5 Vocal Tuning Mistakes and how to avoid them #vocaltuning #cubase #variaudio

before you make any corrections think do i actually need to do this does this a little bit out of tune note make musical sense does it add to the expression or is it plainly just a wrong note that needs to be corrected hello everyone welcome back dom here and on this video we're going to talk about the five top vocal tuning mistakes and how to avoid them coming up so this day and age one of the most important skills to have if you want to work into the music production field if you want to work in studios or even if you are you know a self-produced songwriter you know or artist that is vocal tuning and when i'm talking vocal tuning i'm not talking about slapping an auto-tune plug into your vocals and call this auto tuning that's not what i mean this also serves a purpose it's a quick and dirty way to get things done and get vocals of sound a little bit better what i mean with vocal tuning is i mean manual vocal tuning with things like vary audio or melodyne so on this video i'm going to show you the five mistakes that i see most people do when they do vocal tuning when they start out this process and it's their first time and they're not sure exactly how to approach this now i'm going to be using vari audio because it's my favorite vocal tuning tool it's super tightly integrated in cubase it's fast i don't need to render anything but of course everything that i'm going to show you here applies to let's say melodyne that's also a great tool and it's supported inside cubase with ara support i use melodyne for more complex things when i'm dealing with polyphonic material it's great for this it's such an advanced tool but for my bread and butter vocal tuning vari audio is perfect let's get started let's talk about the first mistake and the first mistake is over correcting your vocals now this is very typical when you're starting out tuning vocals you have the tendency to make every single note straight every single note exactly on the pitch grid and you know some genres really call for this this is a very typical approach for some genres of music you have a very hard tuned vocal as we call it but for stuff that is not supposed to be like that this can really make your vocals sound unnatural for example let's take this vocal to let somebody in again and as you can see let's activate vary audio for a second and one of the things that people do is they grab all the notes and what they do is they quantize the pitch like this now before you start doing this just think do you really need to do this does this sound really wrong to you or are you just doing this because you see that they're not in a straight line they're not exactly on the grid on the pitch grid i would say that this vocal for example to let somebody in again you know it's quite nice it has a nice feeling it has expression i don't want to ruin this you know there are a few fluctuations here and there and if you start correcting this like if you take this and you say i want to quantize the pitch vary audio will still do a great job let's listen to it and again but maybe this portion for example was supposed to be a little bit flat it was supposed to be to have that little dip there now if you want to correct it of course you can do this and what i would actually do in this case would be to actually separate in more segments for example i can see that there's a little bit of a bump here in pitch so maybe i could instead of doing this what we just did i would just take this one and i would go here set my arc point and then go like this okay and let's listen is it better to let somebody in same with this one now you see i have another segment here maybe i can go here and i can go like this okay let's listen again so you can see that here i have this note that is not straight it has this slur here okay many newcomers to vocal tuning they get completely confused with stuff like this the problem that most people have is that they try to figure out should i place it here or should i go like this or should i straighten this all together and that's one of the main dangers many people go i don't know how to deal with this let's straighten this and then they end up with something like this which is obviously wrong so in this case you shouldn't do this you should actually find the main note not the slur and then make sure that this isn't pitched in this case we have an f sharp that goes momentarily to g and it goes back to f sharp so we're going to correct for the f sharp and in this case i can see that this is pretty much okay this might not go as much to in the center of g as you know it would be visually correct but when you listen to it it doesn't sound wrong if this note sounds a little bit flat to me maybe i can do the same thing i can bring in my anchor point and just pull this up and let's listen now and again the other thing that goes under the umbrella of over correcting is making your vocal sound flat and that happens when you use tools like the straighten curve in various for example so that's the original to let somebody in again so because many people are afraid of manual editing what they do is they go here and they straighten the curve and now they think okay now all the notes look straight but then they end up with something like this which of course is hard tuned vocals it shows that it's a cheap vocal tuning you don't want that so make sure that you treat every note individually before you make any corrections think do i actually need to do this does this a little bit out of tune note make musical sense does it add to the expression or is it plainly just a wrong note that needs to be corrected especially if you're working with experienced singers when you're working with professionals i would try