The main vocal ideas are in place, with just a few spots to finesse and fill in. Once the takes are in place, ill adds processing and effects to the vocals to enhance each section and create atmosphere.
See how ill Factor:
Write the ending line of the pre-chorus
Stack harmonies on the pre-chorus
Explains which warping algorithm to use when adjusting vocals in Ableton Live
Discusses treating the vocals during production before mixing even when passing off to another engineer like Jimmy Douglass
Breaks down his thought process behind vocal processing and effects
Talks about listening to what the artist is naturally doing while listening to playback and adding those ideas during the vocal production
Sidechains delays and effects to the vocal to duck them while the vocal is happening and bloom when finished
Automates filters on the delays to add movement to the effect tail
Watch ill Factor, produce "Light Shine Through" from Jared Evan. Only on pureMix.net
00:00:49 Alright?
Let me tweak it a little.
Because I think I can...
00:01:04 So then, we can keep it...
00:01:14 And just shorten that last part there.
00:01:16 So, keep that 'curl' on the 'Pre', right?
That's it, that's it.
00:01:32 Let's put that down.
00:01:33 Alright, dope.
00:01:35 I think...
"We just wanna forget what it's like."
And that's it.
00:01:41 Just to make sure...
00:01:48 That's dope. Let's put it down.
00:01:51 Shall us Coldplay it real quick?
No.
00:02:07 Dope.
00:02:08 My 'ks' might be a little...
00:02:09 Let me hear the...
00:02:14 Is it too hard?
Should I do it softer?
Yeah.
00:02:17 It's a little too.
00:02:19 Because we're about to
transition into that other...
00:02:22 Yeah, we can't overplay.
00:02:34 Dope, dope.
00:02:36 Let's double that lead on the 'Pre'.
00:02:41 I'm gonna bring this back down here.
00:02:43 'Pre Doubles'.
00:02:53 Yeah, right from there.
00:03:20 Let me do that line.
00:03:30 Let me punch 'like'.
00:03:38 Alright, let's double the whole lead.
00:04:08 Dope. Let me check that out.
00:04:11 Lows too.
00:04:47 Alright, cool. I wanna see what
this is like coming out of the rap.
00:04:52 So, let's go over here.
00:04:54 Alright.
00:04:55 And get this a nice little
purple.
00:04:59 We'll color you purple.
00:05:02 And, let's see...
00:05:31 There's the star, there's the star.
00:05:34 And how did you sneak on the bus?
This is the wrong guy.
00:05:39 He's not supposed to be there.
00:05:41 'You're supposed to be working today.'
Alright, here we go.
00:06:10 Alright. So, you wanna
put those harmonies in?
-Yes.
-Alright.
00:06:16 And you got harmonies too, right?
I always get harms.
00:06:21 'Harm farms'.
00:06:23 Alright, in that second 'Pre'.
00:06:27 Alright, we'll take you
from the top of that 'Pre'.
00:06:29 Just go to right there because
I don't wanna forget that.
00:06:32 Let me just put one down.
Play it.
00:06:43 Again.
00:06:56 Double that... That was the one.
00:06:58 Yeah.
00:07:09 -Beautiful.
-Alright, dope.
00:07:10 Beatles.
00:07:12 Shout-out.
00:07:21 Alright, cool. And then left to right.
00:07:58 I've put these in the wrong place,
so these are supposed to go here.
00:08:17 Let me put that down.
00:08:19 The what?
I'll double that.
00:08:42 That should have a low too.
00:08:46 Go for it. Ready?
OK. Double that.
00:09:09 Alright señor.
00:09:10 Yeah, that's good. I'm trying to just
get the landscape of
the vocals, where they're at,
and then I'm gonna start
infiltrating with some vocal production
and things like that with the harmonies.
00:10:06 Let me just listen from the top,
see where we're at.
00:10:09 We doubled everything that
needs to be doubled, right?
Yeah, for the most part.
Then I'd like to go through,
give some 'ad libs', stuff like that.
00:10:18 Oh, you could also...
00:10:21 Like, in the beginning
you flipped the sample filter-wise,
you can now do that with my Hook vocal.
00:10:26 You know what I mean?
And have it come alive gradually.
00:10:46 I'm feeling...
00:10:50 It doesn't need it on everything.
