How To Produce PITCH PERFECT Acapella (when you're bad at singing) [Vocal Production + Mixing]

i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate how beautiful i sound using pitch correction software but i can't sing a note above f sharp or keep my voice from going out of tune yet here i am still sounding like a pro but pretty soon the truth will really show and you will see that i have not been doing fine i've relied on just to keep from making all of your ears cause this is what i sound like when i'm laughed all on my own i sing glorifying harmonies and sometimes quarter tones but i always know that if i need some vocals on my song my computer keeps my notes from sounding in this video i'm going to peel the curtain back a little bit on modern vocal production techniques and show you exactly how i was able to create the track that you just heard and throughout this whole process i'm hoping to really reinforce three concepts first is i really want you to know how much work goes into something that sounds this way if you're not comfortable with studio work or if you're not familiar with recording acapella you might be surprised at how much work and effort actually goes into creating something that might sound so simple secondly i'd like to demonstrate some very common sense and practical mixing techniques concepts that you can use on your own mixes at home when you're trying to make your vocal sound better and lastly i'm trying to drive home the point that these tools are extremely powerful and potent and they can transform an average performance into something spectacular just like a lot of instagram models are photoshopped to look that way and in real life that's something completely different a lot of singers use these kind of techniques to sound way better than are humanly possible and it's good to keep a skeptical eye and ear out for these kind of things happening because this technology is omnipresent if i can do it here in my home then obviously the pros are using stuff like this as well when it's needed so today we are working in ableton live 10 but before we do any recording or producing there's a few steps we have to take care of first first you have to write a piece and then you can arrange it then you can record it and then you can produce it those would be the four steps that i look at as far as writing well to write this since i knew it was an acapella piece i wanted to write it with my voice why would i want to write it on my guitar or a piano i wanted it to be singable so for me personally i know about the highest note i can comfortably sing is this high b and the where i'd rather be singing is about ee that's a no those are notes i can hit comfortably kind of and with some power so when i was just writing melodies and lyrics it all ended up kind of settling in that area and then i just settled on okay this will be the key of e major so once i had my melody um i wrote this song just for you it was time to put some chords to it so this is where the arrangement process starts but this is still kind of writing we need to have chords that fit my melody and since my melody was all in the key of e major i just picked bread and butter garden variety car chords of the diatonic e major scale and that's where most of those chords come from so there's a million chords that would have worked for this melody i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate but you know i could do a different chord progression i could have started on e i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate how beautiful i sound lots of choices right so the choice i picked there uh you know basically once i had my choice in place i liked the chords those were the chords that were going to dictate my arrangement now as soon as i wrote my main melody as soon as i was finished writing my melody and my lyrics i immediately went into reason to program in my melody and that way i could see what my melody looked like i used this little violin sound you can hear it is i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate so by being able to see my notes and hear my notes it made this next step much easier which is arrangement i chose a four-part harmony and a four-part harmony is something that like any music major can do at the drop of a hat but i'm not a music major the idea is to have four different parts that are independent you know you've got a low part you have a high part you've got something in between maybe something higher and it's like four different characters in a play they all have their different role to play and very rarely does one character just disappear right they're always kind of visible they're always kind of audible and that is what a good arrangement is supposed to achieve it's supposed to achieve you know independence between the voices and it's supposed to avoid any sort of clashing now if you don't know the formal rules of harmony if you haven't been trained and had those rules reinforced like me then do what i did and just do what sounds good you know if you like it the way it sounds then it should be good enough but there are certain rules that uh you know certain people will criticize if you are formally trained you might criticize my arrangement it's fine with me i like the way it sounds but i will say this when you're not well trained having it on your computer is such an advantage once i had my main part written i was able to start exploring harmonies here on the computer before i actually sang them to see if i liked them so it would be a real pain to be singing a bunch of things that i don't like and then fixing them or you could just write something on your computer first [Music] and really go in there and tweak things if you don't hear a note if you hear a note you don't like you can go in and fix it this is so much easier than writing on the page you know if i'm writing on the page i can't hear those things i'm not good enough to keep all these harmonies in track in my head uh and i