Vocal Tricks the PROS Use

there are so many things i wish i would have known about music production when i started that i know now that i look back and think man that would have made my life much easier and in today's video i'm going to share three vocal production tips i wish i would have known when i started what's up everybody it's nathan larson here back at you with another video for those of you who make music at home whether you're a producer an artist a songwriter composer if you write and record your own music at home this is the channel for you if that sounds like you at all uh subscribe to the channel the button's down there and in this video i'm gonna be sharing exactly what you would expect based on the title of this video which is three production tips vocal production tips that i wish i would have known when i started producing now the song i'm gonna be using to demonstrate this is all it's all in the same song so i used all three of these production tips in this one track and if you haven't watched last week's video it was the one mic challenge where i produce a track this track i'm going to be demonstrating with only one microphone so you should first of all go check that video out but before we do that a quick message from today's video sponsor this video is not sponsored shut the camera off since there's no sponsor for today's video i do want to just let you know that if you're a home studio producer wanting to take things to the next level as a producer you should check out my producer accelerator program down below it's in the description but let's jump into the daw and get started okay so we're in the dawn now and what we're gonna do is take a look at these three techniques so number one is what's called vocal throws now this is used all the time in really a very wide variety of genres there's really a lot of different ways you could use this i mean it's basically the same in all them but different genres you can kind of utilize it in different ways so what i'm gonna do is just show you a beginning part of this song that way you can have a little bit of context as far as how this fits in so here's the beginning of verse one [Music] i'm living in a fantasy [Music] okay so there was right there you can see it's called vocal throw on the word make believe you get this repetition of make-believe it's it's an effect or a production technique i guarantee you've heard before so this probably isn't new but whether or not you've heard it before versus being able to actually do it's two different things so we're going to build this from the starting point so what we want to do first of all is make sure that if you're going to do this you need to have space to do this so notice that when i say the word make believe all this space right in here right there's basically a bar that we have of space okay if this was straight into the vocal here this would not work because it would be too muddy and messy and it really wouldn't make a lot of sense okay but since there's a space here i'm gonna take the vocal throw off make believe there's nothing happening there so this is a great place to put a vocal throw so if you're want to know when should you use this that's kind of the main thing all right so let's do this and build it up so what we're going to need to do is first of all i'm gonna just duplicate this track so command d for those uh mac users i'm gonna cut just this little part out and i'm gonna copy it down so now we have this set here let's mute this vocal throw but if i were to play this right now so obviously that doesn't make any sense because really all this is doing is making it twice as loud that's not what we want the way i'm going to do this is by adding a delay to this so i'm just going to go ahead and use one in logic i'll use a tape delay the main thing is you don't want to use a stereo delay i suppose if you did yeah just don't use the stereo delay i'm going to set dry to zero so what that's going to do is make it so that when you actually have the audio playing here it you're not going to hear it it's only going to allow through the reverb what is the actual not the reverb the delay what is actually delayed okay now you need to make sure it's tempo synced i already know that this is a dotted quarter that we're going to be going for so you might need to figure out what that is in a lot of cases it's a half note or a whole note that you want to go with but you can kind of play around and make sure you're getting the right rhythm okay so here's what's going to sound like right now with basically nothing done to it other than what i just did [Music] so just that right there does the job in the sense of you you have the effect it's it's literally that simple however where you can take things kind of to the next level and make it sound a little bit more unique than just a delay is and the reason why i actually put this on a separate channel is because that way i can actually do other things to it so on the original one you can see here i have byte which is a native instruments uh distortion plug-in okay i'm gonna go ahead and go a little bit of a different route on this i'm gonna go ahead and jump into sound toys effect rack i'm gonna use uh one of my all-time favorite plugins i talked about it in my top 10 plugins video which you can check out down below uh and that is decapitator which is a distortion plug-in this is a really fun one