Help with fixing singer's timing problems

[Stig Eliassen]

Originally Posted by Julia B

The reason I said EA was that for example if I'm singing a jazz vocal, I play a lot with the phrasing and the timing. You'd never get a beat detective to work with it. Sometimes I drive my voice coach crazy, but when we get it all done it works. She's a rocker. I'm not. I'm using the pocket set by the bass player to whom I'm paying particular attention (bass player always on my left -- good ear) and singing my phrase all around it but we'll always end up the same.

I'd recently recorded some piano and bass using midi on instrument tracks which I send to audio tracks. After working with it a couple weeks I felt the tempo was a little too fast, so I stretched out parts of the song I wanted to make slightly slower and left the bridge at the previous tempo. Well since I had to do it twice to get it to where I wanted the sound got distorted. Maybe no one else would have noticed but I did. But fortunately all I had to do was remake the audio tracks with the instrument tracks again. Done. So be a little careful with EA.

the toughest thing for me is to shift gears from musician to engineering tech (engineer to me is for those who are pros at it) where I have to be critical of my own performance.

EA on polyphonic instruments is a long-shot, but I get excellent results on monophonic vocals and bass.




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[rcaban]

CJ, if you're recording almost anything other than jazz...timing is very important. Use lots of fades, try to grab words from other parts of the song, etc. Not really an easy fix to it.

I'll assume that you tracked him to some kind of background arrangement to give him a pitch to reference while singing. If not, you'll have to deal with the rath of S*** that comes with arranging a completely blind vocal performance (detuning your instruments to match the vocal pitch numerous times throughout the song, etc). My guess is if he had such bad timing issues, he may have pitch issues as well. If you did do some kind of background arrangement for him to sing to, great. If you didn't, a little extra time coming up with something basic in the key of the vocalists melody, tracked to a metronome, should help their timing. Adding a simple drum loop helps too. The metronome isn't really too musical and it doesn't help a vocal performance. The drum loop always seems to help.