00:10:55 It needs it there.
00:11:57 I'll fix that there.
00:12:39 Alright, cool.
00:12:41 One thing, sorry,
in my rap, can you play from my rap?
There's something I would like
for you to nudge to the left a little.
00:12:48 So, let me set a marker and I'll call this
'Rap verse'.
00:12:58 OK...
00:12:59 Can you just take 'night'
and move it a little to the left?
This is just a hint late.
00:13:08 -'Overnight'?
-No, just 'night'.
00:13:10 Not the 'over'.
00:13:15 OK, at the end.
00:13:17 Bring that to the left a little.
00:13:19 Just that word.
00:13:20 Cool.
00:13:21 Thank you.
00:13:22 He's asking me to nudge
something over to the left
and I'm going to be using
my warp markers in Ableton Live
and the word he's looking for
is this right here, 'night'.
00:13:30 You see, slightly off the grid.
00:13:32 So I'm going to nudge this to the left.
00:13:47 You could still move
it a little to the left.
00:13:51 Like that.
00:13:52 There you go.
00:14:02 Yeah, it sounds good.
00:14:03 But what sounds wrong is the 'it's', now.
00:14:12 The 'it's' could me a little...
00:14:15 It just sounds it's like,
there is a punch sound, a little bit.
00:14:21 Better.
00:14:24 So what I did was
I unwarped
that part of the audio.
00:14:28 By default Ableton will
enable the audio to be warped.
00:14:32 So, this gives me the ability to
actually nudge audio,
correct any timing.
00:14:36 I personally love the workflow
of having the audio vocals warped
because there's a lot of
stuff I can do
which in the vocal production
things will be really cool.
00:14:46 But sometimes when you nudge them
the artifacts and the algorithms,
specifically when you
have 'Beats' mode on
is very noticeable.
00:14:53 So, it's always good that when
you're warping vocals
you use the 'Complex Pro'.
00:14:57 That is the best setting to have when
altering any type of warping
when it comes to vocals.
00:15:03 So you could see,
the moment you nudge anything
you start to see the transient artifacts
that Ableton Live will try to replicate,
plays it forward and backward.
00:15:12 So, always use 'Complex Pro' when
you're adjusting timing on vocal.
00:15:18 I'm gonna do that now, hit 'Complex Pro'.
00:15:26 -That's better, right?
-Absolutely.
00:15:28 Alright, cool.
00:15:29 Right man, I think I've got some...
00:15:31 The good bones here, the vocals
we'll start tweaking and adding
some sauce on everything.
00:15:37 -Sounds good?
-Absolutely.
00:15:38 Now that I've got the bones
of the vocal arrangement,
which is really good,
we've got some pretty good takes that
we're happy with,
I'm now going to add
some vocal processing.
00:15:50 And it helps me and also
Jared here,
as we're listening and playing back.
00:15:55 It actually puts me in a better
state of mind
when I'm doing a little of
processing to the vocals,
getting them to shine
and jump out a little bit
when adding production.
00:16:04 Not all the time, but in this case
I wanna kind of get
the vocal sounding good
and also it helps Jared,
when playing it over and over again,
that the vocal sound good, right?
So I'm gonna do a
little bit of processing,
even though we're gonna
handle this over to mix
we wanna create the energy
and that's important too.
00:16:21 I'm going after a specific
type of energy and vibe
and when I'm handing that over to
Jimmy or anyone to mix
I'm passing the baton to them,
I'm not having them reinvent the wheel,
I'm not saying:
'OK, here's where I got it, erase all that
and then you try to
match what I did and
then take it further.'
That's not what we're trying to do.
00:16:43 We wanna incorporate any mixing engineer
into the process of
enhancing where we left off.
00:16:48 I think that's really important.
00:16:50 That's what I'm gonna do now,
I wanna treat the vocals a little bit
and I know that my vocal arrangement
is a bit unorthodox, it's a little messy,
but it's like that
because I wanna be able to be
flexible with dropping
harmonies in or doing whatever
and then, when we've got everything we need
I can arrange this in a
way that makes sense.
00:17:05 So, like I said,
I've got a group of lead vocals here,
all these vocal tracks in white,
I typically like to have my
lead vocals in white here.
00:17:13 This group track,
that's where I'll be doing the processing,
that's gonna affect
all of the lead vocals.
