With the ongoing love affair between pop, hip-hop and dance music, there has never been a time when the vocal track has been so popular in underground dance music. So read on for some production tips on how to fit a vocal into your own beats... From dubstep to deep house, from layering an acapella on your future garage track to recording a full session, everyone's looking to vocal music in 2011, and it's not hard to see why. With dubsteppers like Rusko and Benga troubling the charts, and producers like L-Vis1990 grafting R'n'B vibes onto house tracks, we may even have a genuine trend on our hands.
So what are the main points to make your vocal stand out? There are a few things that need to be addressed, but first off, the mistake that your author sees most often is that the vocal is simply too quiet. Pay attention next time you're in a busy shop, for instance, and a Rihanna or Beyonce tune comes on to the crappy house system. Over the background noise, what can you hear? Oftentimes, all that will be audible is a vocal, a hihat, maybe a little string line. The brightest elements, all pushed to the fore. If you're writing a vocal track, then the vocal will be what people latch onto, the bit that gets stuck in their brain, they'll be remembering the words. So you need to make it easy for them to pick out the vocal from the rest of the track. Err on the side of volume!
On a related note, you need to make sure the vocals are crisp and bright; plenty of top on there. This is less essential for backing vocals and harmonies, but in general you need to remember that your lead vocal will be jostling for space amongst the hihats and lead lines; so it needs to have plenty of high frequency content. In addition to vocals you've recorded yourself, I often find that acappellas downloaded from the internet can be recorded from vinyl, and lose some clarity in the process, so even with ready-recorded vocals you might need to add some top back on. Similarly, if you're working in strongly electronic fields, you'll need to compress the vocal fairly heavily. Of course, sometimes you want a natural feel to the track; but in this age of slamming basslines, searing leads, vocoders and overdubs, 'natural' tends to be restricted to Norah Jones records. You need the vocal not just to sit up front, but stay there, so get that compressor fired up. Fast attacks, medium release, hard knee, taking off anything up to 10 or even 15dB. If you've recorded several takes, then it's good to layer them up to get a thicker, bigger sound. Pan a couple centrally, then have one to the left and one to the right for a really full atmosphere. But - and this is a big, tedious, important but - you need to make sure they're fully in time with each other. That means down to the level of individual words; even syllables - because if they're not, the result will just be a mess. Like having your drums slightly out of time, the impact will be lost. So this means you may need to go right in and edit your vocals word by word to line them up. It's a long and drawn out process, and possibly one of the most boring procedures in music production, but it's necessary.
Effects can be very useful on vocals, and used well can really bring a track to life. A good example is Magnetic Man's track 'I Need Air'. A fairly straightforward vocal, mainly on one note, is given a metallic texture in the verses with heavy use of a vocoder, and in the choruses with reverb and delay; while variety is provided with flangers, phasers, glitched edits, extreme reverb settings and so on. Without all this processing the vocal would be in danger of becoming dull; especially as it's a fairly wispy sounding recording with no backing tracks and few adlibs. Luckily, clever production techniques keep it engaging until the end.
Effects can also be used to 'rescue' a vocal somewhat - subtle use of an autotune can correct out of tune singers, chorus can beef up a thin sounding vocal track, and one of the most popular recovery tools is a good de-esser. Use these to cut out sections when your vocalist is overemphasising 'ss' sounds to create a harsh sibilance. A de-esser is essentially a frequency sensitive compressor; and getting good results is rather an inexact science.The Sony Oxford de-esser comes highly recommended, but if you can't afford one of those then try your DAW's native option. Sibilance is usually around the 6-8kHz region, but you'll need to do some fine tuning. If it doesn't get the required result, then you can fall back on the long way - draw in some volume or EQ automation by hand. You can even try a standard compressor, set up to sidechain off a buss, where the buss contains just the vocal track tightly bandpassed around the offending frequency range. It's a convoluted solution, but if it gets the result you need, it's as valid as any other!
Production of vocals is a big subject to tackle in one article, but it's important to get to grips with if you're going to write the next chart smash. So don't wait around - dig out that microphone and get moving!
