harmony

Using Reaper's ReaTune For Vocal Harmony

February 1, 2017 by Ken 2 Comments

To record vocal harmony, the most basic thing to do is have a human sing each part and put those parts on their own tracks in audio recording software. If you can do it that way, it is arguably the best and most preferable method of doing it.
But you can also create harmony recordings using software.

Why would you want to use software to create vocal harmonies?

There could be several reasons, like:

You would rather not deal with singing harmonies, or it’s not in your skill-set
You don’t have anyone else around to sing your harmonies
You want the sound of artificial voices – that sound a bit like singing robots – as an effect

What software can you use for this?

There are several programs available that are specifically designed to create vocal harmonies. Two of the most popular are Antares Harmony Engine (brought to you from the makers of Auto-Tune), and Vielklang Instant Harmony. There are others, of course. These programs work really well. But they can be a bit pricy. Harmony Engine is $199 and Instant Harmony is $149.
If you don’t have a couple hundred bucks in your budget for this, there are a couple of other options. Reaper, one of the best and most affordable recording programs around, comes with a couple of different plugin effects that you can use to create harmony. One of these is called ReaVoice. I did a video on how to use it here. The other one is called ReaTune.

Using ReaTune to create harmonies

The primary use of the ReaTune effect is to correct pitch, very much like Auto-Tune and similar programs. But you can use the pitch-altering ability to create harmony notes from a single track of actual vocals. You can see how it works in the video below. But in a nutshell…

You sing (or have someone sing) the melody of a song on a track (say Track 1) in Reaper
Copy the vocal to track 2
Load the ReaTune effect on track 2
In the ReaTune window, draw in the harmony notes to shift the original audio to those notes
Repeat the process for each track of harmony. For instance in the video below, the song has 3-part harmony. The sung vocal track is on track one with ReaTune generating one harmony on track two and the 3rd part on track 3

This is a lot more clear in the video here:
[genesis_club_wistia_video id=”0ecf4l543e” pt=”75″]
This video is an excerpt from our course Harmony Recording Awesomeness. Find out more about that by CLICKING HERE.

Sing Harmony With Yourself – Learn How to Record Your Voice on Your PC and Sing Along With It!

November 30, 2016 by Ken 54 Comments

Believe it or not, it is possible to sing harmony with yourself. No surgery required:). I’m doing it in the video below.
https://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/0ic40qwze9?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640
Believe it or not, it is possible to sing harmony with yourself. No surgery required:).
Have you ever been singing a song by yourself, and you could just hear the harmonies that were “supposed” to be there but were not? Every time I sing Take It Easy, by The Eagles, I get to the chorus and just have to imagine that I have Don Henley and Timothy B. Schmidt standing beside me. Without the vocal harmonies, the song just doesn’t have the same punch, the same magic.

Some Songs NEED Harmony

Imagine trying to perform Kansas’ Carry On Wayward Son, solo! I don’t think so (actually I managed to do it…the intro anyway. Wanna hear it? It’s right here: How To Be Your Own Glee Club – Queen Harmony Demo.)
The same holds true for Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen (I have not done that one yet:-P). There are certain songs that just cannot or should not be performed without those magical vocals. So what in the world do you do about it if you’re a solo performer?

What About Singing Live?

Well, for live performances, you’re pretty much stuck with having to get a few other singers for the harmonies. Actually, depending on how technically savvy you are, there are little machines that can split your voice up and play it back as harmonies, but that’s another thing for another article. And trust me, it is a huge pain to get decent results. Yes, I’ve tried it; no, I don’t do it anymore;).

Here’s How To Record Yourself Singing Harmony With Yourself

However, you can record yourself singing harmonies with yourself (yourselves?), right now if you want to, with tools you probably have around the home;-). As long as you have a computer with a sound card, head phones/ear-buds of some kind, and some sort of microphone. Those little $4.00 PC mics are just fine to start….no really, I’m serious. As long as you have the stuff I mentioned, and you want to try this out right now, all you need to do is download the open-source audio program called Audacity.
If you want significantly better audio quality, you can use a USB mic like the Samson Q2U for $59. If you already have some experience you could REALLY crank up the quality using a large-diaphragm condenser mic in combination with an audio interface, as well as jumping to the totally professional recording program called Reaper, which is free for 60 days and only $65 after that, which is completely insane for the quality and capability of this program! I used a Rode NT2-A microphone and Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface for the harmony demo recordings.

Headphones

The reason I said you need an mp3 player is for the headphones or earbuds, not the player itself. Plug those headphones into the green (typically) hole in your PC’s sound card. (“hole” = “jack” if you insist on using technical terms). You may have to unplug the speakers first, which is fine. Then plug the microphone into the pink hole…I mean….jack in the sound card.
You just need to set up a couple of things in the software before you start. Open Audacity and go to Edit/Preferences to open the Audacity Preferences window. Put a tick in the box next to “Play other tracks while recording new one.” Then click “OK.”
Next, go into the “Sounds and Devices” window (“Sounds and Audio Devices” in Win XP) from the Windows Control Panel. In Windows 10, accessing the Control Panel takes a few more steps. Just type “Control Panel” in the Cortana search box in the Task Bar, or ask Cortana via voice command to “Open Control Panel.”

