How To edit an Acapella Choir

[bonz91]

Hi everybody.

I'm new here in the forum, and I have some problems editing an Acappella Choir in PT10.
I'm trying to achieve a good method to do it but I think in this moment I'm stuck on the wrong way.

In my specific case I have 12 elements choir, they are recorded following the click, but there are still flames and people who aren't right in time.

In this case the voices were recorded 4 people contemporarily in turn, so in 3 times they did the overall recordings for each song.

For the majority of them it was the first time in the studio, and probably the first time they singed on click, so the biggest problem is that nobody is right on click.
So, To manage it, I took the best vocal part (in terms of timing) and edited it with elastic audio to make it perfect on click.

For all the other people I just match the tempo of my right vocal to the others with the Vocalign 4 plugin, who made some artefacts but still maintaining a good feeling.

The problem is that Vocalign isn't really precise and i can't really have the overall control of the parts with it, so I'm Just thinking to redo everything only with elastic audio, following the PT10 grid.

Of course I have to do it for every voice individually, and it's really a huge work to do.

Does anyone do it in a different way, or have some advice to help my workflow?

Ps: does your elastic audio feel a bit weird too sometimes? Is still better to do this kind of editing in the old cut and past way?
Is there a way to show the grid under the warp mode as it is for the waveform view?

Thank you for your suggestion!
Alberto.

[Stig Eliassen]

Welcome to these forums.

Are you editing the recordings to the click? If so, I would try to turn it off. A click track must be the least groovy and human thing on the planet. Listen to how they sound as a choir (without the click), and take it from there.

Secondly, everyone has to breathe, and with timing fluctuations, that's where I'd separate clips, and then visually nudge clips into place, and crossfade. S's are also a good place to separate.

Very hard to give good advise without hearing it, but I can say this: when I first started out with a similar project, the biggest mistake I did was to have the click audible during compiling and editing.

[bonz91]

Thank's for the advice, I'll try this way.
I thought it more or less as a drum editing, everything stuck to the grid, with some natural groove in between.
So instead of going for a word by word editing, you think it's more musical to edit more or less phrase by phrase?

The sound I'm trying to achieve is like "The Real Group" or "Rajaton" modern gospell choirs.
This is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDnaeVRXdW0

That's why I went for a "grid mode" editing, but the result wasn't that good.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by bonz91

The sound I'm trying to achieve is like "The Real Group" or "Rajaton" modern gospell choirs.

Rajaton is a finnish group that can really sing. They really do sing their parts without any tuning and time-aligning, live or studio. Really. If you have the skill, you don't need to do much.

But if it isn't the case, you need to tweak it -- as said, like a drum kit and most certainly without click -- and perhaps add some reverb to mask imperfections.

[Stig Eliassen]

Oh, and spend some time really listening to the performance. Pen and paper (or use markers/comments), a good cup of coffee (or beverage of choice), and start writing down what needs to be fixed. Start with the major ones, and then work your way down.

It's so easy these days to get overly "concerned", especially when using click and visual aids. It's great that we have these tools, but sometimes we just need to listen.

My 2,- NOK.

[bonz91]

Thanks a lot to all of you, now I think I'm going in the right mood ;-)