certainly am not good enough of a piano player to do this all on the keyboard the guitar is certainly not the instrument you want to be writing a four part harmony on just because of its geometry so to me this is about as easy as it gets when it comes to writing a four-part harmonies being able to write it on the computer hit play listen to what you just wrote go in there and change notes and really independently keep track of all four parts so that way before you actually hit record you know that it sounds okay now to handle the recording part of everything well that was very simple i just sat right here i sang right into this microphone and yeah it's not the perfect environment this isn't an isolation booth there's noise around the computer's right there so you can hear the fan in the background but you know what sometimes good enough is good enough and as long as you cut out the dead space or use a gate and we'll talk about some of that stuff you don't always need these pristine vocal environments i think that uh this day and age even without you know noise removal software if you've got a lot of stuff going on a lot of that background noise kind of just goes away now if this was a professional project if this was for a movie or a commercial or something really you know um where i was they were expecting professionalism yeah i would want an isolation booth i'd want a quieter environment but you know you can't always have that luxury and you shouldn't let that hold you back from doing something like this anyways and like i said this isn't the best treated place but especially right next to a computer fan but i still think it works all right now we can get into the actual production and mixing part of things let's take a listen to just my main vocal part all on its own here's one little excerpt of my main vocal part or keep my voice from going out of tune here it is recorded once and what i have opted to do for every one of these tracks is i have opted to double track it so i sang the exact same part again and you can see this is a different performance this note saying a little bit late here it ends a little bit differently they're not identical and if i play these both at the same time you should hear that slop you should hear the difference between these two it might not sound that good or keep my voice from going out of tune there's moments where the the pitch matches and it's actually kind of nice it creates this phasey nice little twinkling thing but you know the other parts are kind of harsh to my ear when it does that listen again or keep my voice from going the timing when the timing's not perfect you know that creates an issue so why did i unison double it when unison doubling can create so many issues well i knew i was able to make it perfect afterward so this was one of those things that normally if i didn't have any tricks up my sleeve i would say don't unison double your vocal tract maybe do like a triple track or a quad track that'll actually even things out it'll kind of add in more slop but it averages out to something better when you just have two tracks like this though it's very very particular and you have to be very careful when you're doing a unison double one of the quickest things we can do though because right now both of these tracks are being played in the center so you're hearing the actual discrepancies between those two they're kind of being processed together and merged together through the same speaker but if i pan them hard left and right okay so here's what it sounds like with them in the center or keep my voice from going out of tune now all i'll do is pan one hard to the left and pan the other one hard to the right and listen to how much better it's gonna sound or keep my voice from going out of tune you may not have noticed the out-of-tune-ness because they're hitting each ear independently and they don't have a chance to actually interact with each other and create that you know interference so you're not hearing this effect if you're on a mono speaker or if you have like uh you know you're gonna have to have two speakers headphones or two different speakers to hear this effect but immediately just by hard panning left and right i've immediately made just this one vocal track sound better or keep my voice from going out of tune i also think that this hard pan left and right is way more interesting than if we had decided to just do a single track in the center this doesn't have a or keep my voice from going that doesn't have dimension to me that just sounds like one guy singing where all of a sudden my double track spreads things out starting to sound a little bit more acapella so i took a similar approach to every other part that i wrote here here is my high part for example here are two different independent tracks that i sang separately and once again i decided to pan these hard left and hard right so it kind of clears up and cleans it up just a little bit but once they were panned hard left and right i didn't want them to take up the exact same space as my other groupings as my other parts so what i did is i grouped them together and then i kind of moved this whole thing over to this one side so that basically means that there's a lot of that high part on the right speaker there's just a little bit of that high part on my left speaker and once again just trying to create dimension trying to create space trying to just not make it sound like a flat production but maybe like there's actual eight people around you singing so let's listen to that where it's just kind of mostly panned to one side [Music] and then combining that with my main tracks again here's what that sounds like a note above f so you can see it's starting to come together whereas if i played these tracks all in the center speaker with no mixing let's listen to that same performance a note above f sharp i know which one i'd rather have i'd rather have them split out like that i'd rather have that space the only tracks i didn't