Modern Vocal Processing In Practice
Technique : Effects / Processing
A new generation of vocal processors, and a
new generation of engineers, confront the possibilities and ethics of
digital vocal manipulation.
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Like many CD covers these days, Nashville recording
artist Allison Moorer's latest has a sticker on the jewel box. However,
Moorer's does not warn parents of explicit lyrics; rather, it advises
that it was recorded and mixed in a manner that's becoming increasingly
rare. The sticker on Moorer's Miss Fortune LP states boldly:
'Absolutely no vocal tuning or pitch-correction was used in the making
of this record.' Moorer's producer, RS Field, observes, "Vocal tuning is
contributing to the Milli Vanilli-fication of modern music. [Putting the sticker on the record] was sort of our little freak flag."
Has the pursuit of perfection gone overboard?
Listening to the radio, it might seem as though the recorded vocal is
experiencing something like what the guitar underwent in the 1970s, when
a proliferation of stomp boxes spiced guitars with fuzz, flanging,
wah-wah, phase-shifting, envelope filtering and other processing
flavours. The result set on edge the teeth of many purists. On the other
hand, effecting vocals has been an artistic pursuit throughout the
history of recording, from running a speaker and microphone into a tiled
hallway to create reverb, to using springs and plates and finally
digital reverbs. The James Gang's 'Rocky Mountain Way' and Peter
Frampton's 'Show Me The Way' famously used voice boxes that allowed the
guitar to modulate the vocal, and there were plenty of other late-night
processing experiments over the years, some of which survived
morning-after scrutiny to make it onto records. And then there were The
Chipmunks...
Surrounded By Plug-Ins
The vocal is the one element of a recording that
can't yet be emulated by a computer, but it's increasingly encircled by a
rapidly expanding pool of plug-in processors, the sheer availability of
which seems to have precipitated a new era in vocal effectation. "[Plug-in processors]
are like pretzels on a bar," says Nashville engineer/producer Bob
Bullock, whose credits include the Tubes, Reba McEntire and Shania
Twain. "They're within easy reach and you can't eat just one." The
watershed of vocal pitch effectation may have been Cher's smash single
'Believe', which in 1998 put unbridled digital vocal processing on the
front page. Since then, artists from Lenny Kravitz to Madonna have
created purposely processed vocals that cross the border into the domain
of distortion.
The focus of what has turned from a purely technical
pursuit into an ethical debate — one that's played out on the pages of
general-interest media as well as in the audio trades — is not so much
the digital audio workstation as it is the third-party plug-in from
Antares Audio Technologies, Auto-Tune. The device — which had a
parallel hardware version used live by Cher — has been both praised and
pilloried by audio professionals and music aficionados alike, with
plenty of both on either side of the debate. Michael Logue, marketing
director for Antares, in Scott's Valley, California, relishes the
discourse. "Sure, we've been vilified," he says affably. "But I then ask
people, when you use a word processor, do you use a spell-checker? It's
really no different than that."
Nashville engineer/producer Bob Bullock: "[Plug-in processors] are like pretzels on a bar. They're within easy reach and you can't eat just one."
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Logue says that Cher's 'Believe' was a watershed not
only for the application of automatic pitch-correction, but also for
its users coming out of the tech closet. "The song made it OK to admit
that you used it," he says. "That has really opened up the artistic
possibilities of Auto-Tune. We now see our hardware versions in
live sound racks on tour with arena-sized acts. It's also used on the
broadcast feed of the Grand Ole Opry. It's used far more than people ever realise."
(Just for the record, Antares chief scientist, Dr. Andy Hildebrand, is an award-winning exploratory geophysicist. Auto-Tune's
algorithms were based on work he had done in developing systems that do
real-time geophysical seismic data interpretations. He made his mark
some years ago, as Exxon's youngest-ever vice president, developing a
crawling computer, dubbed 'The Pig', which would travel the length of
oil pipelines using sound to check for structural integrity. That
product, ironically enough, was based on research he did for another
product — this when he went back to university to learn music after
already having achieved several PhDs — called Infinity, which was the
looping processor used in many synthesizers since the early 1980s.)
But, in a larger sense, DAWs have become synonymous
with a quest for perfection that can leave music soulless — 'Pro Tools'
has become a generic, in much the same way that 'Xerox' has come to be a
trope for any copying machine, and is becoming emblematic of the
antithesis of reality. "This is definitely our anti-Pro Tools record,"
Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron recently told a reporter on the release
of the band's last album Riot Act. "It's more interesting
hearing musicians in a room playing hard, with the tempo fluctuating
slightly as the band heats up. Perfection is boring." Geoff Foster, a
veteran engineer at Air Lyndhurst, was recently quoted in print as
saying, "To some degree, Cher's got a lot to answer for... Sure, [Believe]
was an extreme example and meant to be an effect, but the public bought
it — literally. From a pop standpoint the public said, 'We don't care
what our vocals sound like'. But in a way, that was a testament to the
fact that the musicality of recording can easily become secondary to the
technology. Cher can actually sing, but the current generation of pop
stars have been given a mandate that they don't need to."