In Windows XP

In XP, go to the tab marked “Audio,” and in the section called “Sound recording,” click on the “volume” button. That will bring up the Windows Mixer.” Find the channel that says “Stereo Mix” or “Wav Out” (depends on what sound card you have), and put a tick in the “Mute” box on that channel. Just close the Windows Mixer and you’re ready to rock!

In windows 7 or 10

In Windows 7 or 10, select the Playback tab in the Sound window. Make sure there is a green check mark in your sound card. If not, select it and choose “Set Default.” Then go the Recording tab and choose your microphone and set that to Default. Then while still on the Recording tab, click Properties. Now choose the Levels tab in the Microphone properties window and make sure the mic is set to about 75.
The video a few paragraphs down from our “Harmony Recording Awesomeness” course will clarify that stuff above:-P
[jwplayer config=”700×394 Custom Player” mediaid=”22304″]

Step 1 – The Melody

Focusrite-Scarlett-2i2-Web — Click To Buy

Record the melody by pressing button in audacity with the big red dot on it. An audio “track” will appear as if by magic. Start singing into the microphone. When you’re done, click the button in Audacity with the big yellow square (meaning “stop”).

Step 2 – First Harmony Part

Go back to the start of the song by clicking on the button in Audacity with the double purple arrows pointing to the left. Now you can add a harmony by simply pressing the red dot button again and singing along with your recorded voice on the first track.
Make sure you listen to the earlier track(s) on headphones while you’re recording the new track of singing. THIS IS VITAL because you can’t use the speakers or else your microphone will record what’s coming out of them as well as your voice.
You’ll end up with both the first vocal AND your harmony on the second track. This is NOT what you want. Each track must have only one part on it. So when adding tracks, either turn the speakers off, or unplug them and use headphones only.

All The Other Parts

Do this as many times as you want to (there is no practical limit in Audacity), for 3-part or 4-part harmony. Heck, turn yourself into a choir. I once turned myself into an abbey of chanting monks!
That’s all there is to it. You just sang harmony with yourself and didn’t spend a dime!

Other Things To Make It Sound Even Better

There are lots of things you can do to improve the sound once you’re done, such as reduce the noise, pan the voices left and right, etc. If you’re interested in learning about those, and tons of other great stuff you can do with that recording-studio-you-didn’t-know-you-had, check out our tutorials here.
Other lessons in our course The Newbies Guide to Audio Recording Awesomeness will show you how to create a voice-over with music behind it, how to create loops, and how to edit audio, do multi-track recording, etc. The tutorial covering the stuff we did in the article is also there, in case you were wondering;).
If you want to see and hear some awesome examples of other cool things you can do in the harmony-singing realm, head on over to our Vocal Harmony Demos page. Cheers!
Below is an excerpt video lesson on how to do this – from our new course Harmony Recording Awesomeness.

For an example of 3-part harmony in a rock song, check out my cover of “That Thing You Do!”

Harmonizer Software: Another Way To Sing Harmony With Yourself

August 23, 2016 by Ken 2 Comments

I talk a LOT about harmony singing. My search for a way to 3-part harmony with my friends when I was in high-school and failing – (not all my friends were in choir) due to the fact that a lot of people who CAN sing, still cannot sing harmony, is arguably the reason that I discovered multi-track recording in the first place!
If my friends couldn’t sing those other parts, maybe I could sing them with myself somehow. And ultimately I discovered how to do just that. My first article for Home Brew Audio was, in fact, Sing Harmony With Yourself – Learn How to Record Your Voice on Your PC and Sing Along With It! Check out a bunch of audio of how it sounds here: Vocal Harmony Experiments

Recording All The Harmonies With Actual Voices (Even All Your Own)

The way I always have done it (singing harmony with myself) has been to sing one part – say, the melody – and record it. Then play that recording back while singing one harmony part along with it. Then I rinse and repeat to get as many harmonies as possible recorded. These days it is easy to do and have it sound awesome.
In the early days I had to use cassette tapes and bounce them from one machine to another (truly old-school like Les Paul and Mary Ford!). The hiss was terrible. But nowadays, you just open a track in some multi-track recording software like Audacity or Reaper, and you can have as many tracks – one for each vocal part – as you want. And each one is clean with no additive hiss like in the old days.

Using Technology To Generate The Harmonies From One Voice

This worked fine for recording. But for solo live performance, not so much. In the 90s I discovered hardware harmonizers, machines that would split your vocal into parts for you. If you didn’t have band members who could sing harmony, that was the only way to go. The machine I used was called the TC-Helicon VoiceLive. It could do some amazing things, but is was fairly complex too. It’s discontinued, but you can see the info on it if you follow that link.