pan hard left and right are my bass tracks i actually left those in the center just like so because i have a tendency to like to keep my bass in the center in mono uh this is a pretty common mixing principle and it's not a rule by any chance i just didn't see the need to pan these out left and right like this [Music] and especially because i'm trying to create space i think it would be nice to have something that's just solid there in the center that low deep resonant voice and i don't mind the phasiness that comes along with it also keeping in mind this all will get pitch corrected so a lot of these mistakes will go away after that pitch correction occurs so for me the next step is to continue mixing things without using any effects i don't want to add any effects yet just get the very the fundamentals of the mix figured out and we've already started splitting things left and right we've already started balancing things so for each one of these tracks i'm just going to group them together here's my main track as one grouping and now i can take my main vocals and listen to them all on their own and what i'm going to do is just balance this mix all right i'm going to pan things left and right and more importantly i'm going to try to get my parts to blend with each other i do want this main part to be louder than everything else that's the part i want you to sing along to if my bass part is louder than everything else think of how weird the song would sound but pretty soon the truth i don't want that i want this melody to be really be sticking out this main melody is the most important one so i'm gonna try to balance everything around that i'll try to make sure that that stays prominent and none of those other voices dominate that voice all the other voices just kind of sit around my main voice now to do this mix i don't want my headphones on i really prefer my monitors so i'm going to take the headphones off take a little bit of a break mix this to my taste and then we'll come back all right so we have spent some time mixing this and once again there are no effects here just simple panning uh and mixing and that's it and take a listen to how much better this already sounds than what we were working with before you can still hear the out of tune this yes but at least there's some clarity there some crispness there whereas if i did something like this instead let's flip this to mono so there's no stereo width at all listen to this [Music] so hopefully you hear that stereo field really really helps out and just by you know spending a little bit of time with just the basic mix you should be able to make a lot of improvement now we can finally start pitch correcting this i'm going to use melodyne and i kind of insist you put melodyne at the beginning of your vocal chain if you put in effects and then add a melodyne unit well all those effects will kind of be baked into melodyne and you won't be able to kind of tweak them later on so i do highly suggest you at the very beginning of your chain you start using melodyne and then you hit transfer record that audio in here but pretty soon the truth will really show and that's a pretty bad performance right there but what melodyne does is it shows you exactly the notes you sang and this little squiggly red line this little one that's going up and down it's waving around here and then it scoops way up here that's what my voice actually did that's tracking my actual pitch and as you can see and as you can hear but pretty soon the truth it's not controlled and it's also not on tune uh in tune that's what these these big blobs are averages of the note that melodyne thinks i'm trying to sing so what i'm going to do here it sounds like my melody should be e to d sharp back to e and then to f sharp and that's that's the note i just i literally can't hit an f sharp without hurting myself so what we can do is we can move these notes after we've sang it here was this note that was supposed to be an e but i'm a little flat on it i almost hit it but i could move it way up here to f sharp i could move it way up to you know way up here to a pretty however do you notice the farther away i get from where i started it's starting to sound weirder and weirder like if i pitch it down here it doesn't sound like a human anymore so with an acapella performance you need to be in the general ballpark you need to be within a half step or a whole step for this to work but i mean any decent singer should be singing within a half step of their desired target note if you can't sing a half step out of i mean that's that's pretty important stuff for any decent singer the important thing to note though is the less pitch correction you do the more human it will sound so for many of these tracks i tried to take a light touch uh but often because there's so much going on i was able to take a pretty heavy-handed brushstroke to these and actually kind of over autotune it but pretty soon the truth will really show so that's already a little bit better just because i've moved things around but i hate all this craziness in my voice so what we can do is we can actually get rid of all these little modulations just average it out a little bit and let's maybe find some ones that we can really iron out like this one but pretty soon the truth will really show i hate this word truth you hear that word truth but pretty soon the truth with the truth so that no true that's one giant sweep so once again what i could do is i could just kind of even this out and it's supposed to be an f sharp the truth a truth will really show a truth will really show now it sounds robotic but i'll be honest with you i think in the context of the mix with all those other vocals going on i'm pretty sure a little instance of roboticness won't pop out to the ear it won't be noticeable so basically this process of going in here and distinctly editing every single part that's the step that you need to do to make it sound perfect so here's what that sounds like