Vocals in dance music often polarise people - it's easy to see them as being only for the funky house cheese brigade, or the underground grime crews, which could mean waiting 4 hours for a late MC to turn up with his dodgy mates and make your studio smell of weed. But there's actually a lot of variety between the territory of full vocals and hardcore instrumentals. So lets take a look at how you can spice up your tracks with a slightly more refined use of the human voice...Using vocal samples has a very clear advantage over recording a full vocal; you don't need to find a good singer, you don't need a microphone or a decent recording booth, and you don't need years of practise producing vocals either. You also have access to a whole world of ready-recorded material. Sites like 'acappellas4u' offer a wide selection of acappellas culled from released music, usually mp3, with varying bitrates and varying sound quality. It should be noted that it's not really legal for them to do this, and it's not actually legal for you to use them either (whether you'd actually get sued is another matter, but the likes of Soundcloud and Youtube are getting increasingly vigilant in identifying and taking down tracks that use uncleared vocal samples). So if you want to find good quality, legal vocal samples, it's often better to turn to one of the increasing number of sample packs out there that offer vocal samples. They're usually tailored to specific genres and feature gigabytes of well-recorded vocal snippets and phrases to use in your tunes. Alternatively, speak to local bands or MC's and see if you can do a remix - this will give you an original and exclusive full vocal to play to with.
In general, the stage of your tune will dictate what you want to be doing with vocal samples. If you're still working on a one-bar drum loop, then it's often fun to drop tiny, half-syllable vocal sounds quietly into the loop. Maybe an 'Ah' on one of the snares, a pitched-down hit on a kick drum somewhere, or a breath noise very quietly in the mix. If done well it can really catch the ear and make the beat more interesting (an obvious example would be the 'Think' break from the Lyn Collins track of the same name), and if you mix it quietly it will hardly even sound like a vocal sample.
The next level up is using a simple hit to add interest to the overall groove. This could be as simple as a 'yeah' sound or an 'uh' sound from a hip-hop track (hip-hop intros are usually full of these sounds) and these can add a surprising amount of energy to the groove if used well. Just once every 8 or 16 bars can really give things a lift. On a similar tack, the intros and outros to RnB tracks (especially by female singers) often tend to be full of adlibs, featuring simple or extravagant 'ooh's and 'aah's. Load these into a sampler so that you can re-pitch them to suit the key of your track, and you suddenly have loads of little melodic motifs that can be used for hooks or to harmonise with your existing melodies.A very 'current' way of using vocal samples is to chop them up into loads of little short sounds, map them across the keyboard, and then 'play' them to create a new melody (which of course doesn't really make any sense lyrically). First demonstrated back in the 1990's by the likes of Todd Edwards, then completely recontextualised in style by Burial, and since copied by every Future Garage producer from here to Croydon, this technique may soon be rather passé, but there are still original options; avoiding burying everything in reverb will certainly help.
Vocoders offer a whole wealth of fun opportunities. They're the effects units that create the 'robotic' effect and are usually pretty simple to set up; put one on your vocal track and then assign an input signal, rather like selecting a sidechain input on a compressor. The vocal will then be modulated by the input signal; so if you put a chord sound in, you'll get the classic 70's synthy vocal effect. Great for funk and soul or disco influenced tracks. Alternatively, combine with the 'chopped' technique mentioned above for some seriously other-worldy vibes. Then if you bang some heavy effects such as reverb or ring modulation on the results, you can create spacey atmospheric effects that scarcely resemble the human voice at all, but give an instant sci-fi feel to your beats.
We shouldn't let this article pass without mentioning spoken word samples. In general, these have been somewhat played out - from portentous, deep-sounding vocals over the breakdowns in progressive house, to the kind of snappy shout beloved of dubstep heads before their track drops into the filthy bass, to the motivational stuff about Jack's house you still sometimes hear in house music, this is a territory that has been well explored already. However, they're popular because they do work - so don't be put off digging deep in the archives for radio interviews, live footage and the like, as you can still unearth some gems. Just don't touch Martin Luther King!So, it should be clear that using vocal samples doesn't just mean mashups and remixes - you can use them in any number of ways to find inspiration, add energy to your tracks and give things a new flavour without having to turn to yet another softsynth. So give your beats a new lease of life by grabbing some packs and acappellas and getting busy with the sampler!
Ready to make your tunes more vocal? Check out our vocal packs here!
