Huge 12 Voice Auto-Tune Choir Session (feat. Vocodist)

hey there do you know what part and process of music production i dislike the most take a wild guess considering that like 90 of my released music is instrumental that's right i kind of hate singing the main reason i kind of hate singing is because i want a voice that sounds like this or like this but despite my rather deep raspy sounding talking voice my range and singing voice that i was born with is a lot more like this or this and that just doesn't fit with my music too well at all so when i do sing it's soft and vague and usually shrouded behind effects another reason why i typically make instrumental music more personally as a musician my entire life i really do feel like language and words reduce expression or communication in such a broad and specific way compared to harmony or melody and unless you have some seriously good metaphorical poetry skills lyrics kind of robbed the listener of using their own imagination when feeling a song by the way i do realize that my personal opinion on this matter is in the strong minority and 20-plus years of lackluster record sales compared to musicians who sing never ceases to remind me of that but anyway that's a topic for maybe another video at another time because today i am going to be singing i'm going to be singing really hard and singing a whole lot i'm going to be taking a melody and some lyrics that i wrote like 15 years ago and turning them into an auto-tune choir and then i'm going to turn each track into a vocoder and then make a crazy sloppy sounding polyphonic synth without ever having to touch a keyboard and i'm going to do it all with the auto-tune unlimited bundle from antares not the star the software company the funny thing is that when i initially wrote these lyrics and this melody in 2007 it was intended for me to be singing it as a choir or even an auto-tune choir but anytime i tried recording it i just never really liked the way it sounded and it actually ended up as a song called goodbye bastion on a record i released a couple years ago piety of ashes and you can hear it as a brass ensemble there so i'm going to be re-recording this song the way it was initially intended to be a big ass auto-tune choir and if you're wondering if the timing of this video is a result of my twitter drama regarding rick beato's video it kind of is because a lot of people literally think that autotune can make anyone bleed into a microphone and just become a pop icon and that is simply not true you're going to see me produce something that was the result of literally hundreds of takes and about 20 hours of transposing and editing and i promise you it won't sound anywhere near as good as imogen heaps hide and seek because she is an incredibly talented vocalist and vocal writer and i am a jackass it also won't sound as good as t-pain or post-malone or a lot of auto-tune-using artists because they're actually good singers with great vocal rhythm and i'm not this also gives me the opportunity to check out a pretty rad looking fully featured vocoder that is now included in the auto-tune unlimited bundle so let's briefly play around with some of that stuff so let's just jump in and start with something that's super fun this is auto-tune efx plus it's kind of like a multi-effects also pitch correction module that does a whole lot of different things has like a tube amp a duet a filter all in the one preset that i'm using here that you'll hear in a moment i'm going to enable a little bit of reverb and then i'm going to freestyle over a loop that is in c minor and obviously i'm going to be bound into c minor so let's get that rolling so this is the c minor scale [Music] i'm going to enable a couple different notes um like f [Music] f sharp would be good maybe i'll do that on and off and then also b [Music] that could be nice i'm surprised that my range is actually getting anywhere near this all right let's just do this here [Music] all right that d works [Music] and then we'll maybe enable that f i'm making these videos all the time now it's already past midnight i sometimes drink too much whiskey but that's when singing feels right i am always [Music] in all seriousness that was quite easier than i imagined i don't really know how it sounded on your end and hopefully it's not too embarrassing but what it was was a lot of fun so that's worth something let's play with some more of these presets is there a such thing as a plug-in or synthesizer that doesn't have richer divine presets on it another thing to note is that we have this xy pad here in case we want to actually edit our performances in real time wow so this is my throat length and ah this is my pitch ring modulator disabling mutate and then bringing my throat length back to its original organic value and my pitch to its normal value of course we still are being auto-tuned i'm going to go over to automotion here and i am going to play a pattern which will basically trigger an arpeggiator or pattern that will control the pitch of the auto tuning on my voice so i'm just going to keep one tone straight and i'll show you how this works [Music] and i could choose different patterns pentatonic major maybe turn up some reverb here a little bit just a little just a little bit of reverb maybe turn this on toggle so i don't have to hold the button down it's fine to see major gonna put on a blazer and shoot you in the eye with the laser [Music] you're gonna have to have a fundraiser for a medical appraiser [Music] all right so let's look at some other stuff auto-tune pro is probably the most commonly used thing in the