Trying to comp vocals from multiple mics

[jooleyen]

Hi all,

Newbie here trying to do some vocal comping. I have 17 vocal takes and want to comp them for one complete "best take". I would normally not have any questions about this, but each take was recorded with 9 different mics, so there are 9 different tracks for each take. What's the best way to set things up and keep organized so that when comping I can just deal with one of the mics, but the edits carry over to all 9 mics for my mixing guy?

Please let me know if this doesn't make sense.

Thanks

[Darryl Ramm]

Depends on exactly what you want to do, but one option is stick then cleanly on different playlists, how exactly you organize that is up to you. See the Pro Tools Reference Guide if playlists are new to you.

How are you using 9 mics? Are you recording a live performance with lots of ambient recording or is that actually multiple different performers being mic'ed? If you have mic bleed through you are going to really want to sort by take and make sure stuff is aligned.

[JFreak]

Hi, welcome to the community.


It does not matter which mic or track you have recorded your stuff, for comping you need to -- as Darryl said -- create one vox track with playlists. Create enough playlists where you can move your recordings and then start comping.


Read the reference manual or watch youtube tutorials. Groove3.com also has very good tutorials. Nobody can help you but you yourself, this is a trick you need to learn by yourself.

[Ben Jenssen]

Are these nine singers with one mic each, or one singer with nine mics in front of him/her?

[Darryl Ramm]

And popping up a level, which is where I should have started. If you have a "mixing guy" the best way to give them stuff would be in the exact format they want, so ask them. Potentially worse mistake possible is asking folks on a forum what to do when you have one person to work with/please, ask that person. Presumably they are experienced at what they do, if they won't/cant help a newbie with advice like that then you have a wrong relationship from the get-go. Now if their ideas seem to make no sense, you folks can't work something out then maybe asking here for advice is a good idea.

[albee1952]

My thoughts(just in case they help):
1-why were 9 mics used?
2-are all the playlists named properly(so you know which playlist is which take)
3-assuming proper labeling, you could make a group of the 9, mute 8 of them and make your comp by listening to 1 track(the grouping would cause the comp to happen to all 9 mics, but triple-check that playlists follow correctly. IOW, when you select playlist 3 on your "audition" track, the same playlist gets selected on all the other tracks)
4-having said what I said in #3- I would be inclined to get the client to choose 1 of the 9 and comp that one(the rest, I would hide and make inactive)

[albee1952]

5-for future reference, nip this in the bud. The most I have ever done is 3 mics(tube, FET and SM-5). Going any more is a bad idea(and you can guess why).
6-when I do 2 or 3 mics, I make the group right at the start and name each track like this; Tube.01, FET.01, SM5.01. By starting this way, when I create a new playlist on any 1 track(I keep 2 of the 3 mics muted while tracking), each new playlist will automatically be named Tube.02(and upwards) so you can easily see which pass you have by the number, and the various mics will all follow that naming/numbering routine. This would only be done if I were going to also mix. If I were to pass the project on, I would first see if the client will commit to one of the choices, and then ask the mixing engineer what they wanted(before sending 17 takes times 9 mics)

Sorry for the split reply but I got bit by the "access denied" thing

[jooleyen]

Thank you guys, yes it's a live performance with 9 mics on one singing human.

I finally got everything organized in a way that makes sense - had to drag each of the approximately 144 different clips onto the playlists - a bit tedious. Now my problem is that since no click track was used, the waveforms do not match up between the takes. I'd like to drag them around a bit to get them reasonably aligned. Is there a way to group, say, all of the lime green colored tracks together so that when I slide one to the side, they all slide along with it? Right now, if I was to slide "SONG0081" to the right, only that one slides by itself, not the other 8 mics.

The good news is, at the moment, comping works - if I make a selection from a given take, each take from all 9 mics slides up to the main track.