and keep the essence of their vocals as pure as possible and only correct when it's absolutely necessary now when you have a singer that's not well trained and maybe they're amateurs and you know they want to have fun and you're producing a track then you might want to be a little bit more drastic but whatever the case you shouldn't over correct more than needed now let's move on to the second mistake and that's a very very common one and many people have a hard time figuring out what to do to correct this and this is a natural note transitions so the transition between the notes that's the hardest part to correct because obviously you're trying to correct for the slur which is very very hard for example let's take this vocal you say my name like no one else okay let's say that for some reason i want to get rid of this vibrato right here in these two notes okay so let's say i want to straighten the pitch curve so i can go like this straight in this okay and maybe i want to straighten this one as well good now let's listen to how it sounds now you say my name like no one else immediately again we have this hardship effect and this doesn't really happen because we reduce the vibrato okay because we might want to reduce the vibrato sometimes it happens because between these transitions now we have like a hard line okay it's not smooth anymore most people they go stuck like i can't do this there's no way i can do this or they start chopping chopping chopping let me show you one cool tip that you can do inside cubase with vary audio that can get rid of all these problems okay all these artifacts once you do your straightening all you need to do is go here see this little icon here that top right corner just go like this see and the same with this one okay and let's listen you say my name like no one and boom that's one of the most useful tools in my opinion when it comes to vary audio and a huge update compared to the previous version what i'm doing here is i'm saying to various you know what straighten this note yes i want this straight i want this to be perfectly in pitch perfectly in pitch okay like this but i want the transitions to be natural because the transitions don't really affect the pitch we don't really conceive them as wrong notes but we do perceive them as bad tuning we do perceive them as a natural tuning when we hear those hard transitions so listen to this now and i'm going to go even more drastic with the straightening okay even more drastic let's listen can you say my name like no one else and maybe i want to go like this as well you say my name like no so see how straight this note is see how straight this note is but because i took care of these transition portions here these two ranges these ranges here as you can see and of course you can fine tune them until they sound right this doesn't sound like it's a hard tuned vocal even though i can do the whole thing like that you know i can go ahead and straighten the curves but if i leave the transitions intact then i'm going to have a way more natural vocal which is again super in tune so depending on what style of music especially for pop music this is a very cool trick if you want to make pop vocals super tight in terms of pitch but still retain a natural sound the range selection for the pitch curve is what makes all the difference and as you can see if i grab more than one i can tweak them at the same time simultaneously how cool is that let me know in the comments down below if you knew about this feature with vari audio but in the meantime let's move on to mistake number three and that's the artifacts when you're pitching consonants up and down okay this is again a very very common problem and again it gives away and especially if you are a music producer or an audio engineer in your experience it immediately gives away that the vocal has been treated it has been tuned it's such a characteristic sound that you know you can't escape it so don't be that person that has that mistake in your vocal tuning let me show you what i mean and how to avoid it first of all let me show you how it sounds so let's take this vocal for example and you can see i have this s here and you can already see that various has taken good care of that s so it basically doesn't consider it a note as you can see there is no pitch information here but let me try and force it to make it wrong okay let's try this one so hear that artifact it sounds really really strange what can you do in order to correct this the first thing that i would do is if that was connected to my main vocal so my vowel then i would probably split it and then reset the pitching now various here has already separated it that's why you can't do it by mistake but let's say that it was connected to this okay then if i pitch this one up it would sound weird awesome okay so what i would do would be either to go like this again okay and make sure that this is not affected but also i would go one step forward and just go like this and separate it manually if it wasn't separated already now i've seen other dws that have similar functions that don't get this right so if you're using another daw i'm sorry but that's the solution you can do this on your platform but switch to cubase anyway and this is relevant for consonants like s's or f's especially sibilant consonants right that's the solution very easy and once you separate the note you just go here and say functions reset pitch changes for selection and that's it and now it will sound like a natural s again the next mistake is not taking into account the musical context of your song namely the key of the song and this is a very common problem that many audio engineers have when they try to do vocal tuning and they don't have knowledge of music theory and music harmony it can be