Vocal Editing Basics
Vocal editing is probably one of the most useful tasks to get really good and really fast at. When you’re recording vocals, it’ll give you a better idea of what’s really going on and give you foresight as to how much work you’ll be doing in the pre-mix/mix stage of your song. Not only that, but once you’ve become proficient at said task, your vocals will sound much cleaner and, well, better! Not to mention there’s money to be made in editing voice-overs, books on tape, etc.
What you see above is a pretty typical vocal waveform. It’s a low mail voice reading a training manual. Not the most exciting material ever, but it’s a good example for this article.
The first thing I do is start a new session, import your vocals, and, in Pro Tools 8, blow up the waveform to a level where you can clearly see what’s going on. In PT8, the button is on the top-left of your Edit window (its the little waveform with the up and down arrows to the left of the MIDI blocks):
It’s up to you how much you blow it up, though. Now, let’s take a look at some common sights in a vocal waveform. For starters, here’s what the end of an “s” usually looks like (its the little blurb right after what looks like the end of the waveform):
This particular voice talent has some pretty hardcore sibilance going on, so yours may be a little more low-key. But when editing, be careful not to cut this part off. It’s very easy to listen to it and say “Meh, I don’t need this part.” But you will end up undoing your edit once you notice the end of the phrase has no “s” sound and stops very abrubptly. I’ll get into how to tame really harsh “s” sounds later in the article.
Probably the most edited part of scratch vocals (unmixed, unedited vocals) are breaths. Everyone takes a beath while singing. However, for your production, you’ll probably want to take it out. Here’s what a breath looks like in this instance:
That little blurb is a classic inhaling breath. To get your vocals clean as can be, you’ll need to get rid of these. If you also end up doing any voice editing work, the client will 99.9% of the time demand you get rid of these. In vocal-only applications, they’re very distracting.
So now that you’ve cut out the breath (just select it and delete it), you’re waveform is going to look something like this:
The problem here is you’ll probably end up with some hard edits. Meaning, you might audibly hear the end of one region and the beggining of the next. Let’s fade this stuff so it sounds clean.
Fades for this purpose don’t need to be long and drawn out: short and sweet is the key. While you don’t want to hear hard pops/clicks of regions starting/ending, you also don’t want to hear an audible fade-in/out while some guy is trying to teach you how to sell lighting fixtures. Make the fades short/long enough so that the waveform flows seamlessly.
Another thing you’ll see a lot is the “t” sound. It will look something like this:
“T” sounds are much more forgiving than “s” sounds when you cut them off, though. But still, watch out for these things and don’t fade them too hard.
Are the “t” or “s” sounds in your recording way too harsh? Can’t get rid of them but need to tone them down a bit? Never fear! There’s an extremely easy solution. First, highlight an “s” or “t” sound and seperate it from the main region (make it it’s own little blip). Then, in Pro Tools, go to your AudioSuite menu and pull up the Gain plug-in. Note that any gain plug-in in any DAW will work, but I’m specifically talking about the Pro Tools 8 version.
The first thing you should do is, with the offending region selected, hit Find Level. This will tell you the level of the selected region. Now, pull the gain down a little bit. When you think it’s at a good level, hit Process.
This step can be a little tricky and involves some trial and error. So be patient: you’ll find the setting soon enough.
Once you’ve processed said region, the sound you’re trying to quiet should be lower in volume and not sound like shit. Here’s a before and after on an “s” sound:
Before
After
In Pro Tools there’s one more trick you could use: Strip Silence (Command+U). This is a great feature of Pro Tools, but for me, it’s just not precise enough and/or takes way too much time to setup for vocal-specific applications. Also, vocal editing tends to require precises edits most of the time, something SS just isn’t good at.
Instead, use Strip Silence for musical applications. It works wonders there.
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