Hi, this is Ken from Home Brew Audio. Let's talk about an effect in Reaper called
ReaTune that you can use to create vocal harmonies. ReaTune is plugin effect that is part of Reaper
when you first install it, so you don't need to worry about downloading or installing anything. It was designed primarily, as described in
the Reaper manual, to help you correct the pitch on your recorded media items. This is commonly used with vocals, but it
can also be used for other things as well, such as tuning an instrument using the tuner
tab, like this. And for creating harmony tracks from one vocal
track, which is what I'll show you in this video. There are lots of ways to produce vocal harmonies,
the most obvious being to have the singers actually sing the harmony parts. The next most common method, which is what
I usually do, is to sing all the harmony parts myself. It's also possible to create harmonies though
using software. Some programs like Antares' Harmony Engine
and Vielklang Instant Harmony are devoted to vocal harmony, and some of those are demonstrated
in other videos. Those programs do a great job, but they can
be pretty expensive. So if you wanna use software to create harmonies
but don't have the budget for one of those dedicated programs, there are two ways to
do it in Reaper using Reaper's own plugins. One way is to use the ReaVoice effect. I did a video on that already. Today, we'll see how to do it using ReaTune. So let's start with a single vocal track with
some singing on it. So open up a track by double-clicking here. Click here to record and then you would click
down here to do some singing. When you're done, just hit the Stop button. What I'm gonna do is insert a track that I
sang earlier. If you too already have a vocal track, you
can just go to Insert Media File. Let's take a listen to this solo track. For if you shed your blood with me you are
my brother. And men in England now abed shall feel accursed
they were not here to fight with us, upon Saint Crispin's Day. On the recorded version of that song, there
are lots of harmonies. So I could put in another track and sing one
harmony, then put in another track and sing the other harmony, or get somebody else to
come in and help me, or I can use ReaTune. To do that, we're going to need a track for
the first harmony, so double-click here to create a second track. Now, we want to add ReaTune, so click on the
FX button on the second track. Make sure you click on Cockos, Reaper's parent
company, to see the Cockos plugins, and select ReaTune. Double-click and you'll be presented with
this. What we're gonna want first is correction. Down here, where it says Attack Time, change
that to, say, 20. Now, before we do anything else, click on
the X in the upper right corner to close the effects window. We're going to need to put a vocal track on
track two to create the harmony from. So just click on the media file in track one,
hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard, and drag the audio item down into track two. You just copied what was in track one to track
two. Now, go ahead and mute track one. Go to the start by clicking this Rewind button,
and now let's open up the effects window again. Now, let's go to Manual Correction and click
the Track Pitch box. Now, you wanna play through the track so that
you'll have the notes from the singing audio tracked into ReaTune. So click Play, and when that's done, come
over to the scroll bar on the right and drag that until you find your singing. Then use the scroll bar on the bottom to get
to the beginning part of the singing. And we're gonna wanna start obviously down
here. So let's zoom in vertically clicking on this
Plus button over here, and then we can zoom in horizontally by clicking on that Plus button. Now, what we wanna do is put a check mark
in Manual Correction and uncheck the Track Pitch box. Now, you can just draw a line, and what that
line will do is change the pitch of whatever notes occupy the same vertical space there
and it will raise them up. I just stuck that in. Let's see what it would sound like. For if you shed your blood with me. [chuckle] Obviously, that's wrong, but you
could hear how it changed the notes. Let's go a ahead and click on one of the little
handles on the line and hit the Delete button on your keyboard. I happened to know, for this song, that for
"if" the notes for the harmony should be "A". So I'm gonna draw a line right there and let's
see what that sounds like. Let's click here. For if you... Okay so "for if" is correct. Now, I put a line where "you" should be, and
I believe that should be a "G." Check it. For if you shed your... That is correct. "For if you" is correct. If it weren't, I could just drag this line
up. For if you shed... No, that's not right. And just keep dragging it until you find the
right notes. So you'll just continue in that fashion all
the way across the song, placing the blue lines where the harmony note should be, the
red lines representing the original melody. And keeping in mind that this is a free method
of doing this, the corrected note, the harmony notes, are gonna sound a little bit computery,
but here is what the first harmony sounds like. Shed your blood with me you are my brother. And men in England now a abed shall feel accursed
they were not here to fight with us, upon Saint Crispin's Day. So now that the first harmony is done, we're
gonna do the same thing for the second harmony. So let's create another track. Let's mute the second track, and let's drag
the melody down to... You can do it from either track. I'm just gonna do it from track one. Copy it down to the third track, so come up
here, hold the Ctrl button down to get the Plus sign, which means you're copying, and
drag that down to the third track and let go. Then add the ReaTune effect, go to Correction,
change this 250 to about 20, click on Manual Correction, click on Track Pitch, rewind to
the beginning, click Play. Now, scroll down and find the notes, zoom
in vertically, zoom in horizontally, and click on Manual Correction, unclick Track Pitch,
and start drawing in your notes. And we magically skip to the end where I have
drawn in all of the harmony parts here. This is for the high harmony. Now, let's go ahead and unmute the other tracks. And because the harmony doesn't come in until
"Shed your blood", I am going to trim the harmony tracks to eliminate the "For if you"
part, 'cause that's only the melody. And let's take a listen to how it sounds so
far. For if you shed your blood with me, you are
my brother. And men in England now abed shall feel accursed
they were not here to fight with us, upon Saint Crispin's Day. So it's actually pretty cool. It's still a little bit computery. So one thing we can do there to minimize that
is to turn down the volume on the harmony tracks. Let's turn those down by about three point
whatever, 3.4, whatever, and let's pan these about 60% left and 60% right, and take a listen
again. For if you shed your blood with me, you are
my brother. And men in England now abed shall feel accursed
they were not here to fight with us, upon Saint Crispin's Day. You can add reverb. You can try turning the harmonies down even
more. You can add some more harmonies. There are lots of other things you can do. But this is a quick demo of how to do three
part harmony using a free software addition to Reaper so you don't have to buy anything,
but Reaper. It already comes with it. It's called ReaTune.
