Why Syncrho arts help vocal editing in your DAW
If you’re an engineer or producer who regularly works with editing vocal stacks, this article is for you. While it’s always been commonplace to layer multiple vocal tracks together, in many contemporary genres of music, it’s a necessity for those layers to be tightly tuned and time-aligned with each other, so the end product sounds professional and radio-ready. However with tight time and budget constraints often in play, what can be a laborious manual process often puts a real strain on costs and your nerves!
To provide some background here, VocAlign Ultra is our most advanced audio alignment plugin which is capable of matching the timing and pitch of multiple vocal (or instrument) layers to a single reference signal, which is usually a lead vocal. Engineers and producers already save countless hours on vocal editing tasks by using VocAlign as they no longer have to align their vocal stacks by hand which as we’ve already said, can be a long and tedious job.
Our RePitch vocal editing plugin enables both automatic and manual tuning to be applied quickly and easily to your audio with very natural and transparent results. Based on technology from our flagship Revoice Pro software, RePitch meets the challenge of quickly producing tuned vocals that don’t sound processed or doctored.
For VocAlign to work its magic, you first need a lead or ‘guide’ vocal which has your desired pitch and timing and can act as a reference for all your other vocal layers or ‘dubs’. Before RePitch, editing a vocal with other pitch editors meant that your tuning and timing ‘commits’ weren’t automatically transferred to any double tracks you have. That process would then have to be repeated each time you wanted to adjust something in your guide, slowing down your workflow and stifling creativity.
Not any more.
Thanks to our new SynchroLink technology, VocAlign Ultra can use audio loaded into RePitch as the guide track. This means once the two plug-ins are connected, you can not only instantly transfer the pitch and timing from your newly edited lead vocal in RePitch to a double in VocAlign Ultra, but you can keep making changes for as long as you want which can be auditioned right away without extra editing.
This means if you’re working with layered vocals, your window of opportunity to make tuning or timing changes to the lead and almost instantly hear how that change sounds with all your doubles following is open throughout the mixing process. So you can experiment and explore new creative options without the drag factor of all the manual editing that would be needed just to audition. Now you just make the change in RePitch, watch VocAlign update your dubs, render the changes into Pro Tools and listen, it’s that simple.
So to conclude, for the first time inside your DAW, it’s possible to easily and quickly make tuning and timing changes to a lead vocal which are then automatically transferred to all your vocal doubles, whether there’s two or twenty. Then if you want to revert back or try something else that’s no problem, changes can be made in just a couple of mouse clicks, meaning you always retain complete creative freedom and flexibility, right up until the last minute.
Don’t waste time with manual editing when RePitch and VocAlign Ultra can do the hard work for you, fine tuning vocal stacks has never been easier, faster or more intuitive!