to use so i'm gonna go ahead and throw the capital on here i'm gonna turn drive up to maybe six just kind of see how that sounds and then we'll go ahead and play this and see how it works so obviously it made it louder and you can obviously hear there's a little bit of a crunch to it i'm going to turn the brightness up see how that sounds i'm going to turn this down here [Music] that sounds good let's turn up the drive a little bit more [Music] nice i like that that's good so then the next thing we could maybe do just to give you guys some more ideas of things you can do you could put a different reverb on here if you want to sound a little more spacey the other thing that you could do is add um an eq i'll just use a channel eq just since you know if you're using logic you'll have access to this i might bump some of the highs here just to give it a little bit more and the next thing i might do is just take out pretty much everything below like you know here between 150 and 200. i can't believe so that's what that sounds like there i could also turn up maybe like the eq or not the eq the reverb here i can't believe it then we'll need to kind of turn that down all right so that is number one vocal throws so that moves us on to number two and i'm just going to show you this here to demonstrate what we're going to be listening for is these octave down moments so this region right here is where we're going to listen but we're going to kind of get into this a little bit i'm waiting here for you to find me i can't even believe what's happening to me is this all a dream one two three i'm counting i can't breathe i'm drowning [Music] and the good old system overload when everything comes in okay so i'm just going to sell this the lead vocal out with the octaves down just to show you what it is that we're listening for is this all a dream one two three i'm counting okay so you get the octave down that sounds a little bit like vocoder e we'll just call it so the first thing is you can of course get that octave down sound by literally just performing it down the octave which i actually do in the song a little bit later but in this particular case i wanted a little bit more of that effect that you get which is actually formant shifting so i'm going to just build this up from scratch again it's very simple to do to get this effect so i'm just going to cop copy again create two i'm going to call this octave low right octave low left we're gonna do one on the left one on the right pan them hard i've already got this cut we're gonna do option click option click drag and i'm gonna go ahead and just uh mute these ones here now if we were just to play this is this that obviously sounds terrible because we're gonna we have phasing problems okay so what we need to do is there's really a couple different ways of doing it in logic and well in any daw it doesn't matter what daw you're using but what i'm gonna do is go ahead and use flex pitch i've already got it turned on over here and i'm going to select everything command a bring it down an octave now the problem again here is that if i were to play this those octaves down are just going to have phasing problems as well it's going to sound twice as loud a dream it's you don't even hear the panning because it's literally the exact same thing okay so the way that you get around this command a and grabbing the formants and then we can do format shifting up a little bit go to this one and just that alone will make it different is this all a dream okay but we're gonna go to the other one and let's just drag that one down okay there's that now we're obviously going to turn this way down because we don't want it to be overpowering now we have two unique vocals by doing that now if you don't want to use flex pitch that's okay you can use just about any uh vocal or pitch correction software you know you could use melodyne you could use um waves tune or you could go into pitch here go to vocal transformer and then you can actually take the pitch drop it by 12 tones which would be an octave and then you can do the formant shifting right in here for some of you guys maybe you'd want to do that i'm just i'm used to doing flex pitch but the effect is going to be exactly the same you can kind of get different types of sounds with this as well and now it's going to sound like this is this all a dream and of course i need to kind of balance that and everything is this all a dream one two three i'm counting i can't breathe i'm drowning am i alive am i dreaming again so there you go um now just in case people are wondering this is not the mixed session that i'm in this is the production session that i'm in i'm mixing a separate one so that is number two using formant shifting to get different octaves you can actually do this octave up as well it doesn't matter but any case you want to have different you know octave down octave up or you could go and start re-pitching things to make harmonies and things like that you could do that as well just gonna take a little bit more work and that brings us to number three okay so number three is one of my all-time favorites i love using this effect and when i learned it it was like come again and that is using reversed vocals now it's not just reversed vocals because just reversed vocals sounds really weird very weirdly see what i mean but what we're gonna do is get this effect we're gonna get this effect coming