when it's actually melodyned and let's bring back the double track now so you can hear what they both sound like but pretty soon the truth and i really need you to hear what i did to this one i mean listen to how this track originally started without melodyne listen to this but pretty soon the truth will really show i mean i'm not even hitting the note i was running out of breath it was hurting my muscles and like i was trying i was not trying to sing poorly i just can't sing this high so in that case i would rather sing the wrong note well and then just melodyne it into place then crack my voice you can't melody in a cracked voice but you can sing the wrong note and move it into place so once again listen to what this sounds like before melodyne but pretty soon the truth will really show after melodyne but pretty soon the truth will really show all right a little bit of funkiness there on the melody at melody and i probably could have done a better job but it sounds way better than where it started so i've gone through every individual track and literally melodyned every single note that offended me that is maybe the most time consuming thing you can do as a music editor in your daw that in drum processing but it also cleaned up not just the pitches but the timing and like i said to not sound sloppy that's extremely important that all our notes end at the right time and everything is just copacetic and nice and tidy so here is all the melodyne on just that's the only effect we're hearing right now is the same the proper mix but with melodyne yet here i am still sounding like a pro but pretty soon the truth will really show i mean you hear how nice that sounds it sounds but pretty soon the truth as bad as those original tracks are i don't hear anything bad in that so i actually double dipped on the pitch correction and i'll show you what i mean by that uh auto tune is a program that normally just catches your note and then averages it out and i decided to throw a version of auto-tune onto every single track as well i figured why not i wanted it to sound perfect so i opted for the nectar audio plug-in from uh izotope and this is one of those ones i got with their big bundle when i paid for it and it works just like auto tune it catches the note but pretty soon the truth will and let's boost this up a little bit so we can hear it but it catches the note and it just averages it out to the closest note but pretty soon the truth will really show and what i can do is i could really crank this up 100 strength very quick speed and you'll hear it just becomes the t-pain thing you're familiar with but pretty soon the truth will really show so you hear that little warble in there i don't want that in my actual you know uh acapella performance but i did want a much subtler version of that so i took uh i took quite a bit of you know the strength off and i added a little speed so it doesn't kick in pretty soon the truth will really show far more natural and i had every single one of those tracks doing that extra bit of pitch correction on there just to give it you know just to iron things out even more the last effect that i added on here for each one of these tracks uh individually was a gate i did want to make sure that at no point in time did we hear anything ringing out that shouldn't be ringing out so like right here let's listen to this track without a gate on yet here i am still sounding like a pro so i'm not sure if you heard really closely there's like a little lip smack there's a i can hear the metronome clicking back there stuff that i don't want so the gate basically just says hey anything under a certain volume volume we're just going to you know basically turn the volume all the way down so we don't hear that at all so this should be nice and crisp now and sure enough i don't hear anything else in there so putting a gate on and make sure it's well adjusted to clean things up it keeps that computer noise away it keeps any excess of noise away and it's a really key part to making it sound like a clean crisp track we're almost done but one of the really important steps here is to take each one of our groups each one of our parts and to compress each one and then to add equalization to each one so let's listen to our main part all on its own it sounds pretty good we already know it sounds pretty good but by compressing it we're going to kind of even out the dynamic range so if i got too loud in some areas and you can even see this like maybe this note right here was really loud but this one was really quiet so what compression's going to do is it's going to kind of squash this one down a little bit more so it matches this one right it just kind of evens out the higher ones so for me what i like to do with a compressor is i like to put one maybe kind of quietly in front where it's kind of catching it's catching almost everything that happens so almost every note being sung will be hit by this first compressor i wrote this song but it's not a very strong compression it's a uh the ratio is only 1.7 um that can be considered strong if you're working with vocals but it's you know ultimately it's a pretty weak ratio and then i have another compressor after that much harsher much higher ratio there i wrote that catches the louder stuff and that way anything above that gets pushed down even more so that's what that sounds like with uh just compression i wrote this song now for eq i this is a very advanced topic but for me personally you know i think that everything should kind of live in its own eq space and it should sound good here i decided to actually carve out most of the most important frequencies in my voice which is like the 1k range because i've got so much going on here there's so many vocal singing um i thought this 1k range could be kind of you know better used for maybe one of the other parts but it sounds kind of funny on its own listen i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate here's the eq turned off i