Okay, we have all that vocals recorded. And we can make some basic edits to the tracks, in terms of cutting out noise, extraneous breaths, fixing the timing and pitch and so on. But before we get there, let's make a distinction between lead lead paths and background paths, I'm going to be much more broad in my editing and tweaking of my background verticals than that of my lead vocals. So you know, take take, for example, editing out breath, I don't want to do that in my lead vocal, I want all the emotion of the breaths, lips, Max and all those cool emotional parts of my lead vocals. I just want to keep them in. That's what draws people into your song.

Let them know that's a person who's feeling that emotion The song is sing to them along with all of those little imperfections that that just make us vulnerable. Now, if Have a tripled three part harmony with nine tracks, taking all the intake breath at the same time, it's going to sound like an asthmatic convention. But I want to take all the time in the world to chase down all those breaths and lips Max and cut them out of those nine background tracks. That makes sense, right. I'll also be far more broad in my pitch correction with the backing vocals. When you have so many of them, it's great to tune them up really tighten them up because the blend will sound so much more solid and the artifacts of pitch correction don't show as up as much, you know, a bunch of background vocals I'll be much more subtle in my lead vocal pitch correction unless you're looking for that, you know, auto tune back.

So to kind of get that distinction between lead and background vocals in terms of editing, in the case of the lead vocal, take the kind of a Hippocratic oath and do no harm right keep the human emotional part of that performance. For the doubles that are going to be six to 10 Db down the mix, you can go a little harder. And for the last background vocals, I think of them almost like instrumental parts where you know, moving towards perfection doesn't normally have bad side effects. I mean, everybody expects the piano and the guitar to be in tune and the drums to be right on the money, right? So backing vocals usually sounds slicker when you can really clean them up. So let's see how.

Okay, so the first thing I like to do when I really get down into the edit bay and start messing around with all these vertical is to minimize all the other tracks. These are all other internal instruments or things like acoustic guitars and things like that. I like to just, you know, change them down from a maximized view to a smaller view on some da w you can hide these, but the basic thing I'm trying to get through to you is to really bring the vocals front and center so that we can begin working on them. And this is the way to do it. The other thing is to color code, your vocals, it's a good idea to color code your tracks anyway. And there's no real International Convention on exactly what cars you should do.

But just whatever conventions you use, just try to make them consistent over all your tracks. So it's you know, it just makes it easy. Then when you open up a project that you haven't worked on for a while you know exactly where things are. I tend to go from darker to lighter as I go between the vocal so example, in the lead vocal there if I was to grab that, I could set that to click color of where is it, still blue there, and then we'll leave this one, the double is just a bit of a lighter blue and then we'll grab all of these backing tracks, and then we'll set them to an even lighter blue. Where is it? Yeah, like that.

So now it's just makes it very easy. To see that this is the main vocal right here, this is the doubled part. And then these are the backing vocals. And you know, just makes it very easy to look around there. So, the first thing I'm going to be looking at is these double parts right here. And as I said before, I can get pretty kind of ruthless in terms of snipping out things and, and adjusting the timing, things like that.

Because because it's going to be you know, six to 10 Db down from the lead, Burkle. I don't really have to be worried about losing the character, I more just want to make it blend perfectly with the one above here. So let me just zoom in a little bit. And we'll just deal with this first part right here. And we'll start looking for the various lip smacks and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so we're zoomed in on this part here, and let's go ahead And solo, the lead vocal and also the double as well.

Now what I will do is go back into the mixer and make sure that the lead vocal double is back up basically on par with this is not this is not where would naturally be this way we can hear both of them together. And we'll be able to make some, some edits. First thing I would do is take the snap off and I would just cinch up the on the double right about there and right about there. And then we can start listening to this and see if there's any major timing that we need to fix up. So listen to this. Look into my eyes and you and did you hear that the end that consonant at the D of the end says better timing.

There it is and you will see it's pretty close. Then go wherever you Be I think I've captured your hearts a little slack, we can fix them. No, you got me a little different. I think this one goes man, this one goes mad at that stage is six other vehicles carrying that so I probably won't be chasing that one down here. And also any of the other stuff in the very small breaths. And I didn't really hear too many lips max ring like that, in this in this double.

