Adventure Thing #70 - "Burning It Down" Vocal Comping Vid (Patreon)

Zdravo, Pustolov!

As we near the tail end of vocal tracking, I thought it would be interesting to share some more of the nuts-and-bolts elements that actually go into getting a final lead vocal take in a modern studio setting.

This isn't how every genre of music is made, and purists still do fun things like going straight to analog tape, but many studios follow a process somewhat similar to the one I'll show you here in video form.

The first element is doing a bunch of takes - in this case what we're looking at on the screen is 5 different takes stacked one on top of the other (and I did far more than that, but these 5 were ones we all thought had good stuff in them).

From there, the next step is usually what's called 'comping' - and that's what you can see in this video. Noam is going through line by line and selecting out the best version of each section or line to keep in the top track, which is known as the comp (I think it's derived from the word compiling).

After this, the next step for us is tuning - it's one of those things that used to be very controversial back in the day when Autotune first came out and it was generally very obvious, but nowadays it's just an invisible and expected part of how vocal tracking is done in many genres of music. I'll post video of that next week!