wrote this song back on i wrote this song so you can see it's like i've created more space in this middle zone here this is about 700 hertz to about uh thousand eleven hundred something like that um one thousand two thousand so it's there's a little pocket there and now i can kind of use that pocket to maybe fill in some of my other voices like here take a look at my middle ranged voice my middle range voice fits in there right well i i got rid of all the low stuff here why do i need low stuff in there well i really don't that's going to be for my base my base will live over here so this little area right here is where my middle voice lives i wrote this song just for you so i could demonstrate and it sounds kind of boxy right this isn't a great sounding thing all on its own i wrote this song but in combination with my first one i wrote this song just for you they kind of have their own little home there so i'm just gonna show you the eq curves that i made for each one of these and that way you can kind of you know see it on your own and make up your own judgments uh you know on why i may have used that eq curve and why it looks that way so my main one here was just that guy uh you can see i carved out a little bit of 1k my high one i didn't need much here i kept the 1k got rid of a lot of the low and even got rid of some of the high end because i seem to have this crackling hissing in my hyatt register i wrote this song just for you and i didn't want this stuff let's boost it so you can hear it i wrote this song like that was just too harsh for me so i brought that down a lot um to kind of clean that up my mid-range one like i said kind of lives in that 1k range and i left the high end and then you can guess for my bass look at my bass curve here really boosting the stuff at around 100 hertz [Music] and why is it at 100 hertz well i wrote this the e note that i'm singing is an 82 hertz so that lives right about here and i know that's the kind of stuff i wanted to be boosting is that so lots of boost in the bass area there and then carving things out for the rest of it that way this voice really is kind of surviving only on its base frequencies so this is great we've got our eq we've got our mix we've got our our pitch correction everything is good to go let's hit play and listen to what our glorious arrangement sounds like but i can't sing a note above f sharp or keep my voice from going out of tune perfect i love the way that sounds now you could leave it here you could say i'm done you love the way that crisp vocal sounds i personally was like imagining that really i don't know i always thought it was like annoying that high school musical glee kind of music and the big smiles and stuff like that and i imagine them in the gymnasium oh we're gonna bust out into song in the lunch which never happens so i put gymnasium reverb on there for my returns here i just threw a gymnasium and a vocal haul and a lot of these tracks i just cranked it up there just gave you know some reverb to some of those tracks some reverb to the other ones and adding reverb to it now take a listen adds another dimension there another note above that or keep my voice from going out of tune totally preference do you like it with the reverb so it sounds like you're in the lunchroom with them or do you like this chris you know depending on the production depending on what you're making and why you're making it one of these is the right answer and one of these is the wrong answer i personally liked it with the reverb so i kept it with the reverb and that literally concludes the production of this song from here i mean i did a little bit more right we added some snaps uh which was really easy snapping adding reverb i added a tambourine um i added an ooh a single ooh this guy right here it's not good heavily melodyned right to make that sound presentable after this it was just a matter of mastering it which i don't have much advice on i ran it through ozone and i mastered it but everything else was way more way more important getting this entire arrangement put together so i hope this really demonstrates to you all uh a little bit of information on how you can go about doing this yourself and more importantly giving you a better perspective on what is realistic these days what can you get away with as an amateur singer in your basement because like i said i mean if if i have access to this equipment then obviously the professionals do too and you're probably hearing it more than you might assume you're probably hearing uh heavily processed melodyne vocals uh a little bit more than you might assume it's like photoshop for your voice you know and uh use it when you can i think it's a great tool i love to use it it empowers me to use vocals for my own song it allows me to sing my own parts and not worry about it but also be aware that you know a lot of people could abuse this and make it uh make themselves appear much better than they really are for some reason so you know you take some and you lose some every bit of technology has a dark side to it i personally think this is awesome technology and i love using it and i recommend you use it too and that way you can get some vocals on your own song so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you learned something from this video if you did enjoy this video you can consider checking out my patreon page the only reason these lessons exist are because of wonderful people that have signed up for my patreon and donated to keep me making lessons so uh there are links below in the description if you don't want to do that though that's fine just leave a like or a comment or a subscribe all that kind of stuff really helps me out so thanks for watching and i will see you next

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 283,904

Rating: 4.9660015 out of 5

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: EC_Fvs3TEj4

Length: 28min 45sec (1725 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020