Hey, what’s up guys, my name is David of davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
I’m coming at you with a vocal tutorial. I’m sitting over a whole outline and notes
galore on a new training course I’m putting together — all things vocals. Mixing vocals
A to Z with my walkthrough, the things that I’m gonna do to clean it up, blah blah blah.
And then stylistically, I’m gonna pull in Hip-Hop vocal, Pop vocal, a Singer-Songwriter,
I’ve got a live Gospel vocal. All kinds of good stuff.
But I’m going through this and I’m working on a video. And I typically use clip gain
in Pro Tools to — let me put these notes away here — I use clip gain to clean up
phrase by phrase, section by section a lot, to help what gets sent into the compressors
to be a little more level, a little more balanced so that high points can kind of come down
a little bit. Just to make the compressor’s job a little bit easier and that’s been
a process of mine for a little bit now, but I was working on this and something that I
thought of was Dave Pensado on Pensado’s place, there’s an ITL where he talks about
mixing vocals and he brings up Christina Aguilara I believe, and how much character and emotion
she puts at the starts of her phrases and the ending of her phrases.
And I started thinking that, you know, compression is great. I love compression just like the
next guy. But I came across this technique, I started wiggling the mouse a little bit,
you’ll see that in a minute. And it kind of just, I don’t know, kind of shook me
to the core. One of those moments that I was kind of like oh my god, I gotta share this
and see what other people think about it. I’m not even saying that this is the way
to go, this is like man we should all be doing this. I want this to be a conceptual discussion
almost, what you think about it, and how you like the vibe of it. So I’m gonna shut up,
I’m gonna hit play. This is the phrase we’re working with
[vocal phrase]
Cool. Short and sweet. Now, I’m gonna put a break point right here. I’ve got the smart
tool open, if you don’t know the, got the hand if you hold Command and it’ll pop open
so you can add a break point. I’m gonna put one at the high point there, I’ve got
one here to prevent anything to the right of that breakpoint from being affected by
this move. I’m gonna add one here in-between them, and then watch, I’m just kinda pulling
up the sustain of that note. Isn’t that crazy?
So that’s awesome. I’ve done that with vocal automation before, but doing it with
clip gain, I dunno, there’s something that as I started doing it just sounded pretty
sweet. I’m gonna pull this back a little more subtle. I’m gonna do the same thing
over here. I’m gonna put a break point at the high point there at the wave, and then
I’ve got the break point here and then if you click and drag, obviously you can make
someone real articulate and go through and boost some of their phrases, but — let’s
try something like this.
[vocal with clip gain automation]
Cool. Without it. With it. Cool. I don’t have any compression. This was Harry late
night in the studio one night I think he pulled a U87 into the control room. He’s got a
MIDI keyboard in there. And that’s that, so. Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing,
but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Leave me some comments. This to me was just
was a sweet little trick to pull up some sustain. You can come in here, fatten it up a little
bit. Maybe even come out here to this break point and boost the breath so you can really
hear what’s going on there. You can see it get a nice graphic.
[vocal with attack and sustain automated]
Yeah, no not that, so — you win some you lose some. But, let me know what you think.
The starting, the ending of phrases, how important that can be to the character and emotion of
a performance. A vocal, could be for guitars, could ben for anything really. I’d love
to hear what you think, so feel free to like, subscribe, leave some comments in the section
below and don’t forget to check out davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com and we’ll catch
you on the next one.