Hi, and welcome to your one stop shop about how to produce killer vocals. My name is David worlds. And we're going to be going through just a ton of training, teaching you how to produce your own vocals or record vocals of others everything of from how you actually physically produce vocals and take care of your instrument to arranging parts and harmonies, a tracking, punching layering than editing a cueing, adding effects and mixing to get the type of tight punchy vocals that you hear on record. Now, like most things, it's easy to get 90% of the way in which way you want to go. But the last 10% kind of separates the men from the boys so to speak. It's in that last 10% or so, that's where you need professional help and lean kind of on the best practices that have been used for decades in popular music and also new techniques as well.

There are reasons Professional vocals on the radio sound that good. And the years gone by, you had to have professional recording studios with just hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to get those results. And then nowadays think about the equipment is so good and fairly inexpensive, that really comes down to the techniques, the best practices, and the tips and tricks to get the results you're after. And you will nail them down in this training and take those skills pretty much wherever you go. So anyway, let's get started and learn about the source of all this material, your voice. Now, before we learn how to take care of and prepare vocals, what is this instrument that makes vocals now I call it an instrument on purpose because that's exactly what it is.

If we were to take a guitar like this, and what do we have here? We have a powerful To move the strings in emotion, the string that moves back and forth in vibration and then the resonator, which is the body of the guitar that vibrates in sympathy with the strings, but amplifying the sound and also adding harmonics and complexities to that sound of the string in the same way. We have three different components of vocals, our lungs, which is the power source, just like a hand on the guitar, and vocal cords which vibrate as the air from our lungs move over them. And finally, all the stuff after the vocal cords in color, including our throat, nose and mouth, which gives a voice its character. vocal cords which look like this, that when they open when we breathe, but close together when we produce a vocal sound.

When they close up in close proximity, we get a vibrating sound. And if you took just the rest of your head off and just heard that vibrating it would sound more like probably a duck. Coal or a trumpet mouthpiece is the resonator, the rest of the pathway of your throat, nose and mouth that transforms that harsh spin kind of duck call into speech or singing, singing vocal that we hear, let's actually look at all the physiology of this. Okay, so the first part we'll look at is AF pharynx. Or just add throat, and that allows food or air to go down to two different pipes, either your esophagus if it's food, or the tracker, if it is air, and that will go down into your lungs. Now, there's a lot of very complex systems that make sure the right things go down the right hole.

You don't want hot dogs to go down into your lungs, right? And there's a lot of complex systems there but a big part of that is your epiglottis or you went valve when that is open. That will allow air to pass over your larynx. more technical name for vocal cords actually a better way to describe the last Is to call them vocal folds that are thought of more as continuous balls of tissue rather than a court. Now, when you bring them together, they can they alternatively constrict air and then let it through hundreds of times a second, let's clear out some of the stuff so you can see exactly what's going on. So with the larynx opened up like that adopted, then that will allow air to go right through, but in and out and then when you add them, then that will allow you to constrict that air and then vibrate hundreds of times a second.

Now, if you've ever placed a blade of grass like this between your funds and blown across them, you're going to sound like this. And if you hold that place a blade fairly loosely then that they vibrate slowly. If you tighten that up, then they'll vibrate more quickly. The same thing goes with guitar strings. If you tighten the string, they vibrate more quickly and the pitch goes up. When you sing a high note, you're basically just lengthening and tightening the vocal folds together and raising the frequency of those vibrations.

Now your vocal folds vibrate from around 100 hertz to about 1000 hertz. males tend to be lower because their vocal folds are longer about three quarters of an inch to about an inch long. Females are a little smaller from about a half an inch to three quarters of an inch long. Obviously, kids are shorter still, which gives them that much, much higher time. So air from our lungs passed through the vocal folds, which retract or a duct in breathing and enclosed or a duck when making that vocal sound vibrating as they go. Ultimately holding and then releasing sound waves at different frequencies.

We can then articulate different sounds by using ad at teeth sheet Mouth even as sinus cavities to get those higher harmonics and get the final sound that we hear when we sing. Now on to breathing now a lot has been said about breath support and there are a few different ways in which people describe this. But the main consensus is this we want to provide the best and most consistent power source for add vocal and that is a breath right? When we breathe just for air AB breaths are normally pretty shallow when we cycle every four to six seconds. When we breathe for singing at breath a deeper and we have longer breath cycles. Now interesting thing about breath is one of those bodily functions that's both involuntary and also voluntary.