auto-tune suite and it's probably the most featured pitch correction software in the world i would assume i have loaded up auto-key here and what auto-key can do is sense which key you're singing in and then send it to auto tune which might save you a little bit of time if you don't actually know what key you're singing in i'm going to try and sing something in c major c major not bad i got it okay so now auto-tune should be locked in c major do re mi fa so la ti do if you're not familiar with how auto-tune works if you don't want it to sound like auto-tune as much you could turn your retune speed down which gives it a little bit of time before it automatically shifts you into whatever scale that you want to be shifted into also humanize helps with that flex tune helps with that and natural vibrato also helps with that and these are all still in the sort of simple controls there's an advanced menu which we'll get to in a moment i'm in c major [Music] i'm gonna try and sing it a little bit more off pitch i am in c major oh that sounds nauseating okay so if we wanted to get more everyday useful and professional with this uh one thing that we could do is click graph which basically allows us to automate pitch and automation of certain events and it kind of behaves like melodyne would behave i would like to play with that a little bit more maybe in a stream someday but it is actually really deep and powerful and for the purpose of this video being less than six hours long we're just going to go back into auto here but we are going to click on the advanced menu because you also have the option of using midi in to essentially write your own piano roll to guide the pitch however you like and so in fl studio here i'm just going to choose a midi out i'm going to go to port i don't know 35 i'm going to go input port 35 on auto tune so i could learn a scale all right so by selecting target notes what i play on the keyboard will be what autotune pro automatically maps my voice to [Music] pretty cool okay so i have this setup to whatever i play on the electric piano here will also be automatically locked in on the auto tunes target notes and i've turned the flex tune and human eyes all the way down so that part is i guess more obvious for you to hear and here we go let's try doing this with [Music] some more advanced chords or maybe just ac7 [Music] this in an actual session [Music] with a piano roll would be very valuable [Music] so i believe the point of auto-tune artist is to operate at a extremely low latency and let's see that is a incredibly low latency it's almost unnoticeably low and it is working right yeah geez it looks like auto-tune artist has everything that pro has including the target notes and learn scale and all that stuff it just doesn't have that graph editor to my knowledge but it seems like everything else is still there so that's actually really handy aspire here is a noise reduction or noise creating uh plug-in and it's pretty handy i would say i typically just try to eq noise or use mics that aren't that noisy so i don't really have that much content that i could really put to good use with this now the choir plug-in i really do like we could increase things to four voices eight voices sixteen voices or thirty two voices and we could humanize and kind of randomize the pitch and timing and if you slam some of that through some reverb you get and so much like choir we also have duo which only gives you an extra one of you but this basically tries to emulate vocal doubling without you actually having to record the entire take again and so i can uh adjust the pitch variation the timing variation the vocal timbre and the vibrato and bring the level up on my double and maybe pan these a little bit closer and now i have a double mutator is just kind of a fun special effects type thing where you could move your pitch and your throat length and your throat with the throat width thing kind of sounds like the stereotypical california skateboarding guy awesome i just face planted trying to pop shove it over your mom's penny bush dude anyway we have a new type which uh kind of just does this and then we have an alien on yeah this is that oops it seems like alien ice just reverses your dialogue serbian neighbors serbian neighbors so punch from my understanding is kind of an extreme compressor so for example if i were to say something really quiet if you look at the output here it should be pretty much similar to if i said something really loud now cybill is a really good de-esser and i'm using a lawton audio ls208 which is very good at de-essing just as a hardware microphone so it's probably not the best example but i could try and speak in as many s's as possible and then turn on psi bill and you get to see how that kind of takes the s's out of my voice not bad so throat is pretty interesting as it says right here it is a physical modeling voice designer and i can turn my source throat precision all the way up and my voice is pretty loud and i'm going to add a little bit of breathiness i can change the pitch a little bit where this gets really interesting is that i could change the width of my throat and also the length of my throat so i could sound a little bit more of a masculine timbre and then if i pitched my voice down a little bit it would sound you know pretty deep and manly so why don't you meet me down by the construction site or alternatively i could pitch it up a little bit turn my length a little bit lower and now i sound more feminine probably or so if you want to meet me by the construction site i also work on the construction site you probably