A lot of that can be handled with a noise gate and we'll deal with that a little bit later on but let's start working on the timing of this lead vocal double so depending on the DA w dealing with just have a look at how you deal with time but it's going to be very similar to this in in reasoning particulars. Just double click on this and let me turn this off and then you have all of these markers have been placed automatically at these kind of transience points where reason kind of believes a syllable or you know, a part of the phrase has been detected. And what we're going to do is just going to zoom right in on this, if you were to zoom this, you can just use the Zoom tool as well and just zoom right across here. And that will zoom right in.

And then you can see that here are all the different points that we can move around, you can draw in points if you like. Now, I could I could put a point in that let me just undo that. But for the most part, the points that have already been made, the edit points are already being made there. They'll be good enough for the most part and you can see right here that would guess this is the one that was out of town I remember at the end, Look into my eyes and and those didn't line up so they have a list of lists, and listen to these Want to take the snap off here I just want to move these points around really look into my eyes and the can to like right here I feel like this needs to be moving across and hopefully lining up with that let's see how that sounds look into may like bata perfect Look into my eyes and okay this one needs to be a little lighter I think his and his and his and you that's a whole lot better.

Let's go on to the next one I'm going to scroll right here I thought this is all good. You see that go wherever you be okay this is a very busy part here I think I captured your heart and I think the nail the night The timing pretty well, but there's probably a little bit right here. I think I've captured. Yeah, I think I've kept like, maybe this one needs to go a little left, right to line up that. I think I've catch. Good.

Maybe this one. I'm hearing something along here. I catch it. Okay, that's nice. When you start hearing it almost phasing me know you've got the timing. Perfect here should your hearts Hmm, that one and the last one.

Maybe nudge that a little bit to the left. You can see where the beginning of that flare of that waveform is to see that. It's not perfect. Yes, but the things you want to look for are hard consonants. They're the things that will give away timing. And it's just a very easy way of going in there and just look for those hard consonants and just slide them around and just make sure that they're there, you know, first do it by sight, and then just audition it until it sounds just right.

So we click out of that. And we'll zoom out a little bit. And I think there were the two main things that we really needed to take care of in this situation. Now, you might think that this double part, be very easy to cut and paste that to the next area. But if this was a different lead vocal there in the in the chorus, then you would need to go down. In other words, if we go across here, if this was a strict cut and paste I sorry, this is the let me zoom out a little bit better.

Okay, so here is the chorus right here. Here's the next part of the course. Is that right? Looking To my eyes then Okay, so this timing is not good either. So I would go down into here, and I would slide these around. Now, if this was a cut and paste, this was a cut and paste of that.

Then of course, you could cut and paste that and replace it over there and the timing will be right. But I believe I sang this twice. And it has a little bit of a different vocal inflection here. And so you just go down and do the same thing down here into the backroom, sorry, into the into the double vocal. So let's look at correcting a pitch and this case we're just dealing with the double right here I have that solid I've also got the left and right Marcus that up with a loop. So I can just play over and over this part and hear how these edits go.

This is what we're dealing with. Look into my eyes and you see, so pitches Okay, it could certainly be better and there's a A couple of ways you can typically do this in your average da W. One way is to finally adjust each particular note and in this case in reason, you would just double click on that. And then you can see over here, all of our notes and you could get right in there and adjust each note the expression and all that stuff. Obviously, that is time consuming, but it gives you the most control. Another way you can do it is to bring in a pitch correction kind of effect and in within reason, that is underneath effects here and down here Neptune pitch adjuster. The difference between this is that you place this on a track and that means that everything along this line, not just this double here, but the double later on in the song, and every other part along this track will get processed by this kind of effect.

So you get the difference, double double click on this, and you're dealing with individual notes. And this is like micro edit. If we're to close that out, I'll scroll back where we scroll back here. If you add the Neptune pitch adjuster or whatever plugin you have for pitch correction, if you place that on the track, then it will adjust everything along this track all the way along the tracks. So let's just do that. We'll just drag and drop that down there you can see a little plus sign there.