In other words, you can breathe all night long in your sleep without thinking about it. But you can also actively change the way you breathe in order to properly support yourself seeing the way we breathe specifically, the way we x how to provide to fuel those vibrations across our larynx has big ramifications in terms of the quality of tone and consistency of our tone. And because exhaling is primarily caused by relaxation of the diaphragm, it's inherently less controlled. Think about how controlled you are when you curl a weight versus when you let it go. The same thing happens with breathing, there's generally more control when breathing in than when breathing out and exhale. And when you think about it at the business end of singing.

Now, I'm not a vocal coach, and even then there are different opinions on exactly how to breathe. But to give you an idea, to kind of get you thinking about this subject. Let's do a little exercise. We're going to learn how to breathe in two different ways. Either filling the lungs up from what I would call the top or throwing them up from the bottom with a diaphragm or kind of add belly breathing and when we Contrast those two different types, when we exhale, we're going to be looking at the amount of volume that we have in reserve. Now, how big is that power reserve and also, how consistent is that power reserve when we exhale.

So let's, let's just take, what we're going to do is exaggerate this. So if you're doing it the wrong way, this would be how you would, you would inhale to get ready to sing and you would just lift your shoulders and your chest would come out like this, that is chest, you know that that is in inhaling kind of from the top rather than from the bottom. So here's the way we can practice do it the other other way and once you put your hand across your chest right here, and if you feel your chest going up, we're doing it the wrong way. We're going to try and fill up our lungs from the bottom up here. And if you can expand your rib cage without your chest going up, that's the way we can get into this. So Again, we're not going like this with a chest, you know, rising, our shoulders rising, we're going to keep all that in, in place.

I'm going to try to expand my ribcage from from kind of my belly here and my chest won't go up. So good. So my, my chest hasn't gone up, my shoulders haven't gone up. In fact, if you're doing it right, your belly will kind of expand. So we'll do that again. My chest isn't moving, but my belly is going is going out.

It might take a little while to practice this. So do it as many times as you like. Just try to juxtapose the two together. By making them almost comical. It's like, that's the top and then this is the bottom and just feel your belly. This shouldn't move, but this should move now.

If you're doing if you have both of those down Here's an exhale from a top of the lungs breath. It wasn't a lot of volume and it was kind of perfect. It was kind of flattery. If I do it, my diaphragm I have a lot more volume there. I mean, there's a lot more volume, and it's a lot more controlled. Because I find if you fill your your lungs from the top, then you always always have a kind of feeling like you're ready to run out of fuel.

So breathing in from your diaphragm. I have a lot more complex. I've just got a lot more pressure behind that and a lot more consistency in that time. So again, just Let's do it a few more times, keep your hair on your chest and breathe in through from your belly. Obviously, you won't be doing that when you're singing. But if you can get into that room, that routine of practicing and just putting a hand over your chest making sure you're not breathing from the top, but breathing from here and putting a hand over your ability to kind of make sure that diaphragm is pushing out and what are called belly breathing.

If we can really work on that, then the consistency and also the, the amount of reserve of your breath will will improve drastically. So a lot has been said about chest voice and head voice also called falsetto instead of getting into controversial territory here. Let's just Over the generally held belief that there is a standard break between when you're singing in your chest voice, and then you kind of, you know, kind of switch gears to reach your notes in your higher register. We've said before that we raise the pitch of our voice by tightening the vocal folds. But then at some stage, we can only tighten them so much without straining them. So the folds break open a little and thin out, kind of like changing to a thinner string on a guitar and because of the mechanics of that change, more air escapes to give you a thinner area, kind of a breathy sound.

Now I'm not gonna get into all the schools of thought in terms of falsetto, or head voice, there are plenty of arguments go to any single form and and you'll see all that controversy there. But just to get the basics down. That's what I mean when we're going to be talking about falsetto from now on. So let's talk a little bit about vocal. Warming up your vocal. Now.

If you're Not so long this during this 1520 minutes do this exercise, record a song just called just turn up your computer and record your song just with a non warmed up vertical. And then go back and start using some of these exercises and warm up for about 15 to 20 minutes and then recorded again, you will absolutely be sold in the difference between there. This happens in running this happens in sports, you see people just go, I'm just gonna go run, myself included you blow out your car, if you don't warm up. And the same thing with here, you probably won't blow out your vocal but the quality of your vocal in terms of you know, hitting the pitch and also just the tone, the tone of your vocal will really really get a whole lot better. If you allow yourself that 15 to 20 minutes to warm up and we'll do those exercises in a moment.

Let's talk briefly about hydration. Now having a glass What next you at room temperature, that's great. That's, that's good for you fabrics. But it's not going to hydrate your vocal folds because your epiglottis is in the business of keeping water away from your vocal folds because it has that open, then you're just gonna be pouring water down into your lungs, which is you know, another good thing. So you cannot topically, in other words directly hydrate your vocal folds, they have to be hydrated within within your normal bodily functions in terms of hydration the day before, you want to have nice moist vocal folds, your body needs to be hydrated, you can't directly hydrate them. So you need to drink a ton the day before.

