 Black Friday has made some pretty cool vocal editing plugins available at a great price but before we take a look at them I want to play for you some vocals from one of my latest projects which are really in need of some tender loving care. Firstly the lead and harmony vocals have some timing issues with each other and if you listen through to the last note in this example there's some very definite pitch issues. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I'm going to be using two plugins today to fix these issues and because it's currently Black Friday season they're actually available as a bundle at a really great price. There's a link in the description down below for that. Now some of the things that we're going to be fixing could be done manually from within your door but I generally find that's very time consuming and a little bit frustrating so I'm always happy to use a plugin that will do things really quickly and efficiently and enable me to remain creative in my workflow. So let's start off by fixing the timing issues. Now both of the plugins that I'm going to show you today are available as VSTs however I'm going to be using them in ARA or ARA mode. Now this technology is available in many popular doors today including my two favorite doors Studio One and Cakewalk by Bandlab but check out the Synchro Arts webpage to see if your particular door is compatible. Now I happen to be using Studio One today however the process is going to be similar in most doors and I'm going to start off by using a plugin called Vocalign Ultra to fix the timing issues that we can both hear and see here. If you take a look here you can see how sort of staggered some of these vocal phrases are. Let's just play this little section so we can hear it. Yeah it's pretty bad and I think it's pretty bad further down here. Let's have a listen. Yeah we definitely want to fix all of that. So the first thing I'm going to do is just select all of the clips here or events as they're called in Studio One. I'm going to right click and go to Edit with Vocalign. So when I do that the Vocalign editor opens. There's nothing in there yet because we have to start off by telling Vocalign Ultra which is the main track, the guide track if you like. Now before I do that I like to make sure I've got one of the presets selected so I've already got one selected here which is Harmony Tight Timing. Okay so I want some tight timing on this. So I'm going to select the main vocal event at the top here and then I'm just going to go down and click on the Capture button. It just takes a moment and you can see the waveform there for the main vocal. So that's the guide that everything else is going to align to. The next thing I do is tell the plugin which clips are going to be aligning to that guide. So I'm just going to select these four clips here and then I click on the Capture button and it's already actually done. It's dark magic. Let's have a listen to the results. Now I was talking away there which meant it took much longer to do this. It really would just take a few seconds here normally. Think about how long it would take you to manually get in there and stretch and bend that audio to make it match or even spending lots of time to re-sing those vocals so that they're in time. That's really worth considering when you look at this. Now there are lots of options available in terms of the tightness, in terms of making sure there's no artifacts that you can play with in the advanced options over here. We've even got options to do matches based on pitch etc as well. So really it's as simple as that. I've got the timing fixed. Now you will notice however at this point I'll just close this window that visually these waveforms are still not in line with each other. So it depends on which door you're using as to how you do this next but what I would do in Studio One is just select all the clips and then bounce them. So I'll press Ctrl B and after a moment or two we'll just watch these progress bars go up. Hey presto! You can see now that that's sort of now baked in. We've printed it if you like and you can visually see how much close those waveforms are. So that's the timing but what about the pitch? Well for pitch we're going to be using a plugin called Repitch. So I'm only going to scratch the surface of the functionality of the Repitch standard plugin as I correct the pitch of the lead vocal to begin with. That's up here. I'm just going to right click here in Studio One and go down to Edit with Repitch. That opens up the Repitch window and if I scroll across at the bottom then we can start to see the beginning of the content here. Now there's a couple of different ways you can approach this. You can automate the whole thing by selecting one of the macros up here so I could go and select say Normal pitch range snap notes to selected scale and it will do that. While I'm talking about that when it says selected scale in this case it sets a chromatic. You can see that at the top here which basically means all of the available notes it's just going to snap them to the nearest one. However it has actually detected a scale. If we look here we can see it's detected the C sharp blue scale which is a minor pentatonic scale. If I just click on that and then click on this button here then we can make sure we snap to the notes of that scale. Now although it's detected it as a C sharp blue scale I happen to know that this is really in E major which is a relative