[ddots-l] Re: A question about Caketalking
- From: Bryan Smart <bryansmart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:09:45 -0500
The strength of V-Vocal isn't necessarily that the quality of the pitch/formant
correction is supreme, though it can be good if you have the settings right.
Nor is it the perfect tool for going through an entire recording of a singer
with horrible technique to fix every note (that's Melodyne's world). The
strength is that it lets you take an otherwise great vocal or instrument
recording, and easily make a tweak to a small area, like a single note that was
a bit flat, or held to long, or had too much vibrato. If Auto-Tune is a hammer,
then V-Vocal is tweezers. If you take a close look, you'll discover that, not
only can you change the pitch of a note, but you can zoom in to the individual
segments of a note, to edit down to the level of the individual cycles of
vibrato on a single note.
Melodyne does what V-Vocal can do, but you must export the recording out of
Sonar, and open/edit it in the Melodyne editor. With V-Vocal, you can tweak the
audio inside Sonar, while listening to your tweak in context, hearing all of
your music play while lined up with the tweaks that you've made in V-Vocal. The
edits are also nondestructive. If you stretch out a note, and decide you
stretched it too much, you can just pull the length back a bit without having
to un-do your original stretch and do it over with the right length.
People commonly overlook this, but V-Vocal isn't just for vocals. It can let
you edit pitch and time on any monophonic pitch source. If a note on a guitar
was too sharp, or if it didn't sustain quite long enough, or if a glide wasn't
timed right, you can fix it with V-Vocal.
Basically, between AudioSnap and V-Vocal, you have the option of editing the
timing and pitch of audio to a similar extent as what is possible with MIDI.
They're incredible tools for performing those little edits to a bad spot in an
otherwise great take, and bring the world of audio under your editing control.
Just as a screw driver can be used as a poor way to hammer in a nail, you can
use V-Vocal to edit an entire vocal performance, or perform hard-tune pitch
correction. Similarly, you can use Auto-Tune, under MIDI control, to fix
individual notes of a recording, without processing the whole thing. The
results won't be as good as they would have been, though, if you had used the
right tool, just as using a hammer will drive in a nail faster and straighter.
If you want a tool to fix/edit a part of a recording, then V-Vocal is the best
accessible solution that is available right now.
If you'd like to use automatic pitch correction for an entire track, you can
use Auto-Tune 5 with HSC, if you can still find it, or, better yet, use a
hardware effect. In the case of pitch correction, like with vocoders, the
hardware units are still far superior to anything that is available on the
computer. Anyone that has read the lists for a while has heard me rave about
how the TC Helicon VoiceLive 2 is the absolute king of the vocal processing
world at the moment. It is about $800, though, and that might be out of the
range of many peoples' wallets for just a vocal processor. However, TC Helicon
has some other products that can still do a great job.
The older VoiceWorks has many of the same features, just less powerful (4
harmonizer voices instead of 8, no separate 4 voice doubler, no tools for
automatically cleaning a vocal, less effects, etc), but includes an accessible
computer-based editor, and can be found used for about $400. The VoiceWorks
still has the same high quality pitch correction, same high quality (though
less powerful) MIDI controllable harmonizer, etc. I had the VoiceWorks before
the VoiceLive 2 came out, and only upgraded for the extra power of the VL2, not
because there was anything wrong with the quality of the VoiceWorks. The guy
that I sold my VoiceWorks to uses it all of the time.
If you can't find the VoiceWorks, or if $400 is still too much, then they have
a guitar pedal type unit called the VoiceTone for about $200 or so. The
VoiceTone is designed primarily for guitar guys, but you can put any sort of
sound through it just fine. It is scaled back to only be a single voice tool,
meaning that it lacks a harmonizer or doubler. It also is missing the live
enginer/input cleanup effects on the higher end units. However, it does still
have a great pitch correcter, formant shifter, and an effects unit. If you only
want something that will keep you on key without being noticed, or if you'd
like something that will give you the hard-correction/stair-stepping correction
that is all over western radio right now, then this will do it.
If you're trying to edit every bit of a vocal performance, then you're never
going to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time with V-Vocal, and the
pitch correctors, of any type, aren't going to give you the control that you
need. If that is your goal, and if you're real techy, then you must use
Melodyne. If you use a MIDI keyboard to control it, and if you memorize a lot
of the shortcuts from the manual, and aren't put off by having to use the Jaws
cursor, then you should be able to accomplish a lot with it. Working this way,
I can walk through a vocal performance with the arrows on the computer, hearing
it play the segment where I've landed, and then play the note on the MIDI
controller to change the pitch of that segment. Working this way, I can play in
a melody just fine. If someone couldn't sing a run, I can play it in. Zipping
through a performance with the arrows, and hitting keys on the MIDI controller
is a much faster way to edit an entire performance than manually focusing and
editing each note with V-Vocal, and if a performance is full of mistakes,
Melodyne is the best way to fix all of them in one go. On the other hand,
exporting the performance from Sonar to Melodyne, editing with Melodyne, and
bringing the performance back in to Sonar is overkill for fixing a problem with
a note or two that were sung flat or held too long. So, again, it's a matter of
the right tool for the right situation.
With Melodyne, it is true that we can quickly fix lots of notes with some help
from the Jaws cursor and some memorization. However, the other really good
parts of Melodyne are beyond us at the moment. With a mouse, people can change
the boundaries of segments to split or join notes to create new segments.
People can use the mouse to stretch or shrink the length of notes, or change
their start times, which we can do in V-Vocal, but not from the keyboard in
Melodyne. When it comes to tiny/exact edits of pitch, V-Vocal is the best there
is for blind engineers at the moment, on any platform.
There are a lot of options out there. Like sighted engineers, we, too, must
pick the best tool for the job.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Phil Muir
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 4:25 AM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: A question about Caketalking
Don't like it either. It ads a kind of phasing to the vocals.
Regards, Phil Muir
Accessibility Training
Telephone: US (615) 713-2021
UK +44-1747-821-794
Mobile: UK +44-7968-136-246
E-mail:
info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
URL:
http://www.accessibilitytraining.co.uk/
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of neville
Sent: 10 January 2011 18:06
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: A question about Caketalking
I need to go back and check out the tutorial on formant correction. I must
admit I don't like what it does to vocals either.
May the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your heart and mind
in Christ Jesus. God bless you!
Music soft sacred and soulful
Website http://www.nevillepeter.com
email neville@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
phone 407-222-4488
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bryan Smart
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 12:55 PM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: A question about Caketalking
Were you using formant correction? If you don't, then changing the pitch up
just makes the vocals sound like munchkins, and changing it down makes them
sound like a huge-headed monster.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Len Viljoen
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2011 8:07 AM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: A question about Caketalking
i hate v vocal. it gives the vocals a pipy sound. i personally will not use it.
in my opinion it's not up to standard at all.
kind regards
len viljoen
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