I Want To Produce Better Vocals (Warning: Contains Melodyne)

[Raddons]

Alright. I've been working on my songwriting for a while now, and that has really nothing to do with this except for the part about the vocals. I'm a god awful vocalist. But, thanks to technology, I'm not that god awful... Okay, I still am, but you know what I'm getting at.

I used Fruits of Her Labour to practice my vocal production today, but I would like some advice (apart from learn to sing better ). My main focus right now is tightening up the production of the vocals and making them sit well as compared to the singing itself.

Vocals Isolated:
http://soundcloud.com/zach-shore/fruits-of-her-labor-vocal-1/s-pFVwL

Vocals with the song:
http://soundcloud.com/zach-shore/fruits-of-her-labor-vocal/s-lRklS

Any help would be rad.

[Stu Beef]

Yo yo,

hit that sucker up with some compression. IMO for the kind of stuff you do you want the vocals to feel pretty tight. As far as getting them to sit well, usually if the rest of your tracks are mixed well with each other they'll leave a magical space for you to drop a nice lead melody on. If that's not enough for you, just make sure that any parts that serve as accompaniment yield the foreground to it in terms of EQ, and you can always throw on wacky effects and filters and see if it does something cool.

also, you should definitely find a way to record your guitar, that will totally help with your vocals, absolutely.


edit: someone with some real production chops should lay down the knowledge. I can't be very specific because I kind of suck!

[Freewave]

Here's a few good videos all about vocal mixing



There's also some great threads that have already been posted on the subject on mlr. do seek them out.

Now can I ask how you get that Jackle/ Glaze / H8Seed vocal effect on your vocals? No one has ever spelled that out and I've always been curious how to do that. I picked up Melodyne but that just allows you to alter the vocal pitches and doesn't inherently do that to voices.

[LFP]

Now can I ask how you get that Jackle/ Glaze / H8Seed vocal effect on your vocals? No one has ever spelled that out and I've always been curious how to do that. I picked up Melodyne but that just allows you to alter the vocal pitches and doesn't inherently do that to voices.

I'm quite certain that they are using a vocoder for that, more precisely Vocodex (which comes with fl signature bundle I believe?).
Glaze used bitspeek on his rainbow factory vocals but I don't think he uses it very often.
I don't know how to replicate the sound as I've pretty much never used Vocodex though

[Raddons]

Thanks for those links. I'm going to check them out right now.

And are you asking me specifically what I did? Glaze told me what he did in Beyond Her Garden, and I took some of that with me when I did this. Panned center was the main vocals, format raised slightly. I took the harmonies (which in this case were 2, mostly 5ths and doubling the root... hell I don't even remember) and left the format. I also panned those right and left slightly. I should have raised the main one an octave up and kept it pretty quiet in there. I think he did that for Beyond Her Garden. I did some pitch modulation and yeah. It was rushed, I could have done better with the pitch correction.

If you weren't asking what I did... well there you go anyway

edit: and soundgoodizer

I think other than that and some magic, Glaze goes his vocals just like that. I could be wrong. h8 might have a phaser or chorus or some other time based effect with his delay? I'm not too sure.

edit edit: Oh yeah. h8_seed is totally running a vocoder on Heartstrings.

[Freewave]

thx man that gives me some clues.

[Raddons]

Yup. If you ever find out any other techniques, be sure to let me know!