Manipulating Vocals

[F-Rank]

Hey y'all.

As the title says, I am not experienced with vocal manipulation, so I've been seeking knowledge here.

(Explanation would work best if given example is in FL Studio)

I know how to use the slicer for vocals, but I just doesn't seem to get the hang of it.

Any tips and tricks for me?

Cheers.

[FreakshowDJ]

By what do you mean "manupulating the vocals" ? Like adding a effect to it, loop shortening like Headhunterz or Gunz for Hire? Or do yuou mean like slicing it up and using it in a granular synth? EXPLAIN ME PLEASE!

[F-Rank]

If you don't mind then all of the above. Haven't worked with vocals before, so Explaining as much as possible would be great.

[FreakshowDJ]

Allright jehtz geht löss.

Loop effect.

If you are using FL Studio, put your vocal in Edison. Chose the part you want to loop, preferrably like the last word of a sentence or the last word of a punchline. Select the last part, but remember to not select thw whole word. I mostly only select like if you say, the last word is "word" you only select the "ord" part. Cut this part and open it in a new edison or cut away the rest of the vocal. Now type ctrl-A to select the whole sample of your freshly cutted vocal. Put the edison play mode on loop, and the vocal begins to loop. With your mouse you can shorten the loop by dragging the end of the loop point to the begin very smoothly. If you practise this, you get better results with it. Now open another edison, put it on record on input and go to the other edison where you did the loop stuff etc. Now start this loop, and do the trick with the loop dragging. The other Edison will record this all. Maybe you have to do it again, because it didn't go smoth the first time. Export the freshly recorded audio file and experiment with that. You can pitch control it, bitcrush, whatever you want.

Slicing it up.

You can put your whole vocal in slicex and start marking words you want to "chop" with regions. Now you can play around with these regions, like putting a 4 to the floor kick and just play around with the slicex chopped vocal (preferrably a MIDI keyboard or other midi controller). After that you can play around with a granular synth like Fruity Granulizer. I'm still experimenting with granular synthesis, so I can't give you much info about that. Just experiment.

Also i recommend you the free Madshifta plugin. It's a pitch shifter that does not change the tempo of your vocal. And always remember: EQ, Reverb, Delay, Widening the vocal, and eventually compress it to make it tighter.

I hope I helped you enough with this, if you have more quiestions you can contact me by e-mail: FreakshowDJ@gmail.com

[ljk32]

EDIT: Crap, didn't see the above post, his is probably easier to understand.

Well, it depends on what you want. I mean, there is only so much we can explain before you start experimenting yourself. But, one thing you can do is glitching up vocals which I love to do. Basically, you'd grab the entire vocal sample, or just a section from it, and drop it into Slicex(it has more capabilites than Fruity Slicer or w/e it's called). From there, the vocal can be sliced up into to sections, pitch shifted, filtered, panned and more. Though, I'm not sure how much you know in general about production, and the layout of Slicex, so I don't know if I should explain it all. Though, I'll link a video below. But basically, once the vocal is sliced into sections(I'm pretty sure you can edit the size of each section), each little(or big) section counts as a note in the piano roll. So, try adding a vocal into Slicex(you just drag and drop it). You'll hopefully notice that where the vocal is displayed is the same as Edison. Anyway, the forth button from the right(not the circular little buttons, the ones above that), right click it, and that's how you select the way that the audio is sliced. You can also move the slices yourself to get a particular section/vocal glitch that you really like. Above that, hopefully you have seen that section before, it's very similar to Sytrus. Basically, it's a bunch of modulation options for different things. For example, you can create a filter envelope, where a vocal glitch's cutoff follows the way you've set up the envelope. I really hope this makes sense, but I'm not sure how much you know. But yeah, there are also LFO's that can apply to the cutoff, panning, volume and more, so there are a lot of awesome things you can do. Other than vocal glitching, there are so many things you can do with vocals. Fruity Granulizer is pretty awesome, it can give you that vocal effect that you hear in Headhunterz - From Within, and heaps of other tracks. Again, you just drag and drop a vocal or vocal section into the plugin, press a note on the keyboard, and click and hold the 'HOLD' button at the bottom right and you will probably hear that stuttery effect(caused by a section of the vocal constantly looping at a fast speed). Then you can play around with the top 4 knobs to adjust the way the vocal loops, and stuff like that. Though, a lot of this stuff I just experiment with and get something sounding nice. Because the Granulizer is a type of sampler, you also have all the modulation possibilities that the Sampler has, allowing for a range of creative stuff you can do. But the most important thing is to just experiment with different knobs, including the ones you are unfamiliar with, and try to understand what they do. Eventually you should start to get an idea of how to get some cool effects. Vocoding is another awesome thing you can do, and you've most definitely heard it in a lot of tracks. I'm not gonna explain that one cause I'm not too sure how it works. Though, something I once heard, it's a quote I try to apply to my stuff : "Fuck the science, make noise." So basically, it isn't always necessary to understand exactly what is happening and why. All that matters is that something sounds good, so be creative and try experimenting with a lot of things. Don't stay confined to doing things one way. Anyway, here are some videos that may be helpful:

I hope this helps you understand Slicex(I didn't properly watch the video, but if it isn't helpful, there are definitely more tutorials on that plugin).



One for Fruity Granulizer:


And for vocoding(there's the Fruity Vocoder or the Vocodex, I'm not sure which is better cause I've never used them before):


I'm not expecting you to watch all these videos, but maybe try experimenting with stuff like I mentioned .

[FreakshowDJ]

Thanks man! Haha now the TS has two very clear tuts of how to do it. Just as ljk32 said, just experiment with the knobs, combine effects, sample them out and just do random things and if something is sounding cool, write it down how you did it!