Working with accapellas and sampled vocals

Level: Advanced
Posted: 15.07.07

Over the years through the various people I have taught, eventually at some point as your production skills develop you will want to start including some sort of vocal element within your tracks. Now this could be a full blown song with verse/chorus structure or a 4 bar line from a Hip Hop accapella for example. Depending on how you use a vocal performance, getting it to fit in time and in key with your track will involve some sort of time-stretching and pitch-shifting.

So it might appear that getting that wicked accapella you just napped of the net into time and working with your track is a few mouse clicks away. Although this can be the case, all the people that I have explained the above too have got it wrong and come back saying they cant get it to fit properly etc! So I will try and breakdown the way its always worked for me using Logic 7, although these principles will apply to any other DAW pretty much.

1) Listen to the Accapella.

I know it seems daft, but you really need to get a feel for the vocals and the rhythm first of all. This is ok if you already know the original song well, but usually I find ill be trying a lot of different random accapellas, where I don't really know the material that well, but like the sound of the voice/performance.

2) Get a click track or beat together.

Heres the next step, you will need to find out what the exact tempo/BPM of the accapella is. Now since most songs dont come with this information we are going to need to work it out ourselves. This will require bringing up a click track so that we can try and work out the tempo within the DAW. I actually find it better to say program a Hi Hat or even better a simple beat. Its more inspiring and less clinical than a click track to work out the tempo of our vocals.

3) Finding the start point of the vocals

This where things get a little bit tricky and this is the vital key to getting your vocals in time properly. Not every vocal will match bar 1 with the start of your waveform. In fact most vocals start a little before the first beat of the bar. Let me give you example, take Shy FX's "Everyday". The vocal goes "Everyday all we hear is a gunshot....". You want to match up the word "day" on Bar 1, as the word "Every" comes before the start of bar 1. Sing it to yourself and you will see what I mean. Hence why step 1 was getting a feel for the song your trying to stretch.

4) Moving the tempo

Now we know that we have the song starting correctly on bar 1, we will now need to establish the tempo of the accapella. Much of this is guess work at first. For example if its a House accapella you know it will be in the region of 120-140 BPM, if it was Hip Hop it could be between 70-115 BPM. So first of all take a rough guess and try and match the song tempo in your DAW to the accapella. Listen to the beat, does it seem to fast for the vocals or too slow? Its a bit like mixing 2 records together, you get a feeling for what needs to be slowed down or sped up etc. This stage is not easy and may take a bit of time to get right, but gets easier the more you do it. One thing that I can say is in my experience no vocal is usually is dead on a BPM. For example when you think you have it about sounding right, the vocal is rarely dead on 135BPM, it will be more like 135.60BPM. So play around with the tempo and then go into finer detail, so your going between say 135 and 136 BPM.

5) Double checking

Hopefully you should have the accapella syncing nicely with your beat. One more thing before we can start to time-stretch is to double check the vocals are dead on through out the track. You probably checked maybe the first 16 bars to check they were in time and then assumed the rest of the song would stay in sync. But unless its dead on the tempo will fluctuate through out a 4min song. So double check it say 3mins into the vocals and just check wether its out a little, maybe it requires a very slight increase or decrease of tempo.

6) Stretch that Mutha!!!

So finally this is the easy bit where you let your computer do the hard work! Now we know the exact tempo of the original vocal, so we can tell the computer to stretch by entering the original tempo and the final desired speed . Getting a quality time-stretch is all down to the stretching algorithm you use. Cubase and Ableton both have excellent audio warping, Logic's isn't so good, so I use Izotope's excellent radius plug in to get round this. Finding the tempo of the accapella and lining it up in the sequencer can take a while, but gets easier with practice. This is generally something I wouldn't do whilst working on a song, but on a pre-production session where I would try and attempt to get a number of vocals all ready at my tempo of choice......

 

 

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