A good rule of thumb is if you're paying clear, then you're going to sink clear. Okay, I won't make any more graphic than that. But this whole idea of just not worrying about hydration that well I'll just grab some water there. Well, you The water doesn't get to your vertical thoughts. Okay, fair enough. So let's go through some exercise that we can do to warm up vocals.

So let's start out with the mechanics of our voice and warming up the muscles that are involved. The best way to open up your voice just start out with you want to adjust for your like that you can feel that that really opens up your throat so it's been a little while just doing yours. It feels a little weird. You might look a little weird. In fact, most of this stuff, do it behind closed doors because you're going to start looking pretty stupid. And if we're not looking stupid now we're gonna look really stupid in a moment.

Then let's warm up at core down here. We start doing that we're just letting out a very small cautious you can feel what's going on down here. When You just laid out coughs you feel that what's going on there and I would just start moving around my neck from side to side and forward back. You can yawn and you can do that. Everything that makes you look silly. If you're trying to look silly, then you probably won't be doing this but I guarantee if you do this before you start seeing it will really really help things out.

So let's start off with math. I just start stretching out my mouth yawning and then start off with some literals basically just try to massage this area so that it is nice, nicely. Warm warmed up. Also tangible To start moving around the mechanics of this, and as we go from moving up the the core and an F space, and at opening up that throat, then I would start doing those breathing exercises. Remember, we're doing that before we just put your head in your chest and try to breathe without moving your chest out and just expand that. That ribcage sebrae break this down to kind of, you know, probably two or three different areas.

We're warming up back core opening up. At throat here, we're doing trills, lips and tongue just to move things move things around. We've been hydrated from the day before, right? Certainly topical application of water helps your mouth and helps you pharynx but it certainly won't directly hydrate your fault. So once we've done all that, we can start moving on to some warm up exercises with actually seeing now will work in the actual tone of your voice and we're, I normally just stay around octave at the beginning, I don't want to stretch anything further than octave at the beginning, I'm just standing fairly narrow in intervals and for me, I normally go first to a third and then a third to a fifth. And you can start with your, your lip rolls and then also sirens which is like a mean sound.

So let's start off and then that means um and then you got chromatically from that very boring, but if you just keep on doing that, and then you can start moving into an octave, and I normally go 135 octave, so it'd be something like, um just keep on going up chromatically from there, as you start getting into some of the high registers. Don't think of reaching for those notes. When you try to reach the notes, you tend to kind of you raise your shoulders. So one thing I'm not normally like to do is if I'm getting to a note that that's going to be fairly high in in my register, I actually kind of make a conscious effort to drop my shoulders So I don't, there's that natural tendency of doing that everything gets tight, you don't want to do that. So when you I, when you were singing those high notes, try not to say reaching because then you're the whole body will come up, then just keep on going chromatically up and up and up, and then go back down and you can start off with sliding into those notes.

I certainly wouldn't worry about my pitch accuracy. As I'm warming up as I get towards the end of my vocal warmup, then I really start worrying about those pitches. So rather than glistening into those notes, I would normally just try to hit those notes as I keep on going up. Now in terms of the day before, you want to avoid the big three, and terms of liquid net would be dairy, caffeine, and also alcohol. Those three will will really work you over a good thing to do is maybe a caffeine free tea. That might might work well.

There's lots of people Have rituals before before they sing. But just avoid those avoid acidic foods as well. Because that will give you gas and things like that we won't have air from our lungs and not my stomach if you know me. So hopefully that will give you an idea of how to warm up. There are plenty and plenty of tutorials out there on YouTube or whatever. And you get to see how various people's people do their warm ups but it's basically it starts from warming up your physicality, then working on your breathing, and then working on those intervals as you warm up your vocal folds, and you should be good to go.

So if you're recording lead vocals that just have the melody and no backgrounds then no background harmonies or doubles or triples. You won't need to know about the information in this section. However, I have learned that last book with multi part harmonies, and access, just bring a song to life. And you will get great results expanding your vocal arranging skills that listen to any Queen song. And you'll see how important this is. And if you want some further incentive that this will provide better results for you, quite often the sum of the parts is better than the individual voices in a mix.

There's no doubt that, you know, Freddie Mercury had a phenomenal voice. But it was the support of Brian May and Roger Taylor just brought those absolutely huge political arrangements to life. There are many, many times in which I'll drop in really high pots that aren't that perfect, but once you double them or triple them, and then blend them into the mix, they make a really, really great blend. I'm always surprised with that. So let's nail down the lingo so we can move forward. The basis of our vocal arrangement is a melody and yet Generally it's a single track, which can sometimes be doubled or tripled by adding additional parts in unison on top of them.