And you can see now that has been placed across a lead vocal doubled. In fact, let me just scroll up a little bit here. So we're just dealing with a spot here. Okay, so let's typically when I demonstrate something, I like to go over the top so you can hear the effect. And then we can work back into a more natural way of doing this. So let's take the correction speed.

Super fast right here, and then you will get that T pain share kind of vibe, Look into my eyes and you see? Then I'll go well. So you know, that gives you an idea of it. That's like a coarse quantization of a pitch. And what we're going to do this song is in a minor key, and it is in F sharp minor. And what that does is it allows you to quantize to the right particular notes.

There's another thing along here Capstone size. So if you are in perfect pitch, you could narrow that right down. Or if you're like me, you can bring that quite wide, so it will basically grab your notes, and if it's wobbling around this note, it will bring it right into that note. Another thing that I'll do, there's a February wide vibrato there. So I'm going to turn that on. And another thing on Neptune, in particular, this certainly other ones that have this is this format.

Now your whenever you sing this your, your fundamental frequency that that's the melody that you're singing but then there's all the the harmonics and various other parts of your voice that make it your voice that make it sound like you. If this is turned off, then this will shift not only your fundamental, but also your performance as well. You can preserve that format in those formats, if you like just by clicking this on here. So now that I've set my key, and I've brought my catch zone out, why not to get my flaky notes. Then also set up wide vibrato I'm gonna slow down that correction speed and That should give me a more of a natural sound. Here we go.

Look into my eyes and you see a keep in mind that this is going to be about six to eight, maybe 10 Db down from the lead vocal here so you don't if it sounds a little unnatural, I will tend to go a little harder in terms of attuning my background vocals than I will with my lead vocal because they're down in the mix. And plus when you blend them all together, then they just sound you know they'll sound nice and thick, but they won't sound artificial because there's so many of them and they're down low in the mix. I certainly wouldn't go into edit mode here and start tweaking every individual note you can do that. I mean, I don't know whether you you know, are a masochist and you just want to do it every note. I will show you later on how we can hit some These notes for notes, and notes the note along the lead vocal if there's any particular problems there.

And by the way, this will come up a lot. If someone else saying, if I'm the one singing, I don't mind going back and punching it on a flat note, but if your singer is gone, then you really won't have any other any other options but to go in and tweak any particular note, so there we have it, we have on the app lead vocal double, I don't need to go fishing. In fact, let me zoom out here. There's some other doubles along here. And I had to do anything with that because in the lead vocal double here, you can see that this has been applied across this track so all of these guys here will be under the control of this Neptune as long as you keep your correction speed down reasonably low. Hopefully add some moment where it retains the character your form, it doesn't doesn't move that around with a fundamental.

And in this case, a wide vibrato, throw your, your key in there. This is just a side note, you can actually take out notes down here if you like. So other words, if you know that there was not an E, in your melody at all, you could take that out. So therefore even if you hit a note, you know what, you know, very, very wide, then it would be automatically corrected the next one that is highlighted. So right now we'll just leave it where was it, it was an A minor, natural minor and it was F sharp. So with all of those changes, once we bring this lead vocal double back down, and we brought it back up to all of our editing once we bring it back down sound very, very natural.

So that was a lot of tweaking, but if it was all done on the lead vocal to my ears anyway, it would sound a sound a little bit too sterile. But in the case of the double part that has gone live six to 10 Db lower in the mix from the lead vocal, the two should really blend together really well and just kind of not fight against each other. So let's do the same with some of the harmonies. Okay, so let's look at six background vocals. Remember those three parts, and each of those parts were dealt right here. Now there are some people who would really go in and snip every little piece out.

You can do that as spine but just notice something here. There's probably just a little breath or a little lipsmack right about here and another one brought about there. The difference between that level and this level is so great number one that you probably won't be able to hear it in the middle But it's also a great candidate gating using a noise gate. And we'll get into that into the mixing section. So rather than snipping every little piece out, if we place a noise gate over there with a threshold that's just about these little smacks, then what will happen is that all of these parts will get through and it's basically like an automatic mute in between all these parts. Like I said, if there's something quite obvious there, then I will go in and snip things.