00:17:18 Let's start with a little bit of EQ
and maybe take away some of that low end.
00:17:24 I'm gonna take it from the first verse.
00:17:31 I like kind of starting my
EQ from the top or the right
and going down rather than
from the bottom, going up.
00:17:37 It's more noticeable for me
to change in the making.
00:17:55 So, I'm using a high-pass here,
only letting the highs
pass, that means,
just eliminating the low-end here.
00:18:02 Because I really don't need
any of that rumble here
but I don't wanna take away too much.
00:18:06 As I mentioned before,
I wanna go from the right down.
00:18:15 That sounds pretty good there
and what I like to do is just boost,
find some frequencies that are
a bit just weird for me
and then,
when I find it while boosting it,
I will just cut.
00:18:29 OK, I want it right there,
at 2500 Hz.
00:18:33 Usually 2 kHz for me is that...
00:18:37 That area.
00:18:38 So, I'm boosting it,
now I'm gonna dip it.
00:18:40 I'll take about 3 or 4 dB.
00:18:46 And then just add a little
bit of shine here.
00:18:52 That's cool there.
Then I'll go ahead and use
a compressor.
Let's see, I like using
the LA-2A.
00:19:02 Where are you? Here we go.
00:19:04 So I'll use this here.
00:19:15 So, I need to fix that right there,
you can hear some of the edits
that are going on.
00:19:22 So, I wanna make sure
that's a smooth transition.
00:19:26 So, let's go in here and...
00:19:30 When you're doing
these kind of cuts there,
you can see, as I move this along,
the timing of certain words are
overlapping each other.
00:19:37 So, you gotta make sure you're
choosing the right place to cut
these words here.
00:19:42 So, right there is good because
when I look at the old previous take,
the beginning of this word is right here.
00:19:48 And so, what I wanna do
is make sure that the
new word that we do like
is in the right place.
00:19:54 And then I'm gonna go
ahead and crossfade this.
00:19:57 So, in Ableton Live
you can simply crossfade
from one region to the other when
you go to the beginning of that region
and you drag the top over to the
previous or the region next to it
and it automatically crossfades it.
00:20:08 So, let's see if that
makes a smoother transition.
00:20:13 Still a little weird.
00:20:16 So I might need to
find a spot and
usually what's gonna be helpful
is just 'mind' over a little bit
and then do the crossfade there.
00:20:29 And I also wanna unwarp this,
you can hear it a little bit on the
beginning here.
00:20:39 So, right there.
00:20:43 Alright, that's a little better.
00:20:47 That's much better.
00:20:48 So, once I get that in,
let me go back to listening to the vocal
with the rest of the track.
00:21:00 Alright,
let me just do some de-essing here.
00:21:03 I'm gonna use the Waves DeEsser.
00:21:06 So,
tuning, we've got the tuning first,
just doing a little bit of
clean tuning in real-time, Waves EQ.
00:21:14 There's some compression just
to even out the dynamics,
just to smooth that out a little bit
and then we're gonna use a de-esser.
00:21:22 I'm gonna put the side-chain
so I can hear
and just focus in on the frequency
that I want to de-ess.
00:21:28 And let's solo this.
00:21:33 I'll start off with just
going around 6 kHz.
00:21:36 Around there.
00:21:37 And instead of a high-pass
I'm gonna go ahead and go to
the band-pass.
00:21:42 So, it's putting more focus on that area,
that frequency there.
00:21:49 We notice that we see
less attenuation happening.
00:21:53 When I go to the high-pass here
there's a lot more compression happening.
00:21:59 So, I'm gonna do
just a little bit of that,
there.
00:22:03 And I'm gonna add another de-esser.
00:22:06 So, I'm actually gonna
double this up,
so I have one de-esser doing that
and then maybe use this other
de-esser here
to go somewhere around maybe
8 kHz or something like that.
00:22:16 And let's just solo that.
00:22:20 And that one I'll have on the high-pass.
00:22:23 So, let's put this both on audio,
make sure that both are on audio.
00:22:29 And that sounds a little
bit too much on that...
00:22:40 Let's bypass
what we've done so far.
00:22:43 So I'm gonna group this all up together
by hitting the Cmd+G button
and that's gonna create and audio FX rack
which allows me to
bypass them all together
with the bypass button here for the group.