expected me to invite you to uh ballet or something but that's only in your sexist mind just sort of acts as a way to dial it in let's move on so warm is a plug-in that acts as kind of an overdrive plug-in or a even a distortion plug-in if you enable crunch here nothing too crazy so mic mod is pretty interesting unfortunately sitting here right now i can't really do a demo and i also don't really know these mic models enough to tell you how close it sounds but the idea of it is that if i wanted to speak to you into my rode nt1 and have it sound like a uh sm57 uh i could do that you also set the proximity so this is like what 3.5 inches from my face and i want the proximity of a faraway sm57 on a stage maybe add a little bit of saturation i suppose that me hearing my voice right now it does sound a bit more like an sm57 or a dynamic microphone rather than a very airy condenser microphone like the rode nt1 and i do own both of those microphones all right so harmony engine i actually used a little bit when it first came out and it is a pretty amazing plug-in for automatically harmonizing your vocals so by default here you have a scale interval and so we could have a c major and this is how it sounds we also have a choir down here that we could bring up to 16 voices you could also just pick like a c minor seventh and have it go to town with different inversions of that chord but what is actually a lot more powerful is just using chord via midi like we did a little bit earlier with a different one and i can also enable the choir at the end of this uh maybe not that extreme and let's try that i mean let's just max this out and i'll put autotune artist in front of all this so i don't sing too far out of key and we can also have that set up with targeted notes with the same port as the harmony engine and let's just see if this all works together to summarize are using auto-tune artist we're using harmony engine we're using choir and then i'm going to throw a little bit of reverb on the end of that all right see my home [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i'm now realizing that i had this set to soprano the entire time so given that it actually performed really amazingly let's just go with like a c major here and then only control the midi of the harmony engine [Music] that's why i set it up the right [Music] we will use this harmony engine again later in this video let's check out vocodeist good morning uh i'm gonna be using someone else's voice [Music] i'm just gonna do a bit of midi recording here [Music] and [Music] actually it's not the singer's fault it's the editor's fault whoever added these samples did kind of a not great job with the timing and stuff all right why are we here all right so let's have a look at the newest offering from antares the auto-tune vocodist and we have our normal input type soprano alto tenor scale stuff like that up here this is the filter section which has different models of classic vocoders i believe some of these i don't really recognize but you know i don't really memorize vocoders all day um there is a limit to 24 bands which i could see some people being like only 24 bands fl studios vocodex has like 128 well when you get up to 128 bands not only are you using an insane amount of processor power it's almost operating more as a spectral processor rather than simply a vocoder you shouldn't really need more than 24 bands for vocoding if you want a vocoder sound now that being said i have used fl studios vocodex a whole lot but it is worth mentioning that if you want to use it as a vocoder for your lead vocals in a song or a vocoding sample or something like that it is a giant abyss where your time will go into because of its flexibility and power and it also has a pretty high learning curve another big difference is that what we're looking at here is everything in one page you have your oscillators here you have a compressor here it auto tunes your input voice and then it even follows the voice that you're singing in so you don't actually have to map a midi device into it or have a carrier and modulator input like you classically would with most vocoders so here let's just listen to show you what i'm talking about [Music] i can disable one of these oscillators and i could change the shape until like more of a pulse width and this is the interval down here is your like fft envelope if your attack and release is all the way down you're gonna probably be able to hear the words the easiest now if your attack and release it really high it'll probably sound more just like a synth [Music] a smear kind of smears it it kind of makes it sound looser bandshift will just make it sound like a higher or lower formant [Music] also when using a vocoder if you want your words to be understandable uh having a noise signal is pretty important [Music] over here we have like an amplitude voice envelope we have stereo spread warmth just basic output effects and then we could also bring in the voice mix and add some chorus high pass filter mod i think is like a yeah ring modulator i might add a little bit more compression here and then just lower the overall signal [Music] all right so i've opened up a little midi out module here and assigned it to port 35 out for just the reason of a random number port 35 in on here i think any sort of vst will work with this type of setup depending on your daw but now with this little keyboard here enabled i should be able to just play the keyboard and it will control the oscillator here so let's hear that [Music] there you go all right i've pumped this up quite a bit let's hear it from the top [Music] an interesting use case might be if you turned the vocodes plugin down maybe to 40 and then put some reverb on top of everything and had this nice sort of odd harmonization happening with the original voice signal let's hear that [Music] there's an xy pad if you want to map that to a midi controller i don't really mess with those all that often but i also don't really have a midi controller that well i do but i just don't use it i should point out that everything that we've done so far is not actually using an external carrier signal it's using the oscillator in here the actual way that we would use a vocoder in most setups is we would have a separate synth behave as the carrier and so to do this i'm going to create a voice and a carrier and the voice obviously i will route all of my vocal channels to voice and then carrier i'll just have the electric piano in that one and i will route both of these to the output channel of this plug-in this probably seems like complicated if you're not used to this type of thing but this is pretty much how all plugins with inputs and outputs work all right so then over here in processing the closest one and the farthest one so one and two and we'll probably have to adjust some levels here but let's hear it i'm going to make these cords a little bit higher [Music] so if i open up like the most basic synth that you can have in fl studio the three time osc uh i'm gonna just copy and paste the midi data from pianotech over to this all right so i'm gonna level everything else down and i'm gonna blast it with one nice saw wave with any sort of envelopes turned off and so let's try that when we start changing up the carrier signals it is inevitable that things are going to start sounding muddy or off and that's why we have so much control right here like we could find those audio pane points and we could maximize the points that sound pleasant to us by the way in my opinion vocoders work amazingly with ping pong delay just a little bit of it alright i jotted in an absolute minimum baseline all right and finally let's slam this entire thing through a compressor and mute my stupid voice and have a listen [Music] again [Music] [Music] ah [Music] this one's actually using like vocoding from a reactor patch that i made [Music] so i took the liberty of scratching down the lead melody and while i've already harmonized it in that goodbye bastion song uh i guess we could see if there's some other ways that we might want to harmonize it for this maybe at the end of that i don't know i guess if i were to play it like a pseudo mozart piece i always have to make this claw so i avoid playing any nines or weapons or anything [Music] all right let's butter that up all right let's make this sound a little bit more from the heart [Music] do [Music] [Music] oh i can't believe i'm doing this on camera all right yeah that's gonna suck [Music] i would fly man i can't get the timing right on that would fly from no it is da i don't have enough air the arm thing how it works it is dark out here it is [Music] if i could fly i would fly from here [Music] this is actually a feature that most people don't realize when i was recording i kept going back on the timeline while it was recording without stopping and re-recording and fl recorded and put a marker for all of those song jumps so i don't actually have to realign anything which is really handy not that close buddy it's not going to happen that low f is not going to happen maybe with auto tune it will do if there's anything that is my musical kryptonite it is this r20 coming in [Music] bar 20 coming in bar 20 coming in bar 20 coming in oh come on man so close so close bar 20 coming in bar 20 coming in oh ben why would you do this to yourself you dumb idiot i totally forgot about that offbeat that one a starting at starting at bar 18. go i hit c6 starting from 18 again you and your rhythm ben really [Music] the done one that i could get through up to five bars okay man i literally feel like i'm going to pass out that was rough [Music] all right now we get into the hardcore harmonizations the tuba's gonna be the hard one because i had to reach areas that are way lower than i'm comfortable with but i guess we'll see and i'm going to open up autotune pro because i think that might allow me to do some interesting things with those target notes god that sounds so weird my voice at that timber is that actually correcting there or is that just my actual terrible low g now we're good [Music] from here [Music] kind of crazy to like see my little harmonic vision actually if i was doubting myself the entire time i was seeing it i was like this i don't know what i'm doing and then now it's actually kind of making sense [Music] yes so this kind of goes to prove that if you don't know anything about melody you're gonna have a really hard time with something like this unless you just leave it on the auto mode but then you're not gonna be able to get like the specifics of what's happening here and i don't mean that in like a gatekeeping way but it i do mean that in the maybe auto tune isn't such a cheat as some other youtubers like to go on about this needs so much work with the timing everything's off by like bars and places i think we are in pretty good shape here and that's saying a lot considering how much i hate recording vocals and my voice in general one thing that i want to tackle though is in my lead vocal my vibrato is wide enough to where it is triggering other notes in the auto-tune spectrum so if i go full-on auto-tune well let me start from the beginning here first of all if we disable auto-tune it is