scale to this C sharp blue scale but I've only happened to use the notes so far in this piece of the blue scale. But because I may want to change some of the notes here I'm going to go ahead go to scales here and select the E major scale and add it as a scale. Save that and that's now the selected scale. Now I actually prefer to fix things manually. It's just that I like to keep most of it natural with all of its imperfections but just fix some of the worst notes. They tend to be the long notes. They're the ones that stand out. The easy way to do this for me is just to double click on some of these notes like this one here. I double click on it. You saw it shift ever so slightly there. It's a little bit out. This one over here is 11 cents out. If I double click on that it corrects it and I could go through and sort of fix some of the longer notes like that. They stand out more than the shorter notes. Sometimes you have to fix the short ones but I generally find that's the way I like to work to keep it sounding natural. But as I say you could fix everything at once with one of the macros or you could select several notes like this and double click and they're all correct like so. I'm going to undo that. Now one of the very very cool things about this particular plugin is you can go in and make really fine adjustments with the pitch. If I for example look at this note here I'm just going to actually zoom in a little. I'll just go in there and look at this note here. You can see that the pitch drifts up above the actual note which it should be playing there C sharp and it goes back within the range of C sharp there. This can happen with vibrato but just with rubbish singing like mine as well. So let's look at what we can do. We're going to use this tool here the Shaper tool. I'll click on that. I'm just going to put in some kind of I don't know what they call these kind of handles if you like. I'm just going to pop some in there. I'm just going to drag this one down and just see how I've been able to adjust the pitch of that note and just make sure that that's inside there like so. Super super cool. Now another thing that we might like to do and I spoke about this just a moment ago is actually change the pitch of the note entirely. So I am going to grab this note and I'm actually going to move it. So I'm going to move it up here like so. Let's have a listen to that and see how convincing it is. Yeah I reckon that sounds very very convincing as if I'd actually sung that note okay. So this works within reason. If you go a long way out then it obviously sounds quite unnatural but it does it really really nicely in my opinion. So that's another feature that we have there. As well as being able to adjust the pitch in this way we can also adjust the actual volume of the note. So I'll just do that here so we can make it louder and quieter if we want to. And one thing you can also do when you've got lots of variation or a big amount of vibrato going on is just grab the top there and move it like so and the whole thing you can get it sort of confined into the space where you want it. So another example I think I saw it further on down here is sometimes on the end of notes yeah you get a lot of pitch drift. So have a look at this note here. There's a lot of pitch drift here anyway and just have a listen to the tail of the note yeah. See how I go mmm and it sort of tails off and goes a bit sort of weird. Yeah so you can actually kind of fix that quite easily again using that Shaper tool you can go in here put in some points here I'll do it like this pretty quickly like so and then you can just use that and drag those in there. With other plugins in the past with this plugin you would have to sort of split this you'd have to split the note and then adjust things that way but I much prefer I must say to use this very cool Shaper tool I can use over here for this as well and I'll just make some quick adjustments here yeah like so let's just move that one up I'll go on move for me there you go that one down that one up that one down yeah let's have a listen to this and see if it still sounds natural. Yeah I could bring this one down at the end here couldn't I? Yeah so it still sounds like a human it hasn't become robotic but it's just a bit more refined so what I'm going to do now is go through and correct the pitch of all of the backing vocals as well and I'll fast forward so you don't have to witness all of that and then we'll see how it sounds at the end and I guess Superman never really ever gave a damn about Lois Lane the Daily Planet are the people there he's just showing off because his parents didn't love him much and you believe them me. Finally those last notes now sound okay acceptable to me let's just have a quick listen in the context of the song so let me know in the comments down below how you feel about the results are these the kind of plugins that you think you could make use of I'd love to hear from you on that now as I said earlier there's a link in the description down below to a bundle including these two products and there's currently 40% off for Black Friday but while you're there check out the other deals from Synchro Arts there's some other versions of these plugins to suit different budgets so you may find the one you're looking for there there's another link in the description down below for that other Black Friday deals thank you so much for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video