TOM BEIER: Okay, in this example, I'm going to take you through a little tour of tuning a vocal with V-Vocal, and all the cool things you can do with that particular plugin. V-Vocal originally came out with Sonar 5 but it's one of the powerful tools of Sonar 6. So, in order to get into the groove, let's go ahead and listen to, we're starting at the synth solo kind of halfway between the two verses we're going to zone in at a particular line and fix some out of tune vocals, so let's hit it. One, two, three, four.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS A SONAR PROJECT]

All right. So let's scrutinize this phrase. There were a couple of notes that were out of tune here.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS A SONAR PROJECT AND EXAMINES OUT OF TUNE PORTIONS]

All right, so there's a couple of corrections that need to be done with the tuning here. I don't want to do anything too radical, just correct just a couple of simple wrong notes. So what we do is right-click, we enable V-Vocal, create a vocal clip, and as you can see, the plugin appears on my screen, and if I right-click, I like to look at the waveform, and let's go ahead and get a better view of this. In fact, I could -- well, if we want we can go ahead, look, and have view in full screen.

So, what's nice about V-Vocal, and when you're having it in full screen mode, you can operate the transport within the plugin, so for example I can hit play here and hear what I need to hear.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS SONAR PROJECT WITH LEAD VOCAL PART]

All right. So this first word, "baby", it sounds a little flat to me, so let's go ahead and listen to that.

[TOM BEIER FOCUSES ON WORD "BABY" OF THE LEAD VOCAL PART]

So what I want to do is just bring that up a little bit.

[TOM BEIER RAISES PITCH OF WORD "BABY" FROM THE LEAD VOCAL PART]

Now that's a little sharp. Or actually it was sharp to begin with or my ears are throwing me here. So let's go ahead and listen to that.

[TOM BEIER LOWERS PITCH OF WORD "BABY" FROM THE LEAD VOCAL PART]

Okay, so now that's locked in there really nice. In fact, it tells me it should be a G. This is in the key of F actually so yeah so G makes a lot of sense if that's the note.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS CORRECTED LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

And you can see that the original pitch is indicated in orange, the tuned pitch is indicated in yellow.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, "IT'S LOVE THAT" PHRASE WITH ENTIRE MIX]

I guess there's something weird with "love" as well. Let's see.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, "IT'S LOVE THAT" PHRASE WITH ENTIRE MIX]

It seems a little flat to me, so we'll bring "love" up.

[TOM BEIER CORRECTS LEAD VOCAL PART, "IT'S LOVE THAT" PHRASE, WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So now that's right in the pocket.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

And it seems like this word is as little flat...

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

...just a little bit so we bring it up. If you notice here, I really didn't have to really do any selecting, you know, it's the V-Vocal plugin already separates the words and the phrases out so you can just grab it. I'm going to show you a little bit later some of the auto capabilities of this as well, but I think in most cases, if you have to fix a wrong note, you don't have to jump through a lot of hoops to fix it. You just, you know, the words are already there, you can grab a word and move it. That's what I really find fascinating about V-Vocal.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

All right. So I'll listen to the whole phrase now.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Maybe that's still a little flat.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Okay, so simple correction there, but let's say if we want to get a little -- well, we want to change the melody a little bit, maybe we want to either (a) experiment and try a different note and the singer left, or (b) you just have to change it because it doesn't work. I mean in this case, I think it's okay but what if I wanted to change a note completely, so I can go ahead and select that particular word, and let's listen to what we have here.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So now we're going [TOM BEIER SINGING], "Baby, it's...," just kind of changing the melody just a little bit.

[TOM BEIER ADJUSTS NOTE ON LEAD VOCAL PART]

Let me get the pitch right. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that well the character of the voice changed, which it did, but that's going to lead us to the performance feature in this but.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Let me just try to get the pitch right and then we'll work with the gender quality of that a little bit.

[TOM BEIER AUDITIONS ADJUSTED LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Okay that's close enough to rock and roll, but just to make sure that I've got things just -- wait, let me undo a lot of there. I might want to take my pencil tool, I might go back to zoom here and make sure that I don't have anything weird, you know, just to be safe. So in case there were any dips or something -- I heard something in there. So, bottom line is you've got these different tools -- we'll get to the LFO tool in a little bit, but I grabbed this pencil tool to make sure I had a nice pitch change because I brought that note -- Look at what I did. I mean I brought that note up like three steps or so, and right in this section I wanted to make sure it was nice and clean.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

I'm going to go back and just tune that a little bit. Okay. All right, now let's work on trying to match that in there because you can kind of hear the characteristic of the voice change a little bit, but I believe we can fix that.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

All right. So we'll go over to the formant mode here. So right now, we’ve been in the pitch and then we also have time mode which we'll get to but let's go to formant and new -- We don't see the pitch information anymore so --

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So what we're going to do here is I'm just going to go ahead and make a little edit on this particular note and I think I have to this direction to make it blend in a little bit better.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So, that's a little too much. Let's do something drastic and hear that.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So let's see if we can -- It might be right around in this area.

