today we are going to go through how to make vocal chops like this
hey guys it's will from EDM tips now last week I went through a technique for
creating vocal chops that is really quick but it doesn't have as much
control as other methods but this week I'm going to go a bit more in-depth and
show you how to get the most control over your vocal chops that I know how
anyway so obviously if you want to write a good vocal chop melody you need to
have a good melody now if you want help with how to write melodies you can click
on the link as well or you can download my free melody writing guide below this
video and without further ado let's hop into the DAW. So the first thing we want
to do is obviously bring in some vocals and acapella is best because then
there's more opportunity to get different chops from it I'm just going
to drag in this acapella from splice it doesn't matter if it's in the same key
or not no worries because we're going to be changing the notes of each vocal chop
anyway we know this is 128 BPM because splice told us so I'm just gonna re warp
put in 128 there put it into complex pro mode that's very important and now it's
time to chop up the vocals now what I like to do is just solo it and then I
turn off the grid in Ableton Live by holding command and pressing 4 and that
allows me to kind of jump to the exact place I want without being stuck to the
grid and what we're looking for in our chops is firstly tonal sounds so breaths
and clicks and things like that aren't good so if we listen to this this isn't
good but this is a better notes because it's actually hitting a note it's also
good to look for chops that are not changing note halfway through so if they
just stay on one note that's gonna make your mic life and much easier sorry so
let's just grab that command a need to split it delete what we don't need click
just drag it it's nice to mix some of the chops perhaps with the transients at
the beginning and some of them just kind of a big block of sustain okay so it
changes note there so we're gonna splice it there
that's it there now I'm doing this really quickly but you might want to
spend a bit more time choosing the chops that you really love but this is all
good would still get a good result and it's good if it's one syllable per chop
as well Ernest because that avoids some timing issues okay now the next thing to
do is to load up a simple sound like a grand piano in this instance and we're
going to tune each of these chops to middle C it's because we're going to
then load those drops into a sampler so we can basically just play those vocals
as though they were in an instrument themselves now if you remember in my
last video did this all in audio which is another good way of doing it so click
that link to check that vid out okay so let's get our grand piano ya know you
can turn the grid back on now by pressing command and for now what I'm
gonna do is I'm gonna sync these each each of these chops to the beginning of
each beat or the beginning of each bar and I'll show you why in a couple of
seconds so okay we've done that now I'm gonna create a loop that's one bar long
now the reason I'm doing that is because it's time to tune each of these chops to
middle C so I've just solos the grand piano and the vocals by holding command
and pressing solo so you can solo more than one that's middle C C my MIDI is on
there I'm just doing this on my MIDI keyboard so now double click on that
chop and we now have to transpose the chop until it's in tune with that middle
C that was 2 semitones up now bear in mind because this is from an acapella
each of these chops are on different notes and that's why we have to tune
them all to middle C so then I just grabbed a loop and remote you can do
this in any door as well this isn't Ableton specific
okay let's just rush through and do these fast-forward okay so we have all
of those toons to middle C and you can tell that's the case because if we play
them all in succession they all sound like they're on the same note so they're
the tops that we're going to use now the next thing to do is to bounce them or if
you're in ableton consolidate them by pressing command + J and this just
because if you double click into them you can see it's actually still part of
the whole a cappella but we want it to just be that little chop and the reason
is if you try dragging these into a sampler without consolidating them then
the warp mode goes all funny and they change pitch and it's just it's a pain
in the ass basically okay so now we have them all consolidated let's create a new
MIDI channel that's blank and we're just going to drag in a sampler now remember
you can use any sampler that allows you to assign different key zones so contact
is actually better for this by native instruments but I'm doing it in the
sampler because I want to keep it simple and so that you guys can do it with just
the stock plugins okay so sampler got grabbed all of those
shift grab drag them all into a sampler open up the zone or whichever key zone
mapping thing that you have obviously if you press it now if you select that
instrument to play with it plays all the sounds at the same time all of the chops
that what we want to do is select route at the bottom see because you can see
that's where the bottom of all the zones are and we now want to make these one
octave big so running from C to B and the reason we do that is because we will
have an octave of each chop to play with so I'm just going to grab them in
succession so the first chop is from C minus 2 - b minus 2 and then from C
minus 1 B minus 1 then from C 0 to B 0 etc for
as many octaves as you need and now if we have a melody that we've written and
if you want help writing melodies you can download my free melody writing gift
or you can click on one of the videos above
so this is our riff that was just done in a operator just a basic synthesizer
and we want that riff to be played by our vocals so ok all we do is we can
ignore this vocal chop riff track I'll show you what that does in a bit so this
is the sampler that we've just made vocal sampler all we have to do is well
we can kill that grand piano don't need you anymore mate just copy the riff from
your synthesizer into your vocal track and now let's have a listen now at the
moment you can't hear anything because you can see all of the information is
above like an octave above where the last sample is if you had more chops
then you would be hearing something now so what we need to do is go into that
MIDI information I'll just kill that riff actually the one that we made with
the synthesizer now grab all the MIDI notes put them down an octave or two and
now let's have a listen sounds like Chipmunks right but the beauty of it is
now because we've got all these different vocal chops on different
octaves we can just start experimenting and grabbing some of these notes and
chucking them by holding shift and pressing cursor down put them on
different octaves which creates different vocal chops or rather which
plays different vocal chops I'm just going to turn this filter off because I
don't want that bad so let's have an experimentation with that and as you do
this you'll have ideas for little flourishes and things in your vocal chop
riff
so I went that's it last longer and something else is quite fun is to loop
some of them so I'm just gonna grab them all go to the sampler and I'm just gonna
loop them now some of them will sound bad loot so you just turn the loops off
on each separate sample as and when you want them turned on and then it's just a
matter of experiment to the next thing you can do is experiment with putting
them down an octave like some of them let's put this third one down an octave
so what we do is we look at the root note here we're going to change it up an
octave which means it's gonna play down an octave so that can be quite fun just
to experiment with different octaves as well and it's all simple because they're
all in tune with each other and the next thing to do that you can do which is
quite cool if you go to the pitch Bend range in whichever sampler you're using
and make it 12 semitones which is an octave you can then start adding some
pretty cool little pitch bends here and there as well so I'm just gonna choose
pitch Bend and MIDI and then start playing with them to make some little
sweeps and whatnot now the next thing that you can do is start playing with
the formants a bit more now a plugin that is great for this is little altar
boy by soundToys and here's one I made earlier so I'm just gonna stick this on
now and you can adjust the format here you can actually automate it as two as
well which is pretty cool so this is off
so you can really hear it starting to take shape now and then after that it's
a master of putting in your usual processing or whatever processing you
feel it needs and that's really for another video but I've got an Oxford
inflator here I've got a camel crusher for a bit of saturation and distortion
an EQ to take out some of the low ends and then Steve did his trusty OTT preset
for the multiband compressor and or you can download the OTT free multiband
compressor as well from Steve site
and then you put on some aux channel reverb and delay
and that is how to make vocal chops with loads and loads of controlled I hope you
enjoyed don't forget leave me any questions that you have in the comments
below I try and reply to every single one and you give me ideas for what
videos to make and I really appreciate you watching if you like this video give
it a thumbs up and subscribe and until next time cheers happy producing