Here’s a common scenario I often find myself in, as I’m sure many of you do as well. I have a vocalist over to do some recording. We do a bunch of takes and comp together a strong lead vocal. Then I want to get him/her to double track it, so that I can fit the doubled vocal into the mix nicely, as a way to thicken up and enhance the lead. After all, a new live take will always be better than an artificially created double. Right?
So, we double-track it, and we listen back. We duck the doubled take slightly under the lead vocal, and it all sounds okay at first listen. The session is running on at this point, and we’re all getting a little tired. So we don’t scrutinize it too carefully, and call it a day.
Listening back the next day, you realize it’s pretty much all good, except for one or two words, or even just syllables, here and there that weren’t phrased precisely the same as the lead vocal.
This exact situation happened to me in a recent session. These minor phrasing variations are deceptively tricky to correct with standard DAW-based time expansion/compression software. They are often not isolated and usually sandwiched right in the middle of a phrase. It’s difficult to isolate them for editing.
Enter VocAlign from Synchro Arts. Vocalign comes in two flavours, Project and Pro. In most cases, the less expensive Project version is the perfect tool to correct these kinds of hard to get at places. Elastic audio, flex time, and other DAW-based solutions are often not suited for this degree fo nuance.
In this video, see how I use Vocalign Project to quickly and easily match the phrasing of a word in two different takes. It’s not only quick, but I could easily align either of the tracks to the other, to audition which phrasing I preferred between the two versions. If you do any degree of vocal editing, you’ll see (and hear) right away how useful a tool VocAlign is.
Vocalign Project is on sale, at 33% off from March 3 to March 31, 2020.