Adventure Thing #71 - "Burning It Down" Vocal Tuning (Patreon)

Chomreabsuor Anakaphsaangopreng!

In our last adventure thing, we shared a bit of behind-the-scenes vocal tracking by showing a clip of comping the "Burning It Down" lead vocal.

However, the other main piece that goes into making a great modern lead vocal (in most genres of music) is tuning.

Auto-tune can be used as a pejorative term, because when the technology first came out it was super heavy-handed, and is also sometimes deliberately pushed overboard to create that "auto-tune effect" (think Cher's "Do You Believe In Life After Love" or T-Pain's entire oeuvre). 

However, the bulk of the modern lead vocals you hear out there in the world (again, not in every genre of music, but in many of them) have been subtly tuned to some extent to make them sit well to a modern ear.

In this video, you can see Noam using Melodyne to nudge some of my notes up or down a bit, preserving the overall character of the note but locking it solidly into key. 

I'm happy to report that we are basically done with vocal tracking, and working on final arrangement tweaks this weak before going into mixing.

I know I've been teasing this for a month now, but by next Monday I should have everything all set up to collect your vocal tracks for "While We're Still Young", so expect instructions then!