Welcome to the latest installment of Production Tips, our new monthly feature offering, well, production tips, hosted by Simon Langford.
In the first part of this three part series on remixing, I am going to give you an overview of one of its biggest challenges: time-stretching vocals. The higher up one goes on the remixing food chain, the more important it is to keep the vocalist happy. Often, this means time-stretching the vocals while making them sound like you haven't time-stretched them! Mission Impossible? Not necessarily.
To Speed (Up) or not to Speed (Up)
There will be times when the track you are remixing is at a relatively close tempo to the tempo you want to work at. But if the original track you're remixing is 94 beats per minute and you want to work at 128 beats per minute, then you have to make the choice. You can either stretch the vocal up to 128 or down to 64, which will give the vocal a half-tempo feel. This isn't an easy choice to make, so what should you do?
Of course, there is no real “rule" about this, but time-stretching (or compressing) by over 30% is never going to sound “natural." More often than not, though, if you're working at a club tempo, I would be inclined to speed the vocals up. A really languid and slow vocal, which you'd get if you were to slow down to 64bpm, will sap a lot of energy out of your music and make the whole track very hard to dance to.
There are exceptions to this. If your source material is at 94bpm but still feels quite “pacey" at that tempo, with quite a few words in each line, then sometimes you can get away with slowing it down. In fact, you might not have a choice. If it felt quite “pacey" at 94bpm, it will sound, at the very least, manic and, at worst, unintelligible at 128bpm. The reverse of this is also true. If your original track was very flowing and slow at 94bpm, you might not have any choice but to speed it up.
Once you have made your decision, you need to “clean up" the vocal. Just how much work you have to do here really does depend on the vocalist in question. Vocalists with very smooth delivery (that is, without too much jumping around and improvising and, most importantly, not much natural vibrato in their voice) are a blessing, because the things that cause any remixer the most problems are strong vibrato and vocal “gymnastics" (those moments when the singer uses a burst of 27 notes in short succession when just one would have been fine!).
Damage Limitation
When it comes to vocal gymnastics, there's virtually nothing you can do. You can't really cut those parts out because they often flow from one word or line into the next. And they are usually at the ends of lines, which leaves a rather unnatural and uncomfortable feeling at the end of that line. The good news is they don't generally come up too often in a track, so you just have to hope that they don't stand out too much in the final mix.
Vibrato, however, is a much greater problem because that can occur in every couple of lines, or in some cases, every few words. That can mean an awful lot of tidying up. The actual method that I use is to go on a word by word basis, remove any offending vibrato, then find the corresponding word in the un-time-stretched version (which you did keep a copy of, right?), and finally do a cut/paste/edit job to replace the stretched version. It does require a lot of work and it does require a keen eye/ear to make sure that all of the edits are smooth.
It can be arduous and time-consuming, but the results are far better than anything else I have found so far. Sadly, the record label and artist don't always agree.
Take A Deep Breath, And Relax!
I have actually had one or two moments where I have had to play “diplomat" and bite my tongue with record labels. On one occasion I was given a mid 90's bpm R&B ballad and asked to create a “big room house mix." That meant that my mix's tempo had to be high 120's, and that meant a big stretch on the vocals. I spent a full day and probably about a third of the next day just prepping, time-stretching and then editing and post-producing the vocals. I thought they sounded really strong, given the circumstances, but when the label heard the mix, their first comment was, “We love the mix, but the vocals sound time-stretched."
I honestly couldn't believe what I was hearing. My instant reaction was to say, “D'ya THINK so?!" but I doubt my sarcasm would have helped. Instead, I took a breath, put my diplomat hat on and tried to explain that the reason they sounded time-stretched was because they were time-stretched. I then went on to ask, very politely and courteously, what they had been expecting when they asked for a house mix of a ballad.
But before I even asked those questions, I had an ace up my sleeve (and most of the time you will too, in these situations). I knew that they had commissioned other house remixers to do mixes as well, so I said, “If you think that any of the other remixers have done a better job with the vocals then I will happily use their vocals/a cappella in my mix."
A&R departments see remixes as essential to the promotion of a track, but they don't always consider whether that track is suited for club mixes. Add the fact that some of them aren't really be into “club" music and don't understand the mechanics of it that well, and you have a potential problem. But as long as you are polite and at least come across as being willing to work with them to resolve the problem, they normally come around. After all, in order to transform an R&B ballad into a Big Room House Smash, there have to be some compromises along the way.