dark out here it is [Music] the vibrato in the word dark is getting out of hand far enough to where it's triggering other notes especially if i bring the retune speed all the way to zero like straight up pop music style flex tune all the way down to zero um natural vibrato to zero humanized to zero let's hear that it is dark out here it is dark out here yeah so it's it's kind of sounding a little i don't know goofy so i'm going to enable the ignores vibrato targeting thing in the automation right here okay then it gets a little goofy in in my loan so we'll disable it there out here [Music] so what this does is if i have some sort of inflection with my voice if i were like [Music] like that it would kind of allow that to exist on its own rather than trying to correct that exact part of the the singing so like let's hear this part over here i think i i think i do a little bit of these inflections over here from here okay so uh i'm gonna enable it over here and let's hear how that changes from here yeah see that here which i don't want i'm happy with this if i could fly i would fly from here that actually sounds really good and i feel like my pitch was pretty decent in that recording after the 100th take so it's kind of hard to tell how much it's affecting but it is funny because there is that one part where my body voice turns into my falsetto voice i was like that and like that actually sounds auto-tuned because it's just sort of skipping pitch really fast i think i'm okay with this actually i don't think i would ever release it but i think with you knowing the humility that i feel doing this in the first place i feel a little bit better about it like if it was just up on spotify or something i'd be like oh hell no i kind of want this to just sound like a clock if that makes any sense but let's hear the whole thing now it is dark out here it is [Music] if i could fly i would fly from here it is dark out here it [Music] could is [Music] i would fly from here [Music] it is dark out here it [Music] if i is fly from you [Music] oh [Music] that kind of turned out not as terrible as i thought it would just considering how scared i was to use my voice in any degree this seriously or this up front cool guess i'm gonna hit render [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] no [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] so how'd i do to be honest i'm kind of amazed by how efficiently it all ran simply because i had so many instances running at once of multiple variants of the auto-tuned vst plug-in as well as the harmonizer and vocoder and duet and in this process nothing crashed either so back in the day i bought and would use melodyne pro for this type of stuff but it felt like over the years nothing was getting really meaningfully updated and the ui is just a bit clunky and unpleasant for me so then more recently i'd use whatever native daw pitch correction stuff i had and then pitch map from synaptic which is really good but also really resource intensive and crashy in fact at least with fl studio and reaper pitch map would add a huge amount of latency to my overall session so i'd have to bounce things constantly for any pitch correction stuff to work now that i've actually used the midi integration in auto tune pro it kind of does the job of pitch map and melodyne but it does it with a lot of stability and efficiency so i'm probably going to be using that exclusively for the foreseeable future for all my pitch correction needs all these different plugins are available in the auto tune unlimited subscription which is 1874 per month if you pay yearly or 25 bucks per month if you pay monthly vocodeist is exclusively part of that subscription whereas you could buy various versions of autotune and other plugins as a permanent license if you wish a lot of people complain about subscription model pricing and i'm not really sure where i sit on that yet for like a tower defense game on my phone that will never get updated yeah absolutely not but when you get into the world of professional audio and professional video production you're often talking about tens of thousands of dollars of software licenses on a single user's computer and a lot of it isn't even being used that often so if you were to just pay upfront for every single license in the auto tune bundle it would pay for itself after like seven years assuming that you use this stuff at least once a month and that you have absolutely no interest in any new offerings from the company i actually do personally understand and feel how subscription models initially seem like an uncomfortable transition but when you do the math i can't really agree with the people who are like subscription models nope no way it's dead to me i'll never use look at or think about that product ever again anyway i'm gonna try and talk and terry's into giving me some extended trials or something for my patreon and discord members or stream viewers which brings me to if you learned anything today or if you like this video subscribe to my channel click that little notification bell down there if there's anything you want me to cover in the future let me know in the comments if you want access to a huge discord community with everything from music making sessions to game servers and if you want access to audio assets and unreleased music that you hear on this channel and unreleased music 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Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 13,995

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Id: cERffdD-2Rg

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021