Foster goes on to say that it's not just the
artists, but a new generation of audio professionals who have bought
into vocal tuning as a de facto standard. "There's a whole
generation of engineers who have grown up thinking that the first thing
you do when you get into a recording session is fire up Pro Tools ready
to do repair work," he said in the same published interview.
Slacker Sonics
Not all engineers see it quite that way, though.
Josh Binder is a twenty-something engineer/programmer in Los Angeles. He
works regularly with producers such as Dave Reitzas and Walter
Afanasieff, and his work appears on recordings by Kenny G, Barbra
Streisand and Charlotte Church. He speaks of the digital domain as
though he grew up in it and he's an expert on Auto-Tune, but adds that he has broadened his appetite to programs such as Wave Mechanics' Pitch Doctor — his take there: "It doesn't change the sound of the vocal like Auto-Tune
does, but it has a massive delay you need to offset for, like 80
milliseconds," he says — and TC Electronic's Intonator. In fact, Binder
continues, automatic pitch-correction is moving beyond its original
mandate of fixing vocals and is becoming part of the sound of vocals.
Josh Binder, engineer/programmer for producers such as Dave Reitzas and Walter Afanasieff: "[Auto-Tune] is not there to fix the vocal; it's there to be part of the vocal sound."
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"When you're working with a great singer whose pitch is right on, you can still apply Auto-Tune," he says. "I'll throw a chromatic Auto-Tune
[patch] onto the vocal with a kind of mellow responsiveness level,
which gives it a nice chorus/flanging effect. I'll print the effect to a
separate track and then paste it into the comped vocal mix at the end.
You hear that kind of sound a lot now on female voices, like Christina
Aguilera, and on a lot of really soulful R&B vocals. It's not there
to fix the vocal; it's there to be part of the vocal sound.
"You can also use it to get a very cool portamento
effect on vocals or on instruments," Binder continues. "When you get a
nice R&B slide or slur in the vocal, Auto-Tune can enhance
it and make it even smoother. I mean, it almost sounds calculated, like
you can hear the algorithms processing as you do it. But that's become
part of the vocal sound for a lot of singers now."
Binder has recently discovered a new toy: the rather
expensive Waycom flat-screen monitor, which allows the user to write
directly on its surface and affect the data on the screen, In the case
of Auto-Tune, says Binder, this is the ultimate level of
control. "You go into freehand mode and you can trace the graph and
very, very accurately follow the wave of the vocal," he explains. "Once
you get comfortable with the geometry, you can bend lines and smooth out
all the imperfections. You can also get crazy with it — someone once
drew a line that went off the graph and when we applied it to a guitar
you could make it scream up three octaves and then dive bomb, all in
under three seconds. It's a great effect for electronica and genres like
that. It's going to change the world of Auto-Tune-ing."
But Binder, sounding wise enough for the age of 23,
also opines that it's not the public that drives the use of auto-tuning,
nor is it a lack of chops, in most cases. Rather, he says, it's
frequently producers striving for perfection, often thinking of radio
performances. "But whatever the reason someone uses it, it's not hard to
tell that it's being used," he says. "For people who have heard a vocal
track before its processed and then after, the difference is pretty
apparent if you have reasonably decent ears. The new trick will be
finding ways to use it and not have anyone notice."
Using Auto-Tune To Avoid Using Auto-Tune?
Joe Barresi, who has engineered for Queens of the Stone Age, Courtney Love and Hole, and Pennywise, has his own take on Auto-Tune.
While he also tries to keep the application of the processing
relatively light and close to the graph of the actual vocal, he has a
surprising and somewhat ironic use for it. "It's actually a great tool
to help singers with, and not by tuning their vocals," he says. "What
I'll do, especially if it's a young singer or someone relatively
inexperienced in the studio, is use the waveform graphic to point out
where the problem areas or notes are. I use Auto-Tune as an
analytical tool, giving singers a visual cue to show where the problem
is. Very often, that's enough to get them on track and on pitch.
Ironically, we're using Auto-Tune to avoid having to use Auto-Tune!"
Although the Antares Auto-Tune graphic
display can be used to pitch-shift sections of a vocal manually, some
engineers use it merely as a detection tool, either for providing visual
cues for pitch processing in another application, or for providing
feedback to novice vocalists in order to improve their tuning during
performance.
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Barresi finds that Auto-Tune's inherent
delay is usually easily compensated for by sliding the vocal track
forward between two and four milliseconds. "It doesn't seem to be an
issue for a lot of people, but I do like to hear the vocal stay in close
sync with the track," he says. "So just applying a slide [globally] to the track from the first beat works well."
Less casual are Barresi's thoughts on how to pitch a
vocal. "A lot of people do the tuning off-line, so to speak, as a
stand-alone operation, as opposed to doing it while listening to the
track," he explains. "I grab the vocal session graphically and load it
into Auto-Tune and make the pitch adjustments while the rest of
the track is playing. What I'm doing is listening for the pitch cues
that the track can give you. For instance, you might have a vocal that's
a bit sharp, but so's the guitar. It sounds worse if the vocal is in
perfect pitch but the track isn't."