In the first part of this three part series on remixing, I am going to give you an overview of one of its biggest challenges: time-stretching vocals. The higher up one goes on the remixing food chain, the more important it is to keep the vocalist happy. Often, this means time-stretching the vocals while making them sound like you haven't time-stretched them! Mission Impossible? Not necessarily.
To Speed (Up) or not to Speed (Up)
There will be times when the track you are remixing is at a relatively close tempo to the tempo you want to work at. But if the original track you're remixing is 94 beats per minute and you want to work at 128 beats per minute, then you have to make the choice. You can either stretch the vocal up to 128 or down to 64, which will give the vocal a half-tempo feel. This isn't an easy choice to make, so what should you do?
Of course, there is no real “rule" about this, but time-stretching (or compressing) by over 30% is never going to sound “natural." More often than not, though, if you're working at a club tempo, I would be inclined to speed the vocals up. A really languid and slow vocal, which you'd get if you were to slow down to 64bpm, will sap a lot of energy out of your music and make the whole track very hard to dance to.
There are exceptions to this. If your source material is at 94bpm but still feels quite “pacey" at that tempo, with quite a few words in each line, then sometimes you can get away with slowing it down. In fact, you might not have a choice. If it felt quite “pacey" at 94bpm, it will sound, at the very least, manic and, at worst, unintelligible at 128bpm. The reverse of this is also true. If your original track was very flowing and slow at 94bpm, you might not have any choice but to speed it up.
Once you have made your decision, you need to “clean up" the vocal. Just how much work you have to do here really does depend on the vocalist in question. Vocalists with very smooth delivery (that is, without too much jumping around and improvising and, most importantly, not much natural vibrato in their voice) are a blessing, because the things that cause any remixer the most problems are strong vibrato and vocal “gymnastics" (those moments when the singer uses a burst of 27 notes in short succession when just one would have been fine!).
Damage Limitation
When it comes to vocal gymnastics, there's virtually nothing you can do. You can't really cut those parts out because they often flow from one word or line into the next. And they are usually at the ends of lines, which leaves a rather unnatural and uncomfortable feeling at the end of that line. The good news is they don't generally come up too often in a track, so you just have to hope that they don't stand out too much in the final mix.
Vibrato, however, is a much greater problem because that can occur in every couple of lines, or in some cases, every few words. That can mean an awful lot of tidying up. The actual method that I use is to go on a word by word basis, remove any offending vibrato, then find the corresponding word in the un-time-stretched version (which you did keep a copy of, right?), and finally do a cut/paste/edit job to replace the stretched version. It does require a lot of work and it does require a keen eye/ear to make sure that all of the edits are smooth.
It can be arduous and time-consuming, but the results are far better than anything else I have found so far. Sadly, the record label and artist don't always agree.
Take A Deep Breath, And Relax!
I have actually had one or two moments where I have had to play “diplomat" and bite my tongue with record labels. On one occasion I was given a mid 90's bpm R&B ballad and asked to create a “big room house mix." That meant that my mix's tempo had to be high 120's, and that meant a big stretch on the vocals. I spent a full day and probably about a third of the next day just prepping, time-stretching and then editing and post-producing the vocals. I thought they sounded really strong, given the circumstances, but when the label heard the mix, their first comment was, “We love the mix, but the vocals sound time-stretched."
I honestly couldn't believe what I was hearing. My instant reaction was to say, “D'ya THINK so?!" but I doubt my sarcasm would have helped. Instead, I took a breath, put my diplomat hat on and tried to explain that the reason they sounded time-stretched was because they were time-stretched. I then went on to ask, very politely and courteously, what they had been expecting when they asked for a house mix of a ballad.
But before I even asked those questions, I had an ace up my sleeve (and most of the time you will too, in these situations). I knew that they had commissioned other house remixers to do mixes as well, so I said, “If you think that any of the other remixers have done a better job with the vocals then I will happily use their vocals/a cappella in my mix."
A&R departments see remixes as essential to the promotion of a track, but they don't always consider whether that track is suited for club mixes. Add the fact that some of them aren't really be into “club" music and don't understand the mechanics of it that well, and you have a potential problem. But as long as you are polite and at least come across as being willing to work with them to resolve the problem, they normally come around. After all, in order to transform an R&B ballad into a Big Room House Smash, there have to be some compromises along the way.
