And Special Effects Fun

Last night, I did all the vocals for the new “Autumn Rain” track, and I guess that given the results, I have finally decided that it is a keeper for the album.  So now, the track count is up to 10.  This is the END OF THE FEATURE CREEP.  I promise.

For Autumn Rain, I wanted a fairly understated performance, and listening back to the initial take, it sounded all a bit thin and weedy. So I went for double tracking the vocal.  For the uninitiated, This is a technique often used in the studio to thicken up a vocal, where you sing the same thing again, and the natural phasing between your voice singing the same notes provides a warmth and thickness to the performance.

Having soloed the takes I did notice some intonation problems, so I punched in some replacement phrases where I had badly missed the pitch. (In Logic punching in is non-destructive, it adds a second take which it comps in with the original take)

Once I was reasonably happy with that I flattened the takes to a new audio file for each vocal double track, and then imported them into the dreaded pitch corrector.  In my case that is Melodyne which is capable of the most amazingly transparent vocal trickery, you can almost transparently shift vocal pitch and timing by several whole tones.  But I didn’t want to go that far, I just wanted to check my vocal tuning was accurate, and where I was out by a tiny bit, or where the odd note had a bit of wavering pitch, I wanted to smooth that out.  Is this cheating? Undoubtedly, yes.  Is it wrong? No, not really.  Firstly, I am, I confess, not the worlds greatest singer,, and secondly there is so much trickery, slight of hand tweaking etc that goes into recording a song these days, that this is just another tool in the engineers toolbox that helps turn that song in your head into reality.

On to the bridge.  After the first two verses there is a two-line bridge which I wanted to be replete with 4 part vocal harmony.  I duly worked out the harmonies and recorded them.  It was kind of what I wanted, but I wanted something more etherial to go with the lines  starting: Tears we Shed for long lost dreams. So I created a new aux bus and sent the vocal to that.  In the aux bus I loaded up an echo, and a flanger.  This gave a dreamy strange effect, but of course on it’s own was almost unintelligible. But mixed in alongside the harmony vocals it sounds gorgeous. (Even with my singing!)

So, the song that came out of nowhere is pretty much in the can.  I might see if Adam wants to add bass, but otherwise, it’s there.