00:23:07 So I think the de-esser is just doing
a little bit too much
for my taste right now.
00:23:16 So, that's cool there.
00:23:17 And then,
I'm gonna add a
little bit sizzle to that,
I wanna go use the Maag EQ,
that's on there, the 'plug-in alliance',
this, right here.
00:23:27 And I'm gonna give some air.
00:23:29 And bump
why not 40?
I don't know.
00:23:32 Let's see what that does.
00:23:49 And now let's listen to this.
00:24:04 So, let's just check it out,
this is with the music,
no plug-ins.
00:24:27 Crazy.
00:24:28 I got that.
00:24:29 I think the vocal is in a good place.
00:24:31 Now, that's kind of a good
place for me to leave it there
and just hang with
but the effect processing,
such as like reverb, delay.
00:24:38 What's the texture that
I'm gonna add to this vocal?
What's the character that this
vocal is going to have?
This is kind of like,
the vocal just took a bath
but what's the suit that
I'm gonna put on the vocal.
00:24:50 Or what kind of vocals
we're gonna wear.
00:24:52 So, let's create our return track here.
00:24:54 I love that analogy.
00:24:55 Unbelievable.
00:25:00 I really like using the doubler here,
or sometimes like a room.
00:25:03 I just wanna experiment and
see what we come up with
so I'll use the Valhalla Room plug-in
and let's just add a new return track,
which is 'D'.
00:25:17 So I'm gonna use this in a weird way,
I'll bring the decay all the way down,
I'll kind of treat it as a slap-back,
not a large room.
00:25:26 Maybe a little something
smaller.
00:25:28 Very subtle.
00:25:30 Yeah, let's try this one.
00:25:36 It's a really tight room.
00:25:46 It's kind of cool.
00:25:51 Dope.
00:25:52 That's probably neat,
so I'll leave that there
and then maybe put like
another verb here for,
like a bigger plate.
00:26:01 Let's use this one.
00:26:09 And for this plate here
I'm gonna use an EQ
and I'm going to EQ the actual
out of this reverb.
00:26:16 I want it a little bit warmer.
00:26:19 The less high-end you have on something
the warmer it is
and usually that gives you the
sense that it is further back in the mix.
00:26:26 At least for me personally.
00:26:27 So, I wanna warm up
the reverb a little bit.
00:26:33 Like, for instance,
when I put all the high-end back in.
00:26:40 So, let's dull that up a little bit.
00:26:51 Cool, let's give them
a little bit of delay love.
00:26:54 Do I have anything on 'C'?
Yeah,
I've got a quarter note delay on 'C'.
00:27:04 So, that's gonna be my
effect. That's gonna be more of
an actual effect to have
as a part of the melody,
not just necessarily for like, texture.
00:27:19 Something like that, right?
Let's just go show
automation to that delay.
00:27:24 And let's find those cue points
where we're gonna draw that in.
00:27:30 Right there.
00:27:30 So, I'm just gonna highlight the section.
00:27:32 Notice that, over here, on the right,
right underneath 'Lead Vocals',
we're currently in our automation view.
00:27:38 And I can access that by hitting
the A button on my key command.
00:27:42 You wanna make sure
that you don't have this little piano roll
highlighted
because that means you're currently
turning your computer keyboard
to an actual MIDI controller.
00:27:50 So, disable that.
00:27:52 And now, by hitting the 'A' button,
I can toggle back and forth
between our automation view
and our regular view here.
00:27:59 Automation view is where
a lot of the magic happens.
00:28:02 So, here is our mixer
we're in the mixer category,
return send C for the echo
and I'm just gonna highlight that section
I love automating in Ableton,
it's really easy.
00:28:13 And then just bring this up,
just for that note there.
00:28:20 I'm gonna need a lot more.
00:28:27 So I'm missing that first word here.
00:28:29 I'm gonna include that right there.
00:28:31 Alright, let's check this out.
00:28:36 And that's cool. That's dope.
00:28:38 I'm feeling that,
and let's go to that send track here
and let's set it to ping-pong
so it's giving more of that
left and right feel.
00:28:48 I'll open the bottom end a little bit here
and let's add some more feedback.
00:28:53 And I'm gonna slightly nudge
the timing of my right signal.