But for the most part, I normally leave these as big, wide open blobs that makes it great copying and pasting later on. And also, I normally leave them at the beginning of a measure at the end of the measure, just because it's just, you know, makes housekeeping a lot easier when you're moving around these various chunks of background vocals. So I would say for the most part, I'm not going to do any editing here in terms of snipping anything. out. Because pretty much all this can be handled automatically by get. Let's have a listen to the timing of this.

See, that's fine. You be Yeah, that was a little breath there but that can be taken care of where the guy kind of stagger in there. This one swells this one hits. I might move that one back. So what you do just make an edit there and edit there and just nudge it back. But I suspect to pre hear that in in context of a mix, or better see whether it's going to need any work.

Oh god Not I think that works out fine. I mean, you can get, you can drive yourself crazy just snipping every little piece out. But the proof of the pudding is listen to it in the mix. And if you don't hear it, while you're training your ears to listen to it, then you know somebody else's who's just listening to the sign not listening for the timing of the vocal swells at the end of verse one. If you don't hear it in a mix, when you're listening for it, then other people won't do it there. So I think that's all good in terms of editing and timing.

Like I said, editing will be taken care of by noise gate, the timing seems to be fine. Let's look at doing pitch. I certainly wouldn't do the Edit part where you get in there and get in the pitch, edit and change everything here. Absolutely not. I'm not interested in that at all because there's a ton of these background vocals here. We can bring over our, our auto tuner or I shouldn't say that actually right, but the pitch adjuster to this particular track, but you know what, we've made a bunch of tweaks on this lead vocal double.

Why would we bring it back over here? Actually, I drag it down here, right? Why would I do that and then make all the same adjustments that I've done over here. How about I go over to our rack, and here it is right here and here. You don't need to worry too much about how this looks in reason. If you're using Pro Tools or anything else, there's just going to be a way to copy and paste any tuning plugin.

In within reason. Basically, what we do is we hold down Option, and then we drag that down into the next one, and boom, Everything's been not only bring down Neptune on Beaver Background Vocal one, which is down here. But it also brought down the key it brought over the format it brought the correction speed and also the wide vibrato. So you could just do that. But each and every one of these tracks to background to background three. So you can see it doesn't take long at all imagine how long that would take if you had to cut you know, drag them all down and make all of those changes individually.

So now let's have a listen to all of these. And actually let's listen to it in context and see how this sounds you And remember that we had a lead vocal double. Remember I brought this up so we could really hear it edit. So let's bring that down where it should be. I think it was around nine DB like that nano 10 db. And let's have a listen to how this is all sounding.

Grey stone sound good. I can even probably bring these backing vocals up a little bit. We'll deal with that when we get into The mixing part of this training. Okay, so let's tackle this has been bugging me for a while within the bridge part right here, there's some hard consonants and things apart back here they're released of some notes that are just a little out of time. So listen to what we've got, I am solid lead vocal lead vocal double, which is down about 10 db, and then asked for background vocals, which is basically two parts that are doubled. Let's have a listen.

Could it be, by the way, soloing everything and in placing a click on there as a great way to see how your timing is going. And you can also see these divisions right down here that'll help us as well. So I can already see that this could be some nights. So that happens right at the top of measure 56 and this is late. This is light. What's the lesson again?

Could it be So right it picks it up that you fell into my arms just at the right time. And yeah those two releases there is that that's a little distracting there. I mean, that may not come up within a mix but I think the level there that's a reasonably loud I think I would like to better clean it up to be pretty easy to clean up and the last part is tonight. I should the teasle sound pretty good day. I could probably nudge that a little bit there. So anyway, let's get started.

The first one here. Let's that is that part. So let's bring that right back. And we'll go on to the next one. Now let's have a listen. And that should hopefully be in time.

Could it be right? That one might be a little late. So right that you fell into my yard, just at the right time. And okay, these two releases here, let's bring them back a little bit. Light tonight is making even worse make I'm adjusting the wrong one here tonight is not synced with this one here. That's better.