Another interesting approach Barresi has seen used is to work with Auto-Tune and Serato's Pitch N Time product simultaneously. "A lot of people prefer the way Pitch N Time sounds, though they like the way Auto-Tune works better," he says. "You can run both products together, using Auto-Tune to locate, analyse and determine the extent of the problem and Pitch N Time to correct it. For instance, if you see on the Auto-Tune screen that the pitch is off twenty-five cents, you can then create an anti-curve to the Auto-Tune graphic on Pitch N Time to correct it. Pitch N Time seems to affect the tone of the vocal less than Auto-Tune." (Although, Barresi notes, as do other engineers, that many young bands find the timbral effect of Auto-Tune to be a desirable tonal effect in and of itself.) Finally, he adds, Auto-Tune
seems to track the vocal better if it's applied when the screen is
zoomed out. "I'll work on a line or a phrase, then after I've corrected
the pitch spots, but before I print it to a separate Auto-Tune track, I'll zoom it out first," he explains.
Engineer Michael Brauer: "Artists say they want
drier-sounding vocals... but what they really mean is that they want
something other than reverb."
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UK engineer Donal Hodgson, who has engineered for Sting, Counting Crows, Tina Turner, The Wilsons and Euphoria, has his Auto-Tune working preferences. "I regularly have Auto-Tune inserted in Pro Tools
in automatic mode and will automate the bypass switch and the response
time just to fix certain syllables or words," he explains. "I do the
same on monophonic instruments as well. I have in the past had Auto-Tune
on a monitor insert whilst recording a singer. I found this actually
helped him with his ability to perform, as he stopped worrying about the
small tuning problems and relaxed giving a much better overall
performance. Again, when working like this I will slow the response time
down so as not to induce the famed Cher vocal effect.
"In certain situations where a great performance has
been recorded but bigger tuning problems have arisen, I'll switch to
Manual mode, set up a record track and tweak lines manually. I always
prefix the track name with 'AT' so that when I finish the comp I can see
where all my tracks have come from. Manual mode is an amazing feature
of Auto-Tune, and the artifacts of the tuning correction are
virtually inaudible. Retuning like this with live vocal performances can
be tricky, especially if the vocal has been picked up on other
microphones — a certain amount of chorusing starts to happen and then a
few subtle rides in the mix are needed to reduce the effect of retuning
the vocal.
"I don't believe there should be any limitations on
the resources used to reach a great-sounding vocal regardless of the
singer's ability. I am hired to help make a recording that can be sold,
and if the vocal performance isn't cutting it, then get the tool box out
and fix it. Having said that, on the rare occasion I have been sent
into the studio with someone who can't sing, all the Auto-Tune
in the world isn't going to make them sound like a singer! I believe
some talent is needed in the first place and then all the tricks can be
added. I suppose this technology could be considered either as inducing
apathy, or as a time saver — I have often fixed a vocal because it was
quicker and easier than sending the singer back to the booth. I think it
might be human nature."
Dry Is The New Wet
Meanwhile, the debate is not limited to DAWs.
Effected vocals are a time-tested and legitimate artistic colour of the
sonic palette, and have been undergoing an evolution quite apart from
automatic pitch-correction. Some engineers will tell you that, while
there are now more effects on vocals, the net result has been a drier
sound than vocals effected with traditional reverb, mainly because most
new effects track the vocal, rather than tail it as reverb does. (For
instance, Auto-Tune can react in 4ms or less to the input
signal.) "Artists say they want drier-sounding vocals," says Michael
Brauer, engineer for Coldplay, New Radicals and Sugar Ray. "But what
they really mean is that they want something other than reverb. When you
hear the vocal truly dry, it loses its life. So you go in search of
other types of effects." Brauer's bag of tricks includes returning the
vocal through various compressors, each of which has its own tonal
characteristics. "That gives you a vocal that's still dry, but very
present," he says. He has also sent vocals through guitar distortion
boxes like the Sansamp, which when added in subtly gives an effect he
describes as 'angry and urgent'. Bob Bullock has done similar things,
and recalls that years ago he would use a Tom Scholz Rockman unit for
vocals. Even on the country records he often works on, which tend to
want to project an organic vocal sound, he has sent lead vocals through
Leslie amplifiers and added chorusing.
Csaba Petocz, whose engineering work has ranged from
Metallica to John Michael Montgomery, has used up to six Harmonizers at
a time on a lead vocal, blending them in lightly to give a lead vocal
more emphasis. He says the idea of heavily processing vocals has been
around a long time, but that plug-ins offer a vastly wider array of
sonic choices, all of which can be tried more readily. And therein lies
the problem, he feels. "There are too many choices, which leads to
mediocre records. To paraphrase Geoff Emerick, if you can limit your
choices so that every decision supports a specific production goal,
that's what makes great records."
Joe Chiccarelli, who has engineered for Beck, U2 and
Elton John, says that the goal should be to support the song. "The easy
availability of plug-ins too often leads to using effects for the sake
of using them," he says. "Striking the balance is still the artistic
part of it."
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