Perhaps you might want to double a whole chorus or just hit individual words or phrases to just support them. Never underestimate how powerful this support can be. It's very important to double various parts and we can also sing harmonies. When we're singing the words in two or three part harmonies the melody, they can be doubled or tripled as well to fatten them up. Now, they could be entire choruses or just individual words or phrase even echoes or call and response to that will talk to to a phrase that leaves an articulator harmonies where you're dropping vocal parts with no words like your typical pads your oohs and ahhs. So let's do a little music theory to understand how harmonies are built I think you'll find this interesting.

Now forgive me if some of this is going to be pretty rude. mentary for some of you who are very experienced in terms of music theory, but I find that a lot of people who are producing vocals maybe are kind of winging it. And this might be a great help to them in terms of understanding intervals and inversions, and things like that. So we'll start off with a C major scale here. And we start up with Rainey. Tito 234567.

Anybody remember the old sound music? When they talked about dough, do all that sort of stuff. Basically, we're talking about the interval between the roofs and whatever that interval is, so a third would be 123. That's a natural harmony, right? A lot of people talk about fifths, thirds and fifths will come up a lot in terms of arranging our background vocals. So 12345 So a third and a fifth up.

Now, when you think about it, these all Repeat as you go up and down the keyboard. So if you just do a triad like this, which is a 135. That's the same set of notes, if you were to play them from here, instead of a 135, it would be a 351, a guy an octave, or here, five, one and three. And then up here is the same thing, five, just an octave above this. So that's how intervals work and also inversions, and that will come up as we start to arrange our verticals. So let's see how this all works out with a melody.

I have a very basic melody here that goes like this. Can you stay Okay, so it's 123532. So what do you think the harmony to the, that would be the guys data data to start off with a third data? cell, right? That'd be the first harmony to the melody there. The second harmony up would tend to be a fifth quite often.

Remember, fifth is 12345. So because data, data data, and how many guys what do you think is one good day All right. So we have this harmony. Third, the second harmony. So if you're not sure exactly what to sing quite often, as you start to get very familiar with these intervals and start doing things by ear, you'll be able to hear this melody. Da, da, da, da, da, da, dah dah, dah dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

You've got to do that by ear, but in case you you know, until you are able to do this stuff by ear, grab yourself a keyboard and start playing around. these chords because you know, when you start playing around and going 123 Okay, 123 This one's probably like, that doesn't sound right. So that's not right. That's the right one there. And then you can start playing around with some of these inversions if you wanted to start doing an octave on top of that, there you go. So between all of those harmonies, you'll be able to get a really nice chord structure and all sounds so much better than just the melody, just by itself.

There's something else that I just want to add in here. These are straight harmonies where you are. You're you're playing along with the phrasing of the melody. So remember, the melody was so the harmony does the same thing. Go Go, go, go, go, go, go, go go. So all of those have the same phrasing as the melody.

But sometimes there might be another way that you can do this in terms of calls and responses. I've left a bit of a gap between the two parts of this line was, can you stay a bam. So imagine in that gap between there, if we had a call and response, it's called a call response because there's one part of the melody that kind of calls and then there's another response that can come back, either in just in unison or in another harmony as well. But imagine it was like this. And you stay Just promise me a band. And maybe that's different vocalists or maybe it's a different register that you come in there.

But the what that interplay between the call and response really brings a lot of interesting things to your vocal arrangements. So you can see that laying down a scratch protocol is a great way to then sound out some harmony parts. And, and even just, you know, just on a keyboard and look at those chord shapes and see where those harmonies will like start listening to great records that have rich harmonies like lights by Jenny are good vibrations by the Beach Boys, sweet Judy blue eyes by Crosby, Stills national Michelle by The Beatles actually Michelle is a great example of a great reason as I schooling yourself with all of these classic songs as well as you know, obviously listening to contemporary arrangements will really you know, have you stopped hearing these arrangements in your head and having you know, dropped down these harmonies very easily, quite often all have you know, a 10 or 12 vocal tracks already to go and Mark quarter so I can just switch tracks on the fly and drop down those parts as soon as they get in my head.

There's been many a time when I drop down, you know, a bunch of parts with you know, not even really thinking about them and then taking off those headphones and go through listening to the monitors and be amazed at what the some of those vocal parts have brought me. So let me say that again, set up your tracks ahead of time so you can just, um, your tracks and go it's a it's a real creativity killer to futz around setting up tracks and input assigning assignments, and so on when you're trying to, you know, to, to, to put down, you know, fleeting idea that they can just come and go, do your prep work beforehand, and then you'll always record those parts for these