Okay. So let's have a listen to all of this. And context. Remember these parts have been tuned because we have placed that Neptune effect that pitch correction effect across this track. So therefore if this is Living along that track, it's being processed. dislike all of these other ones.

So let's hear some context. We discussed a bit of pre roll here. Bye bye. That release a whole lot happier with that. Like, that's a big part of when you're arranging vocals and when you're working in an ensemble as well you need to know not only where you start notes, but where you end notes and in that situation, my releases When not in time, but with the magic of just a little bit of editing there and and tweaking that time, that sounded a whole lot better. Maybe this tea might come back a little bit as that.

If you do have a hard time with some of these teas, you can just snip them out or you can certainly make up a new clip and then just drag down the volume of those you can do automate automation as well but that's kind of a crash course in how to deal with all your backing vocals. Let's look at a lead vocal. Now before I start into the kind of micro pitch editing, I like to basically chop up a larger piece of our lead vocal into smaller more magical chance because as we get into the micro mode, you might be overwhelmed with the number of notes that you have to deal with. So a great way to do that is just a slice that up. So with a snap set up, I'll just break this out into three different chunks, we'll get to live. We'll get rid of these pieces in here.

And I'm just going to zero in on this very first part right here. Now with this, once we double click into it, I can also zoom down here. So we are just looking at this first part of our lead vocal. And this is what it sounds like. Since the day your heart was open, and you were willing to agree with your job. So I mean, it's a pretty decent performance.

Here's one thing I Will was a focus your attention on all within this pitch edit screen, what reason has done and of course, this will be different depending on what da w had, but they're all fairly similar. They break them down into these little chunks of pitch correction, kind of edit regions. And so within these little blue regions, we can we can work on that pitch. And the let me zoom in a little further here so we can see it really well on the great look at the screen. So you can see that each of these it guests, that's the note that I was trying to sing and you know what, it's not quite on the money. You can see these different color lines, the light blue and the dark blue is showing a semitone which you can see right over here.

Now, some of these I same you know reasonably well Some of them I didn't. Some of them. I did some legato paths. By the way, the black line here is my actual pitch. So you might think, Wow, he was super sharp there wasn't that was. It was legato and you were willing, you were willing, right?

I didn't go and you were willing to I went you were willing to believe. So that part I want to keep. But this part here is a little wobbly. I'm kind of drifting a little flat, or sharp, flat, sharp, and so on. I'm not a professional singer. So that's what my pitch looks like.

So let me show you the quick and dirty way of us working on correcting the pitch of this performance here. So I will zoom out. So we'll look at this whole chunk of audio and right Here we are, if we can command a or Ctrl A on Windows, we've selected all of these edit regions right here. And all we need to do is hit correct. Now look at the pitch of all of these. And look what happens when we hit correct.

Ready, set, go. Boom. So you saw that everything was changed to its nearest STEMI time. And that will all be pretty good. Let me show you the other couple of things that are very, very important in terms of, of editing or micro editing a pitch. And the first This uses two different handles the handles above a stand for drift.

Now if you see I like I said, I'm going sharp flat, sharp flat, sharp flat there. If I was to grab that and drag them down, you notice that will flatten All those pitches out, so I sync perfectly right on the money for all of these notes. Down below, we have another handle here, which is our transition. In other words, how long does it take to kind of cross by between these two pitches here? Does it in other words, it goes straight down there or goes Ah, if we set this to the minimum point, and the drift to absolutely no drift at all, then you'll get the T pain share thing, which I'm just so so sick of. Sorry, let me just get back to that.

Okay, so he is what it sounds like. The D your heart was open, and you were willing to agree with your. So notice a couple of things. It sounds very robotic. It's perfectly in tune but Those little bands, legato parts, they've all gone away because this is just kind of be that night my voice will play back exactly that note for that period of time right there. Let's zoom in this is actually a great way to check for bad notes.

