo):

Identify the problems

• Everything it out of tune
• Everything is out of time
• it sounds dull and dead
• Weird mouth and breathing noises
• Dry
• I can't sing even close to as high as I need to
• My voice is generally weak and wobbly

We can actually get around all of this.

1

Clean up the edges of each track, remove silent parts. Depending on the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) used, this varies fro manual to automatic. While we're at it, we should clean up the whole project, get some colours in, give each track a name and so on:

2

Looks a lot nicer to work with now. You can see some triangles on the edge of parts of the track, that's me fading in so it comes in a little more smoothly. Next we need to fix the tuning and the timing of each vocal track. This is a bit of a pain and takes time, especially if your ears aren't god-like as mine are. Typically the best and industry standard is software called Melodyne:

This will detect each note, digitize it and allow you to manipulate everything, from the pitch of each note, to where and when they are, to how loud, how wobbly your voice is and more.

I got pretty tired by the end so my voice got pretty wobbly like this:

But can easily be fixed like this:

This is extreme as an example but you can see the wave pattern flattens out on this note.

Much of this can be automated but you need to tweak bits here and there to be sure. I didn't bother doing a perfect job for the final product but you get the idea.

Because each vocal is all the same general pitch area, It's a good idea to pan each track (make each one go left-right through the speakers/headphones) so they don't mush together and sound messy

So this is what it sounds like at this stage:

Clearly, it sounds a lot more stable and welcoming. We've fixed:

• Tuning
• Timing
• Weak and wobbly voice*
• Weird mouth sounds (cut out when cleaning quiet parts)

But I can't sing as high as I need to. This is easily solved by just singing the harmony lower, and then using melodyne and just click-drag it way up to the higher pitch. This can sound ridiculous but in a thick harmony you can sometimes get away with it.

3

But it still sounds pretty dead and not really like a choir. Now if you want to sound like Enya or an actual choir, you'd be best just recording each track 5-6 times and going through this process for days (as Enya does), but instead I just used effects.
Other plug-ins I used:

• Doubler - Doubles or triples each track with a slight delay so it soudns thicker
• Reverb - Kind of echo to make it sounds like I'm singing in a church
• EQ - balance the frequencies in the tracks. High frequency brings brightness, low frequency brings warmth
• Compression - Make loud bits quieter and quiet bits louder, so volume is more balanced

4

Finally, in the second half, a double bass digital instrument effect was needed. This adds some very low resonance and foreboding as well as filling out the harmony of the bass vocals by following the melody more or less.

And there you have it.

Once again here is the final product:

Obviously it's far from perfect and there is much more you can do with it, but I think this is a good trial post to start off.

If you're a musician and wanna work together at any point, please let me know! Collaborations are what Steemit is all about!