REAPER: Generate Backing Vocals from a single vocal recording

[Music] hello fellow reaper Ickes and welcome to the weekly tutorial today we're going to look at generating backing vocals from a single vocal recording using standard stock reaper plugins so i've got a recording here and in my chorus I've just got a single vocal and I'd quite like to generate some backing vocals I didn't record them the time I can't get the vocalist back in so I'm going to generate them myself so let's have a listen to what the track sounds like at the moment [Music] okay so to start off with I'm going to do a simple trick to simulate a male vocal and another female vocal by using a pitch shifter to create a an octave down and an octave up so I'll go into that track go into the effects and if you look in pitch correction there's a VST called reap itch which I'll put on the track and you may notice I've got a compressor and EQ already on the vocal I'm gonna put the pitch shifter in the middle the reason being is that the compressor will create a good signal level going into this pitch shifter and I don't really want to do any EQ until after I've gone through this process of pitch shifting so generally speaking the pitch shifter is for changing the pitch of an existing vocal so it's set up to just have the fully wet signal and none of the original signal in there because I want to generate this in addition to my original vocal and then I put the dry signal up to zero DB and so I've now got the octaves and the original vocal together so let's start off by doing an octave below to simulate a male vocal I'm just going to solo this is now so you can hear it on its own I'm gonna go down 12 semitones which is an octave on the pitch shift let's have a listen [Music] it doesn't sound quite right there's something artificial about the voice and that's because when you change a voice you need to change the formants or the resonant frequencies and the voice to compensate so we've gone down 12 semitones let's shift the formant up 12 semitones listen [Music] [Applause] it's a bit better but still a little artificial to my ears so you play around with this a bit I tried a few options and came up with seven semitones that's the best shift for the foreman and that sounds like this that Tamiya sounds a bit more like a human being singing so let's mix that in with the original have a listen so I think they blend together quite well so I'm gonna do another pitch shift I'm gonna put it up an octave in addition to the two I've got to simulate another female vocalist a very high-pitched singer so I'm going to add another shifter gonna solo it for now and put it up twelve semitones that's what the formant pattern 0 if we don't change the form and have a listen it sounds very artificial and like a sort of kid's toy so I need to do the opposite up 12 semitones on the shift down 12 semitones on the form and shift how I listen again [Music] it's very high but it sounds a bit Diana Ross and The Supremes to my ears and mixed in with the other vocals I think it'll give a nice sheen on the top end so let's mix all three together with the music [Music] [Music] so I think that blends in quite well if you think that the relative vocals are a bit loud you can change the volumes of each pitch shifter down at the bottom here I quite like the volumes they are at the moment and you can also create a stereo spread which is good for creating again the illusion that there are vocalists to spread around the stereo stage so we could move the male vocal halfway to the left we could move the female vocal halfway to the right just so that have a listen [Music] [Music] and I prefer that that sounds like there's three vocalists of spread around the stage which sounds much nicer to my ears now let's look at another way of generating backing vocals instead of just pure octaves up and down often you want to generate harmonies and I'll show you a way of doing this let's start off by switching off temporarily the octaves so we can start with the basic vocal again so now we're back to the original [Music] so now I want to generate harmony and the easiest way of doing this is creating a duplicate track from this which will then use a pitch up MIDI controlled pitch shifter to generate the harmonies as we go through this gives us a lot of flexibility as you'll see so I'm going to take the original vocal and hit the to duplicate it and let's call this harmony box and what I'm going to do is remove the re pitch so let's remove that and I got to add in a new plug-in here if I go into the tools there's a plug-in called reavoice and just like with miry pitch I'm going to put it in between the compressor and EQ so it gets a good strong signal and doing the pitch changes so let me just explain how this works it basically allows you to generate a number of voices I'm just going to go for one voice in this example just to give you the introduction and the key things are it let me just go the gain of the voice is how loud it is in the mix so let's put it at parity with the original and then it needs a MIDI input and the MIDI note here c4 is the relative change you want in the voice so if you play C on the MIDI input all the way through the voice won't change if you play D the whole way through everything would be put up a major second I think it'll become clearer as we go through the example so without a MIDI input nothing happens so if I solo this channel and play it you hear silence because it needs a MIDI input for you to actually able to hear the vocal so let's add another channel and we'll call this one harmony control this is our MIDI channel and we'll just create a MIDI input for this so let's edit this so if only just right so here's c4 in the middle if I just draw a note all the way through so now we should be able to hear it now why can't we hear it because I haven't connected the MIDI input to that particular vocal Channel so I've got MIDI here on its own and I've got the vocal and some but they're not connected so if I take the sends and receives and drag to the harmony vocal and you see MIDI all is being sent to MIDI all on the other channel now if I play it right we've got the vocal place and time rising so even just playing the scene mode which doesn't know pitch changes you can use it as a midi gate to decide when the vocal plays and when it doesn't so let me just show you that let me shorten this just to do the first phrase so again when I play you'll hear just rising high and then nothing else so we just wanted to play the rising high parts of the vocal I could just copy that over to the relative sections I'm interested in let's just do the four phrases last one okay so now we've just got those four phrases playing us let's play it through listen so you've heard the middle quark swallow PBV things around and I've got it on the right note [Music] okay so there's no harmonies yet we're just doing the original notes so now we can move these MIDI notes around and get a harmony so standard sort of harmony is to do things like thirds so if I move all of these notes and set them all and I move them all down a third now let's have a listen [Music] so it's moved it down Arthur let's play it with the original part so straight away you notice something that doesn't sound right because harmonies aren't fixed harmonies tend to move from the major third to the minor third in between so I moved down a major third from C down to a flat but minor third is a we might have to move the notes around a little bit so let me give you an example of that let's zoom in a bit on these notes so you can see clearly what I'm doing so let's put the first notes added right so let's just leave that as it is and then let's go let's make the second note the minor third instead of the major third down and let's have a listen perfect so let's do that on the rest and see if that works it might not always work not to do some tweaks here so minor third minor third for the second two notes in that phrase and minor third for the last you nation that phrase that's ever listened to the whole of that section [Music] floating can you feel alright rising [Music] above all space and time okay that last one didn't sound quite right I've also noticed a timing slightly out I could always go back and tweak that later the second note starts a bit earlier so let's put it back down to the major third here there's no listen to that last one that sounds good so let's just sort out these where these no changes they're a little bit earlier okay so now we've got our third harmony let's switch everything back on and see how it sounds let's come out of here let's go back to the first vocal where we added the the upper octave and the lower octave and put that in so now we have the original vocal an octave down to simulate a male voice the octave up to simulate a high female voice and a harmony part just to add more flavour to it so let's listen to the whole thing with the music [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so that's it I hope you've enjoyed this week's tutorial I'll be back at the same time next week if you liked it don't forget to subscribe below and I'll see you next Saturday bye for now [Music]

Channel: SoWhat!YouReap

Views: 2,171

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: reaper, tutorial

Id: iBVfpmC91Ug

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018