So obviously I'm not going to keep it this way this is just a way to basically make the the tuning as pure as possible to then actually transpose some of these. So let's have a listen since the D. So that's because since since and you can have a monitor on here so you can have a reference time. No, that's not right, since that would be right. Since the day your heart was nothing since the day hard was that should be in line with that but it's this Since the day you ha was not as not bad should be up there. Okay. So since the day your heart is open, and you are willing to, of course you can change these notes as much as you like.

So imagine the day your heart D you have. So the vocalist has gone, if this is missing this, I can easily grab a mic and do this stuff over. But if your singer has come and gone, he's got paid is out of here. And you can't get them back and somebody comes in and says, Hey, I want to adjust the melody, then that would be the way to do it. Just select all of them, bring the drift way down, make the transition very fast and then just start playing with these notes. And then you can completely change the melody.

Let me just undo that back to where it was and listen to this. The D you Ha. Okay, so that works out fine. Let's select them all again. And we're going to put the drift all the way back up. And we're going to widen up the transition just a little bit there.

So we've said before that this is my pitch. And was I really seen that flat when I was trying to hit this note. Now wasn't always sliding up into that note, I was doing bends. This one here was certainly doing doing bands there. Let's actually go through and look at some of these parts. Here's a great one right here.

So this, this edit region right here. Now, notice that I am is a long one year is a long one too. Well, either of these would would do fine. So I'm bending this Note up, but then I'm really not landing this pitch right here. So you will think, Okay, well, then I can just reduce my drift. And that will flatten out that part there.

But look at my band, my band is completely gone away. We're still if it was halfway there, you'd be bending like a quarter tone and things just wouldn't sound fine at all. So you're kind of caught in the middle. How is it that you want to preserve this, but you also want to flatten this out? The big problem you have is that the pitch edit window here is dealing with this as one little edit point. What if we could split that in half?

And how would you do that? You hit your trusty razor rod, drop it right here. And then what we can do is we can leave this the way it is, but this one, we can flatten out you could flatten out Completely if they like, let me have a listen to that. He still needs a little bit of a humanist there, right? You're, again over here. I don't want to flatten that out completely because my bends and legato parts just will not.

They'll just basically go away. So we cut that again, cut it reduce the drift there and keep the drift there. So to get the idea behind all of this, I would just basically go through each of these points. And here's another great one right here. Mine. Mine.

Okay, I want that been there. I mean, if you did this, it would just all go away. Mine to mine. Okay, that's perfectly in tune, but I like that little piece right? So let's raise that. And then we can reduce that.

And let's have a listen to how that sounds. Okay, that sounds fun. So, the first thing I would do, like we said is select them all, you can do the pitch correct, which will move these edit points to the nearest semitones. Take the drift out of everything, make the transition really short. So they're all just very pure times. And then you can move each one up and down until you're getting the right note.

And then start splitting up these edit blocks so that you can keep your bands but you know, you can really make some of these other parts just sound totally insane. That was another one along here. I get here's a good example here. Okay, wide vibrato there. And we know that's one long piece, let's chop him up. Here's the thing with, you know, non professional singers like my scope.

When you're singing, you know, up and down. And the piece we share was already there. That's not so bad, but it's really when you hit the long notes. That's what separates the men from the boys, you know, you got your professional singers, they, when they land that note, it's like Olympian gymnast, when they land that land in that band. There's no way rain, they just hit it. I don't.

And so if you can go through and really start looking for some of these long notes here, and then you can, you can either just pull it out, let's listen to how that sounds. We pull it all the way out. Sounds pretty good in a mix. Certainly, if there was some backing vocals on top of there, you could get away with a really pure tone like that. But what if you split the difference instead of it being this wide, maybe split that down to maybe you know, 40% or something like that. Let's have a listen to how that sounds.

So that's great, we still kept that vibrato. No, that's not out of tune that is just a night that's like, you know, bending the strings on a guitar. So, I would really start looking at your long notes, working with them first, trying to leave all the legato parts, you know, pitch bend and things like that leave them as is because people don't really perceive that as being out of tune. They really perceive these long notes as being added soon. So this is where the money is. Work on Mr. And just go through section by section.

Have your lead vocal and you'll get some really really great results.