in here okay but here is the actual effect that we're going for [Applause] so dope i love it okay so i actually don't remember how i specifically got this one so we're gonna do it from scratch okay so what we're gonna do is first of all find a vocal part that would work for this so let me just walk you through the concept first and then i'll actually do it so what you're gonna do is you're gonna find a vocal that pitch-wise works for what it is so obviously if i'm using a section of a vocal that is in the wrong pitch as what i need to be this transitional moment that's not going to work or you could just re-pitch it and make it work i suppose but basically what you're going to do is you're going to take a vocal that's going to work for that pitch that you're going for take a snippet of it put a literal crap ton of reverb on it with a really really really really really long reverb then you're going to bounce that down to audio and you're going to reverse that audio to then make what we just heard let's do it okay the very first thing we got to do is find some audio so let's uh let's find some audio here i'm lost i'm searching all around i think i used something higher you know i have to like use you know what i think i might have used this ad lib part here yeah let's just use that i actually don't know if that's what i use but we're going to go ahead and use that okay so then what we're going to do is create let's just duplicate this for the time being let's go ahead and create that okay i already have a pretty long reverb on here but what i want to do is make this so this is a 2.3 second plate let's see what happens if i turn the wetness way up that kind of works that that works kind of well i i think it needs to be just a longer reverb so let's just do a different reverb so just to kind of stick with some of the basic plugins i'm not going to use any third-party stuff right now let's just use chroma verb built into logic we'll just go ahead and find a concert hall and let's just make the delay crazy long let's see how this sounds it's pretty bright let's see if we can kind of bring down some of those highs let's make the delay a little longer and turn wetness up sure let's just let's just do that just to kind of make something work of course we could we could get a lot more detail here you know one of the things i might do is actually turn replica up this is an amazing delay plug-in also one that i've talked about before in my ten top plugins yeah boy i like that okay cool so what we're gonna then do is bounce this down to audio so in logic ctrl command b and then we're going to do reversed vox okay so now that we got that reversed you can see what this actually looks like okay and not reverse when now that we have it bounced now and you can see what this looks like okay so obviously it's gonna be exactly what i just showed you but now that reverb has been printed on in other words that reverb is just a part of the audio there's no getting rid of it there's no getting rid of anything that's in here okay so now what we need to do is reverse it pretty simple but we're gonna it's not just a matter of reversing it because if we just reverse this let's just kind of take that much there if we go up here into region drop down to more boom reverse there we go we've just reversed it this is going to sound kind of weird yeah so obviously that does not work so what we're going to do is just use kind of the tail end of this or what's now the beginning of it let's do like that just that much okay and then we can now pull it and put it here now the idea is that this is this is really great for transitional stuff so we're gonna now see how this works in the context of the mix that's what i'm talking about now the cool thing about this this trick this specific trick is that you can use it for more than vocals you can use it on guitars you can use it on keyboards you can use on all sorts of different elements this is oftentimes used in intros actually to kind of like or like pre-intros i don't know like moments to kind of get you into something i use this a lot of times in transitions you can use it to get into new moments it's a really useful tool when you know you just need something there to help transition you from point a to point b but you're just not quite sure it is sometimes you just got to do this just do it reversed vocal if you like this video then you need to make sure you subscribe down below it would mean the world to me and it's 100 free to do also leave me a comment down below i would love to hear which of these vocal techniques you found the most helpful and make sure you check out this video right here it was from last week and it is a full breakdown of this song that you just saw with these vocal tricks we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 167,112

Rating: 4.9354138 out of 5

Keywords: 3 vocal tips i wish i knew when i started, vocal production tips, vocal production hacks, how to produce vocals, produce vocals in logic pro x, produce vocals in logic pro, nathan larsen, vocal tips, vocal production tutorial, produce better vocals, how to produce better vocals, three vocal production tips, 3 vocal production tips, production tips, music production tips, music production tutorial, how to record vocals, recording vocals, record better vocals, vocal production

Id: g7NQHiLyL68

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020