00:29:04 Same thing here.
00:29:06 We're gonna do that right here
with the delay.
00:29:16 Yeah, there you go.
00:29:18 I've been hearing Jared sing it
on its own
and obviously,
the artist feels like
it's gotta be there, right?
So, these FX, this automation
that I'm doing is actually a part of,
an extension of his idea,
it's an extension of his melody,
an extension of what he envisions
to be present there
so I wanna respect that
and I also feel like it
should be there too.
00:29:40 So, it should vibe there as well.
00:29:42 So, let's check out this part.
00:29:51 And so we can do a little bit of it here,
as well.
00:29:54 So I'm just picking and
choosing certain spots
that are gonna accent that with the FX.
00:30:00 But you gotta make sure that
you capture the whole word there.
00:30:14 That's gonna be really
cool there with the delay.
00:30:19 I'm gonna give it a doubler,
I'm gonna widen up
his vocal a little bit.
00:30:23 So I'm gonna go ahead and type in doubler.
00:30:26 I'm looking in my 'Plug-ins'
and then we've got the Waves
Doubler stereo.
00:30:31 'Double4Stereo'.
I'm gonna create another return track
and put it right here under E.
00:30:38 Now, the reason why I'm
using these return tracks
and sends rather than
putting the Doubler on there,
I might experiment,
sometimes I'll just put a Doubler
directly on to the Lead Vocal
and have it be a part of the signature,
the actual
DNA of the vocal
but
I wanna be able to control
the balance between this
and you could do that
here in 'Direct' and dry
but I also might wanna
use the same plug-in
on other vocal tracks.
00:31:04 So, rather than dropping the same
doubler on multiple different tracks
I wanna save some resource and CPU
so I'm putting the
Doubler on a return track.
00:31:12 That way I can free up some of
my processing by having multiple
sends to one plug-in.
00:31:19 That's pretty cool and important.
00:31:21 Notice that I'm taking the direct signal off
on this doubler
because I'm getting the direct signal here.
00:31:27 So, here we have the regular
signal of the vocal, the dry.
00:31:34 So, let's listen to the vocal
and now I'm gonna crank up send E,
which is my doubler.
00:31:46 Now, one thing I wanna do,
I don't want that delay
to just jump immediately out
so I'm gonna do something cool here,
that delay is on C
and what I'm gonna do
is place a compressor
after the delay. Let's do that.
00:32:00 Because what I wanna do,
the reason why I'm doing that is I want
the lead vocal to side-chain.
00:32:05 So to cause the delay
to duck out of the way
until it's done being heard
and then delay can come into the party.
00:32:12 So, again, the whole
vocal putting on a suit thing,
you know, the vocal is taking a shower
and the doesn't want the delay to see him
so he's saying:
'Just wait until I get out to be hear'.
00:32:21 I don't know if it makes sense for you
but it kind of does for me.
00:32:24 Here's the compressor,
I'm gonna side-chain,
click the side-chain option,
choose side-chain and now
we need a source to determine
what's causing this compressor
to get it out of the way.
00:32:34 In this case
it's gonna be lead vocal.
00:32:36 So it's the lead vocal bus.
00:32:38 I'm gonna actually put in
'Lead Vocal Bus',
that way it's easier for me to find,
as you saw there,
when I scroll through certain things.
00:32:45 So now we have this delay
and let's adjust the side-chain.
00:32:59 Listen to it now without the compressor.
00:33:12 It's breathing now.
00:33:14 Yeah, it creeps in and
that's kind of what I want,
I wanna make sure it's not jumping in
while the vocal is happening.
00:33:20 So, that's a pretty cool
trick that you can do
with reverb, delays,
your neighbor's John Cleta,
which is a sandal,
whatever.
But, it gets the job done.
00:33:57 So now I've got some basic
bones there in place.
00:34:01 I can start applying
some of the FX processing
on the Pres and the background vocals.
00:34:05 I'm just using this as a placeholder
for me to kind of vibe with and listen to
because I wanna go
back into the production
and some more bells and whistles.
00:34:13 Let's go to these 'Pres'.
00:34:18 I like adding some more verb on those,
some doubling.
00:34:21 We can put some of the
quarter note delay on there
and my return track E is the doubler
and D is our room.
