Let’s make better music, Together! – Tuning Vocals

Hello Steemians!

Welcome back to the wonderful world of digital music making! Today I’ll be going over how to prep and tune vocals so that even if you can’t sing for shit like me, the end product sounds good 
So to kick things off I made a little 8 bar loop and wrote the melody which I will be singing over it(played by the piano)

When singing and especially when you plan on tuning vocals, I find it much easier to write out the melody you want to sing by. This removes a lot of the decision making in later stages, because you already know what notes you want to be hitting.

Now how do you want to sing if you plan on heavily tuning your vocals?

First off you want a good recording environment. That means no outside sound, back of the mic facing the nearest wall and appropriate settings to record.

Now to the actual singing, you can do it however you want, but it is MUCH easier if you sing consistently. That means little variation in pitch during a word. This is more important than what note you are actually hitting, because as long as the recording is clean, we can digitally move it to any pitch without much problem. (Although it does sound less human the more you have to move it.)

So I wrote some basic lyrics to go along with the melody and hit that record button.

Yeesh right?

I know, I know, doesn’t get much more eh than that, but that’s what we’re gonna fix!

Newtone Tuning

So I’m going for that super tuned type of vocal and to start that process off, I’m gonna open the vocal in Newtone, which is an FL plug-in that lets you manually shift the notes in a recording.

Here’s the vocal open in Newtone. You can see what notes I hit with my voice along the way and can drag them up and down. For reference, this is what the melody is written down:

Eh, I wasn’t even that far off  Here’s the vocal without the beat

Now let’s get to editing. To get that super tuned sound the first thing you want to do is go to the top right corner of Newtone and find the ‘Center’ and ‘Variation’ knobs. Turning center up put’s the recording close to the frequency of a note, while variation smooths out the small differences in pitch. Think macro and micro tuning and we just put all of it to perfectly be on the note. Turning the ‘Trans’ knob all the way down also makes the transitions between notes a jump instead of a slide, which also makes it sound more robotic, but may be a cool effect.

Now all you got to do is move the notes to the notes you wrote previously. If you didn’t write a vocal melody than stay within the scale and play around with it. You’ll generally be faced with 2 notes you could put it on (up and down) which is a decision for each note on where it’s supposed to be. Previously written out melodies make this process much smoother.

So this is how my Newtone ended up looking by the time I was done moving the notes around:

And this is how the new vocal sounds with the beat:

We’re getting there!

So if you haven’t already read it, it’s at this point I’d like to refer you to my vocal processing basics tutorial, which you should implement at this stage of this tutorial. Slap on a limiter, a de-esser, and an EQ on that vocal how you see fit so we can move on to the next steps.

So we got are vocals processed on the basic level and manually tuned now! The last thing to add in terms of vocal pitch correction is an auto tune plug-in. You can get MAutoPitch for free and it’s the plug-in I’ll use here. The reason I like to throw in an autotune after Newtone is to put the final polish on the pitch. This will correct any remaining issues with the pitch of the recording.

This is MAutoPitch. The 3 main things to know about here are the ‘Depth’ and ‘Speed’ knobs as well as the ‘Scale’ interface. Depth is how much Autotuney it is, speed tells you how fast it corrects the pitch ( like an attack envelope) and the Scale section lets you pick the notes it won’t tune to. I was in D-Dorian, so I marked all the black keys to not be pitched to.

Here’s what it sounds like with the autotune on( and I cut the long notes and put them in the second half so there’s something there):

That concludes the pitching!

To finish off your vocal, throw in some reverb and delay and maybe make another layer and play around with the ‘Formant’ knob in MAutoPitch. This is now purely up to the song how you effect it up so I’ll leave that to you. I put in some reverb some delay and copied the vocal twice to make it sound bigger.

Here’s the snippet of what I ended up with:

Hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and learned from it! Happy music making and until next time,

Let’s make some awesome Music!