In this stage, though, any corrections should be purely in service to the performance. You can go that creative route later with the voice, if that's what the song calls for, thanks to a number of available effects plug-ins. The goal here, though, isn’t to push things to a mechanical and inhuman vocal sound. This will give you the ability to tighten up anything that may be off-pitch or off-time. To compensate, utilize a pitch correction tool like the Pitch module in Nectar 3 to examine and finesse those moments. There may be areas where the timing of the vocal is a bit off or the vocalist just missed the note they were going for. At that point, switch gears to look at the performance characteristics that can be tidied up. Once you’ve cleaned up the natural artifacts and glitches of the voice, things usually start sounding pretty good. These sounds can be removed manually by reducing the level every time you see or hear a click in the vocal, or attenuated automatically using something like the Mouth De-click module in RX. When you put a sensitive microphone close to a singer, you begin hearing the mechanical noises of the mouth that can become especially distracting if the vocal ends up very exposed in the mix.
Mouth clicks and smacks can also distract from a vocal track. To avoid the tedious manually edit of those breaths, try to make use of a de-breath plug-in, like the Breath Control module in RX. It’s obvious but worth stating that a singer needs air in their lungs to sing, and sensitive vocal mics will easily pick up the sound of those incoming breaths between vocal lines. If you hear the esses jump out across a range of volumes, fire up a de-esser, like the De-esser module in Nectar 3. Listen to your mix at multiple playback levels for perspective. Sometimes it can be tough to determine how hard to de-ess, or even whether you should at all. Trust your gut: If a take of a particular line or word doesn’t immediately grab you, scratch it off the list and move on to the next take! Dealing with the natural sounds of mouth machinery In order to avoid spending hour after hour comping together a vocal and losing sight of the bigger picture, be ruthless. It is common, though, to dig in line-by-line or section-by-section, depending on your singer, to assemble the most compelling complete version of the song’s vocals. It’s probably not necessary to go as deep as word-by-word, since the mood and spirit of a vocal delivery can get squashed through too much editing.
#AUDACITY AUDIO EDITOR SONG SURGEON SONG SURGEON FULL#
Start with one of the strongest full takes and begin scrutinizing. Once you’ve tracked everything, you can assemble the best versions of each section into a “top” take. By this point, you’ll already have plenty of backup takes, so the continuity of a few complete runs can make for a great starting point to comp from. Let it roll and don’t stop partway through if you hear anything wacky. Once you’re sure you’ve grabbed solid stuff for every part of the song, ask for a few passes through the entire tune. Aim to track the vocals of each song section between four and eight times-a nice round number that should give you plenty of raw material to draw from.Īfter working on each section individually, a singer has often rehearsed their way into a really strong performance. Since hard drives and additional memory are both relatively inexpensive, there’s really no reason not to capture extra versions of your singer’s performance. To get your tracks into shape for mixing, it’s important to carefully analyze the material you’ve captured and perform any needed surgery or cleanup. Between the twin pillars of recording vocals and mixing vocals lies the crucial, but sometimes overlooked, stage of editing vocals.