[TOM BEIER ADJUSTS FORMANT PARAMETER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

A little more. Let's go ahead and leave that.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

It's not bad. Let's -- I think it might be right about here though.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

So I think that's pretty convincing, you know, if you're sure, if you've listened to it over and over, you can probably hear it but I don't think your average listener is going to hear it and you'll forget about it when you're listening to the whole mix and everything.

So what we did there, let's recap. We tuned three notes. We actually changed the melody. What if we wanted to change some of the phrasing? Well, we go to the -- excuse me -- we go to the time mode, and let's just -- What could we do here?

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

What if we just wanted to make this word shorter? Wait, let me -- we had been -- make it more choppy. I didn't -- I kind of get -- We just have to experiment but this allows you to really start tuning -- manipulate the phrasing.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH MANIPULATED PHRASING ALONG THE ENTIRE MIX]

Let's see if we want to change -- let's just see what we have.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

We'll shorten the word "love".

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH MANIPULATED PHRASING ALONG ENTIRE MIX]

That's probably too much on there. I got some vibrato there I can get rid of. We'll try to fix that a little bit later.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Now just for fun, let me go ahead and se if we can actually make this word longer. Let's go and listen to --

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH ENTIRE MIX]

Let's make the word "making" a little bit longer, and we just -- oops. Go ahead and put another notch in here. Oops, one too many, and we just make that a little bit longer...,

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH MANIPULATED PHRASING ALONG WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

...and we can make this word longer too as well, just to do something drastic so you can kind of hear what happens.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH MANIPULATED PHRASING ALONG WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

So, bottom line is you can do a lot of radical changes there. If I don't like what I did, I can grab the eraser tool and erase it all back and bring it back to where I had it, so let's go ahead and go back to the pitch mode here, and I was talking a little bit earlier about getting rid of some vibrato on the voice. A lot of that is just personal taste, but let's go ahead and zoom in to this again, and let's see.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

so if I want to get rid of some of the vibrato on "love", I can grab the vibrato tool from right over here, and bring it down.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, VIBRATO REDUCED, WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

So if you listen to the little phrase, you don't have as much vibrato on "love".

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

And again on fly.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, VIBRATO REDUCED, WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

All right. So, you know, you can also do things like add vibrato to a particular section if you wanted. So let's go back and I'm going to show you another way. So let's recap what we did: We fixed the wrong notes, we changed the melody, we -- where we changed the melody we changed the formant to match the original characteristic of the vocal a little bit better, and we did some time edits, and then we fixed the vibrato.

There's another way to use the auto-correct capabilities and auto-tune so let's take a look at how to do that right now. As I said earlier, you can easily manually correct vocals with V-Vocal. But there's another method of using V-Vocal, and that's to automatically have it change a selected area. So, what we'l do first is we're going to select all, and let me go ahead. I like to view my waveform, make sure that I'm in the key of F, and I've increased the sensitivity so it's really it's going to maximize the pitch correction amount, and now we have something in perfect pitch.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS AUTO-CORRECTED LEAD VOCAL PART WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

So you can see all the correction that went on. You know, sometimes I don't like to, when I'm producing vocal tracks, I don't personally like to tune everything unless it was necessary or if you we're going after specific effects but the fact is that you can do it if you want, and then it works fine on this line. In fact, I might decide that's the way I want to go on that particular line because you can't hear any artifacts on that. Listen to that.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

Let's listen to that again.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

It's totally in the pitch pocket there. So now let's go ahead and let's say I wanted to do something a little more drastic. I'll just maximize the note amount and let's correct it again, and see what we've got.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, AUTO-CORRECTED, WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

Or let's try it the other way, and we'll select all again and correct, and now we have -- I basically took out the vibrato so you get more of a -- now we're going down the road of creating just really radically changing the vocal sounds. Sometimes you want to do that, maybe that's a big hook in the song. I mean we've all heard the Cher hit, some of the other hits out there where the vocal is being sped up or what have you. If you want to go that direction, well Sonar 6 gives you the tools to do so. Let's listen to that.

[TOM BEIER PLAYS LEAD VOCAL PART, AUTO-CORRECTED HARD, WITH THE ENTIRE MIX]

So we hear that a lot these days, but what would be cool with the vocalist actually go in there and manually change a lot of those particular words you really want to accent, so there you have it with V-Vocal. Well, there's one more thing that you're able to do within V-Vocal. Instead of -- If you were working on a phrase and doing something pretty intricate, maybe you want to just chnge the volume of a note, you can -- you know -- you actually have envelope editing right inside there as well, so V-Vocal does pitch correction manually and with a an auto way as well. It does time. You can change phrasing. It'll change the gender or the formant of your particular track that's good for matching up, you know, if you're doing some radical pitch change, you can get it pretty close to the original vocal, and then you also have the dynamics which I showed you just now.