Perfect Pitch
In many respects it’s perhaps easier to ensure the tempo and key of both music and vocals match perfectly before you begin the cutting-up process. Most DAWs offer decent time-stretching these days, so that you can at least start with all the elements more or less in time with each other:
Once the timing of the loops lines up nicely, you can pitch-shift the vocal part to match it to the key of your track:
And here’s how the vocals sound after this time-stretching process.
In recent years there have also been increasing forays into using re-tuned vocals (usually pitched lower), particularly in the sparser production environments of post-dubstep and future-garage (as well as other rather hastily-named genres). This can be achieve by transposing the audio before slicing…
…although purists might wish to explore re-pitching the audio first (by slowing it down), and then finding the new tempo. For example, using a bit of maths, we find that taking a vocal at 160bpm and transposing it downwards by 4 semitones will result in it being played-back at 126.992bpm. This is exactly what we had to do in the pre-DAW days of hardware sampling, but I’ll spare you the tales of how hard we had it back in the olden days.
Man vs. Machine
A simpler alternative to manual chopping is to let a plugin do it automatically for you. Izotope’s Stutter Edit or the freeware Melda MRhythmizer can deliver some excellent results…
…though the effectiveness of these plugins does rely heavily on what kind of signal you feed them.
05.18 PM
Seems to be a bit of a jump here. You got from a vocal with a backing track and drums to what basically sounds like an acapella. How did you manage that?
Cheers
A
05.19 PM
Correction: That should be “go” not “got”.
05.40 PM
Hi Ablore. Sorry for the confusion – we’re not trying to show how to extract an acapella here. The demo clip is just there to show the source of the vocal. We’ll come back to extracting acapellas in the future, but the easiest approach is always to start with an isolated vocal.
02.11 AM
I find that slicing up vocals and throwing little snippets in on beat is so easy. It’s the tuning and all that stuff that’s hard. Getting something “good” sounding out of it. I guess that’s where the artists finesse comes in.
01.14 AM
I love this effect. Big question: how would I pull this off in Ableton??
04.30 AM
Hey Attack, thanks for this interesting write up. My question to you is, for re-pitching, would you always do it before sampling? (for the pitched down vox) Sometimes I load a a phrase across many keys in the ESX 24 (with pitch on) and see what works. Does it make any sense doing it this way as well?
08.49 AM
Whichever method you find easier is fine as long as it gets you the sound you’re looking for – we’re not keen on imposing rules on music production! The reason we’ve pitch shifted before slicing here is that it maintains the tempo of the original material. If you slice first then pitch down an octave in EXS-24, for example, your slices will play at half speed. In some cases that can work, but it’s not always the sound you’re looking for.
12.18 PM
Hi guys – you mention above you’ll be addressing how to extract acapellas. Would still love to see an Attack tutorial on this if it could maybe be added to the longlist of Technique features. 🙂
01.57 AM
Definitely interested in an extracting acapellas walkthrough, find it’s easier with Hip Hop and Soul music at the same tempo, for house it can be tricky when you’re dealing with a backing track, for me there’s a bit of luck involved with what works and doesn’t.
Solid techniques would be more than welcome.
Cheers
01.09 PM
Hey!
Nice post, is there any way to get the acapella you used, really like the sound of it! 🙂
12.08 AM
https://soundcloud.com/kidmethuselah/future-beat-it
Like dis?
05.58 PM
nice …could you do it in ableton too