really really challenging try to tune a vocal like this because you have to have a very trained ear and you need to be aware of the key of the song so that you pick the right notes right for example let's take this vocal here and let's say i was given this and i was asked to do vocal tuning we're sailing across that fading light with those of integer lullabies now in this case i have no musical context i don't have the track playing in the background it's really hard to tell which notes i should use but with the new cubase 11 there's a little bit of a hack that you can use to figure out which notes you're supposed to use and what i would do in this case would be to go to my vocal activate very audio and then what i can do is i can go to functions and say extract midi now when you do this you will get this dialog i would try with static pitch bend data and then i would go fixed velocity and maybe i want to add a new midi track now once you hit ok this is what happens you get a new midi track that comes from this vocal so it has extracted all the notes and it has turned them into midi let's check it out see now all i need to do is make sure that i get the notes that are the most stable you know select maybe these notes here see and these notes here maybe i won't select these ones because these are slurs you know they're like you know that that first note that might not be in the key but these look like they are in keys so let's grab them and then what i can do is i can go to my skill assistant here and i can ask it to give me some suggestions so let's go and select a few notes and as you can see i have some suggestions here it says it could be c major it could be a major e aeolian and so on and so forth judging by these notes so now i have a little bit of a ballpark if i know this is in a minor for example okay let's go a minor then i can even go here and say okay look i want to see if all the notes are there so what i'm doing here is i'm using the pitch visibility to show me if these notes are in the key of a minor let's see we're sailing across that fading light with those of integer lullabies velvet sounds for so now all i need to do is go and check which notes are allowed for a minor and then go to my very audio here and then i'm correcting the notes for a minor for example if i go here and say i want to correct this note and let's say that this note was in between c and c sharp i don't need to worry about it because i know we are in a minor so all i need to do is go to see natural of course after i do this i can just give it a listen as well right we need to hear and i have a more focused way of doing my tuning now if you are very good with music theory and music harmony and you know your scales and your keys obviously it will be much much easier for you and the last mistake that i want to talk about today is the lack of practice like with everything else in life tuning vocals takes a lot of practice if you do it once you're going to do maybe a bad job maybe an okay job if you do it twice you'll become better and better and better because the point with vocal tuning is that it's not always standard there's no magic recipe for a good natural vocal tuning and sometimes as a matter of fact a good vocal tune might not be natural maybe the song needs an unnatural vocal tuning a more hard tuned feel you must know how far to go every single time you know how far do i need to time correct this how far do i need to pitch correct this and this is something that unfortunately i cannot teach you on a 15 minute video this is something that you have to work with a lot of artists do a lot of vocal tunings don't avoid doing the vocal tunings that's a very important thing don't choose the easy way slapping a auto-tune plug-in into your inserts and think oh that's probably gonna sound good because you're training your ear your training your musical skills when you're tuning you have your own say when you're doing your vocal tuning you can destroy a vocal you can make it completely lifeless or you can actually enhance it and that's the whole point you should enhance a vocal you shouldn't be intrusive to a vocal making it completely unrecognizable the only time that i would do this is if i have a really really really bad singer and that happens you know sometimes you need to completely salvage a situation and in this case you can't do much but in most other cases spend time with vocal tuning do this one take feedback from other people other producers see how they feel about it take feedback from your singer if they're saying that ah that sounds unnatural you're probably doing it wrong so that's the final mistake and in the comments down below let me know if i missed a mistake on this video i would really like to know if you've also experienced other mistakes when it comes to vocal tuning and also if you'd like me to do a video for vari audio a little bit more in depth let me know in the comments down below leave a like subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and of course share this video with anyone you think they might find it useful or entertaining so i'm absolutely confident that all of you amazing people that watch this video are not going to make this vocal tuning mistakes ever again thank you so much guys i'll see you in the next one take care bye

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 16,465

Keywords: pitch correction, vocal tuning, tuning vocals, auto tune, vocal editing, t pain, vocal production, vocal editing in cubase, melodyne editor, vocal tuning in cubase, learn how to do vocal tuning, how to tune your vocals, best way to tune your vocals, fix the pitch of vocals, fix vocal pitch, learn vocal correction, vocal correction techniques

Id: lAzk-XZbZyE

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021