00:34:29 So, I'll just give it a little
bit of that slap back room.
00:34:36 And I'm also gonna
treat this a little bit.
00:34:38 So, I'm gonna just repeat this process,
both for the Pre doubles,
the background doubles and the harmonies.
00:34:42 Just give them a good starting point.
00:34:45 And then focus in on the production.
00:34:48 So let me go and do that now.
Let's go in my 'Plug-ins, Collections'.
00:34:51 I'm gonna do the same thing.
00:34:53 I'm gonna use the EQ here.
00:34:59 Just high-passing about 220 Hz.
00:35:02 For me it's really just stopping
at what's gonna feel good.
00:35:05 What energy is getting across.
00:35:07 I don't wanna get loss
in numbers too much
because then you're
really mixing with your eyes.
00:35:16 It's sounds like 'Cream'.
00:35:22 Remember what I did earlier?
How I boosted a signal I didn't like
and brought it down?
That's kind of what I'm doing here,
I'm just repeating that process,
putting a little bit of
some shimmer there.
00:35:32 And then I'm going to do compressor here.
00:35:35 I might actually use
the RComp for this.
00:35:38 And this is a compressor from Waves,
I'll use RComp Stereo.
00:35:48 I'm just getting this now,
remember the attack is
how quick is this compressor
gonna react.
00:35:53 I want the lead to be more in the front.
00:35:56 I want the lead to have all the action,
all the punchiness, the transients,
all that, to come from the lead.
00:36:01 And these are decisions
that I'm making with the artist
because we're trying to after a vibe
then later on if someone is gonna step in
and mix it they are gonna enhance that.
00:36:10 I'm after a certain vibe,
a particular feel
from this right now so that
that's the foundation
that's gonna be built on.
00:36:18 So I want this to be like,
more like haunting,
a little further in the back.
00:36:23 So, I don't mind the attack...
00:36:24 No, it's dope, it sounds great.
00:36:30 Back over here.
00:36:31 And let's go with our DeEsser Stereo.
00:36:35 Same thing.
00:36:40 I'm gonna leave the high-pass on here.
00:36:45 And see what that sounds like.
00:37:04 So now let's go back to that,
creating more of the
energy that we did before.
00:37:10 Let's go and automate
some more of that delay stuff.
00:37:13 Did you do like 8th notes on the...?
Maybe not...
That, yeah...
00:37:21 I mean, play with it.
00:37:23 So let's do this.
00:37:27 Like, some could be different.
00:37:28 Some could half notes,
some could be... You know?
So I'm gonna do the same thing here,
Audio FX,
Time & Space,
we'll use the delay.
00:37:39 This will be just the 8th note.
00:37:41 And you could ping-pong it,
you know what I mean?
Yeah.
00:37:51 Alright. So, that's gonna be
my crazy delay.
00:37:56 And I wanna automate that
so that it sweeps up.
00:37:58 Yeah, do some craziness.
00:38:02 So let's highlight that,
automate this right here.
00:38:08 So, it's coming in a little too late.
I need the downbeat.
00:38:16 I want that down to be evident.
00:38:18 Let's put that here.
Let's raise it up.
00:38:23 Alright,
let's extend the feedback a little bit.
00:38:28 And, ping-pong.
00:38:32 Let's take it off ping-pong
and let's automate.
This delay comes with a filter built-in
so what I wanna do is
show the automation here.
00:38:40 And do something
like this for this section.
00:38:45 So, raise it up.
00:38:48 This is will filter up.
00:38:56 So,
it kind of just fades out a little bit.
00:39:04 That's kind of cool there.
00:39:06 And let's give a little
bit more bite to that.
00:39:08 So, I'm going to
add a little pedal
but I'll do it before the FX.
00:39:24 And, just an EQ after the delay
and make sure there's
no crazy low-end stuff.
00:39:33 So this might be a little bit like
too much.
00:39:43 Let's see what that sounds like
with everybody now.
00:39:51 Cool, maybe we just need
to open up the 'Q' a little more.
00:40:00 -Cool.
-I'm digging that.
00:40:02 Yeah, that's pretty dope,
let's bring this up a little bit here.
00:40:15 The 'down' is still getting lost for me
so I'm going to
maybe switch it to 'ping-pong'.
