Vocal tuning and why it’s important | Flex Time

Pro Production Masterclass | Logic Pro X | Julian Hinton (Stormzy, Rod Stewart, Seal, The RPO, Laura Welsh, Trevor Horn, Don Black...)

When you present a a less than polished vocal, it has the potential to stand out, not sound quite as professional. That’s the place we’ve got to. I should also point out that the timing is really, really important as well. and often when people say, talk about tuning a vocal in the professional world, the timing of that vocal nudging different phrases and words,  you know, around on, on, on the grid in logical pro tools or whatever it is to sit in with the instruments and sit in with the track, is actually, in my personal opinion, more important than the tuning.

We can sort of cope with a little bit of tuning  discrepancies here and there,  but, the timing thing, that’s the thing that makes everything so solid.  So  I was thinking earlier and I was thinking, why would you try to tune or time a vocal?

And just to reiterate, we, we live in an age where commercially most of what you hear is timed and tuned.  And that’s become a sonic identity,  really. And what you are hearing is the most sort of perfect performance. in fact, I noticed the other day when I was working with a singer who was a lot younger, you know, we’re talking 19 years old. he had a thing in his voice, because he’d been listening to  so much pop, you know, and he was basing his stylistic vocal on pop.

He had moments where his voice sounded like it had been tuned. And when I was going through and timing and tuning his vocal after the recording, there was a couple of bits I didn’t actually do anything to whatsoever. In fact, what I was trying to do, make him sound less tuned,  I was using the tuning software to make him wrong. ’cause it sounded unnatural to my ear. I, the way I like to think about, timing and tuning is that the vibe and the personality of a vocal has always been about a moment and capturing a moment, and something in the performance.

If something in the performance feels a little lacking, just tiny bits here and there. but overall, it’s got a vibe. It’s it, you feel like you’re in the moment and the intention of the vocalist when you’re listening to, to track, then the timing and the tuning can replace that intention and make the vocal land on a listener’s ear in the most convincing way.

 And so we feel like we were there in that moment when the singer sung it, back in the day when things were recorded live and all the players were together in a room, and the energy was there  in the same environment. That meant that any natural timing and tuning issues, discrepancies were all smoothed out and didn’t really matter.

so, in terms of you guys getting your song demoed, vocal is gonna be the most important thing. And it’s the thing that everyone will listen to, and it needs to be as convincing as possible.  So it could be that you’ve hired a session singer. It could be that you are singing the song yourself. It could be that you are a have a songwriter’s voice. Do you like where you are trying to, to give an impression of what you want the song to sound like. You don’t wanna be the artist, but you might be just demoing it for, for a session singer to sing.

you want it to be, the timing and tuning part is going to be an important part in creating the best sounding vocal  to present in today’s musical world. You could argue that to a degree, somewhat stylistically. there are some genres which you might not need to do it quite so much, jazz or folk or, or what have you. so that’s up to, up to your discretion. But essentially in this  course, I thought that, you know, a lot of you’re writing pop, a lot of, you’re trying to pitch, for pop artists, in all different genres and styles.

 Timing and tuning a vocal can lend a sense of professionalism to it. You don’t really know and notice until you’ve done it. So the best way  for me to do it is to show you.  Now then I’ve gotta admit I don’t use logic to tune. but let me share the screen.  but so today I had to really get into it,  find out how do you do it in logic, I use a software called Melodyne.

the big ones you hear about be waves, Tune waves, Melodyne, and Auto tune. the thing is about all those is that you have to buy them, really. And, just as starting off the principle and having looked at logic today and the way that it does it principle is pretty damn similar  actually.

the sonic difference, you could argue, one might argue is not as good and you can’t do quite as much, in the nitty gritty of things, but it’s a  definitely a great place to start from. so let’s have a little listen to it. And, and at the very least as well, what it can do is then a sense of confidence to your own vocal. You know, I  don’t really do much singing anymore, but from in this environment.

 But, you know, having played around with this this morning, I’m gonna say it made me feel better about my vocal performance. And as I said, I, I hadn’t been feeling good about it at all till that point. right. So  what I’m gonna do is, I’m just gonna  mute that because that’s the one I worked, worked on yesterday, worked on it earlier, and I’m gonna redo it. so I’m just gonna hide.

That’s one. I, I, that’s one I prepared earlier. I’m gonna hide that by pressing h  clicking on my focus track H and you’ll see it disappear.  This is the vocal that I’ve had already, okay? Every time you come around, okay? and yes, a lot of you have been quite flattering about, about that, which is very nice of you. But let’s see  if you’d like it after what I’m about to do, right?

I’m gonna press  command D  for duplicate, that’s the shortcut for duplicate. And I’m gonna press that and we’re gonna get here. You see this track and this track are duplicates of each other. So I’m gonna relabel  here  this track, t and t timed and tuned. Okay?  So this is the track we’re gonna look at, and I’m going to  highlight these two.  And I’m gonna press alt,  which will mean that when I drag this down, it will create the duplicate of that, those files, because I want to keep  these files.

In fact, let me press alt C,  bring up the colours, highlight both regions, give it a nice greenie, highlight these regions, give it a nice yellowy. So yellowy is gonna be, the one I’m gonna time in June and the green one are gonna be the ones that I’m gonna set leave as they are, because I want to be able to play you  the, new version and the old version so you can see the difference.

 Okay?  So, and I’m, now, we’re gonna mute  the old version, you know, the untimed in tuned one, and I’m gonna focus in on this one here. Now, this is, we click this little arrow here. As you can see, this is a  few different versions that I did. Okay. There’s various different ways of doing this, but for the time being, I’m quite happy for that, for, for, for this to be the vocal.

 So if I click on B in  the middle,  ’cause I’ve got two comps that I had going on, I’m gonna just gonna press flatten. Now Flatten is going to  lose all the other vocal texts behind and  I’m, but I’m okay about that. What you can do is you can also export the active comp to a new track,  okay?  in fact, if I do that,  there you go.

I’ve got,  this is all the vocal takes that I chose from here,  alright? in which case I can just keep these ones behind, but I’ve got versions of them already. So I’m gonna undo that  controls Z, sorry, commands, Z commands there. Then I’m gonna go to Flatten. And it’s just going to flatten those annoyingly colour of them back blue. No thank you. Put ’em back as yellow. So  this here is a  compilation of these takes that I chose  within that folder,  okay?

 Right?  So here are our regions. We want to now, and we’re going to use logic’s flex time and flex pitch functions. Okay?  So if I go up to here, you’ll see up here  is Sho and Hide flex or Command F. So if I press command f  like that,  then zoom in on these files.

The first thing I’m going to need to do, oh, and I think logic has thought I’ve done this already. I’m gonna click this little arrow up here.  And here you can see  flex mode.  First thing I’m going to do is I’m gonna go down to flex time because I want to do some timing, okay?  And by clicking any of these, but in the case of a vocal, well  actually we’re vocal automatic, but because a vocal is just one signal,  one instrument if you like, it’s gonna interpret it as monophonic.

We talked about this before. Let’s go to automatic. and we can see here that what logic has done  is it’s, oh, sorry, I still zoomed in, aren’t I? It split it and interpret it into various different regions of timing. It’s put these little, what they call flex markers in, okay?  and I think one of the things I might do actually is, ’cause we did this with the guitar, is I’m going to teach you the other way and I’m gonna go instead of going to automatic here, ’cause that’s just the timing, I’m going to go to flex pitch.

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