00:40:28 So,
it's coming in right at the next phrase.
00:40:31 So, I gotta make sure that
it comes back down like this.
00:40:34 ill, did we do lows for this?
-I don't think we did.
-No, but I'm gonna do...
00:40:39 Artificial lows.
00:40:45 So, here's my 'Low Vox' track,
and what I'm gonna do is go to my lead,
I'm gonna take this 'Pre Lead' here
I'm gonna copy them down to
my Low Vox.
00:40:56 I like having a Low Vox track,
which I'm purposely
tweaking to get like a low octave.
00:41:04 Let's turn this on.
00:41:08 So, I can set this to Complex Pro
and then if I go to -12
this is going to the formants.
00:41:14 It's actually gonna pitch it down.
00:41:18 It actually kind of have him
singing an octave lower.
00:41:25 Sometimes it works, sometimes
I'll use Little Alter Boy
to see how that affects it.
00:41:30 So, I'll go here, 'Plug-ins',
'Soundtoys' and 'Little Alter Boy'
and put that on the 'Low Vox'.
00:41:37 I gotta go back to the audio
and set it back to its normal state.
00:41:43 Solo this.
00:41:44 And let's take a listen.
00:41:52 That's what I was talking about,
by the way, earlier.
00:42:06 Let's see what that sounds like.
00:42:07 And, I kind of wanna add
some chorus on it,
I'm hearing it,
just kind of
go a little wide.
00:42:14 So, let's check out this Chorus Ensemble.
00:42:21 Let's check this out.
00:42:49 Now I'm gonna focus on the Chorus.
00:42:51 Once I got the Verse, the Pre
and the Chorus set in a good place
and the rap vocal...
00:42:58 I'll focus attention on our big guy
or the loud vocal.
00:43:05 So, he's gonna be aggressive,
I'll just go like
'Loud Vox'.
00:43:10 Let's give him a nice little
reddish pink tomato color.
00:43:15 And this I wanna just kind
of crush a little bit.
00:43:18 So, I'm gonna go into my
Audio FX.
00:43:21 Let's go to our drive
and let's look at it,
it's one of my favorite plug-ins here.
00:43:31 Oh...
00:43:34 Don't worry, I got it all,
I'll figure it out.
00:43:43 Yeah, he pointed out,
we've got a weird note here.
00:43:46 So we got...
00:43:49 I'm just gonna highlight that
and pitch it down here.
00:43:53 And the stretch it out like that.
00:43:56 And then make sure that
this is set to 'Complex Pro'.
00:44:00 So, that fixes that issue.
00:44:03 And now let me see what this sounds like
with just the screamer and the lead.
00:44:13 Alright, cool.
00:44:15 We've got the lead, the Pre,
I'll add some of the same
processing from this Pre vocals
to the background vocals for now,
I'm just gonna hold 'Alt',
drag all these three plug-ins
into the background vocals.
00:44:27 Just for the sake of having them
in a good place.
00:44:30 Here's my thought behind all this.
00:44:32 What I'm trying to do is add life,
texture characteristics
to all these little vocals,
like I said, that just adds spice,
it makes homeboy back here
feel happy about his life
and also makes me feel energetic
and inspired
to add some more stuff to this.
00:44:46 Sometimes when just hear the
plain vocals it's like:
'Something is missing'.
And I might overcompensate that
by putting too much
production elements in there.
00:44:55 Because if the vocals
can just ride out
with just like the
piano chords and his vocals
we're good, right?
That's the heart of the song,
you know what I'm saying?
That's what I'm trying to go after here,
but I'm also some really
cool tricked out stuff that we can do
that I think will be
awesome to implement.
00:45:10 I don't wanna get ahead of myself here.
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Ivan Corraliza, professionally known as ill Factor, began creating music where most everyone begins, in the bedroom fueled by ambition and a dream to turn his hobby into a full-time job. Countless hours of music-making and tweaking led to some moments of frustration while trying to get his music noticed. However, everything changed when Ivan sought out a mentor and was blessed to be taken under the wing of Jimmy Douglass. Jimmy is a veteran in the music industry with more than forty-plus years of experience working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Justin Timberlake. He began sharing his network and insights into the Industry with Ivan, which helped Ivan create relationships with artists and industry professionals, turning his hobby of making music into a career.