Anyway, nowadays there is software that can basically do the same thing as the old Vocalist Workstation, which represents an alternative way to sing harmony with yourself and record it. Some people prefer using harmonizer software over simply singing all the parts. If you have trouble figuring out harmony parts, this can be awesome.
Once you learn how to use it, the software method can definitely be faster. One of the more popular harmonizer programs out there comes from Antares Audio, the same company that makes Auto-Tune. It’s called Harmonizer Engine EVO. It generates harmonies and gives you control of several things such as a humanizer to make the harmonies sound more natural, creating your own harmony parts, etc.
In our latest course – Harmony Recording Awesomeness – you get two lessons showing you how to create 3 and 4-part harmony with Harmony Engine Evo, as well as how to figure out harmony parts! Below is one of the videos from the course:
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/9vje3hd6rr?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=700
Personally, I like singing all the parts myself, but for something different in your harmony arsenal, or a completely different way of singing harmony with yourself, you should check this out. To get more detailed information and/or buy Harmony Engine EVO, CLICK HERE.

My First Home Music Recording – How I Split Myself in Three

February 29, 2016 by Ken Leave a Comment

[This is one of the first posts I published – if not THE first – for Home Brew Audio. I thought it would be cool to take a look back. This is especially interesting since our latest course is Harmony Recording Awesomeness, which shows you how to actually split yourself (well, your voice, anyway) in three. Check out our other tutorial courses here.]
It took over 20 years to get here – to a place where I have done so much audio recording (some of it really bad at first:)) that I can teach others how to do it without having to go through all the technical translation and trial/error. You can use my learning curve.
But why did it take so long and how did I get started? Well, I was a geeky teenager with only one thing I thought I was good at…music! I was mainly a singer, which eventually landed me the girl…but geeky high school boys who sing? Well, not all that sexy. ANYWAY…..
I sang all the time, much to the chagrin of…well…anyone who was around me really. Not because I sucked (at least I didn’t think I did;)), but because for some reason, someone apparently deemed bursting into song in public places some sort of social no-no. Whatever. It didn’t really stop me. In fact, when I was in 8th grade, singing solo was not enough for me any more!  ”Without Love,” by the Doobie Brothers, just sounded so naked without the other voices. And none of my friends…I mean NONE…even knew what I was talking about when I mentioned harmony. The best I could manage was for THEM to sing the melody (read: LEAD VOCAL), so the one of us who knew how could sing at least ONE harmony could do so. But this was completely unsatisfactory. If creating real live harmony meant giving up the lead vocal AND only ending up with 2 parts (almost all wicked cool harmony has at least 3 parts), I had to find a better way.
I began to fantasize about ways to sing harmony with myself! Maybe there was a surgery…or some sort of mystical ventriloquist trick I could learn to sing harmony lines with myself. That alien on Battle Star Galactica could do it! Ehhh, but she had 3 mouths. No fair! Sigh. Then one day I was digging (very innocently, of course) through my parent’s garage looking for nothing in particular. What I found was something very interesting…A TAPE RECORDER.  I started playing with it and soon realized that I could at least solve ONE of my current harmony woes…I could sing the lead vocal part AND one harmony! Still only 2 parts, and it would be somewhat “less-than-live”, exactly 50% less I guess;).  But who cares, I could sing along with my own voice and thought it was cool. But it was not AWESOME. I now wanted AWESOME.
Seals and Crofts were cool. Simon and Garfunkel were cool. But “Carry On Wayward Son,” by Kansas was AWESOME. “Dance With Me,” by Orleans was also awesome. What was different about THOSE songs? 3-part (at least) harmony!  I needed it… I was haunted by it.  I started hearing 3 and 4-part harmony everywhere…The Eagles, Yes, The Beatles, The Mamas and the Papas, Asia, Van Halen, CSN, The Who. The weird thing was…I seemed to be the only person who could hear it! I’d learn all 3 parts and try to teach them to my friends who actually could sing. I failed. They just didn’t get it. AAARRRGGGHHH!
Then one day I noticed that my brother had a small radio that ALSO had a tape player in it. And there was a little flat round thing that said “mic” under it. Huh? It didn’t LOOK like a mic. But when I pushed the “record” and “play” buttons down at the same time, it recorded what I was saying.  Cool! Oops. I seem to have just recorded over my brother’s ELO tape!  Maybe he won’t notice. Maybe he’ll decide he doesn’t like ”Evil Woman” any more. Maybe he won’t notice that it was MY voice inserted in the middle of the chorus. Or maybe I could just arrange for the tape to disappear. After all, it was HIS fault. Who buys a cassette album and doesn’t poke out the tabs on the top that prevent you recording over it? No matter, I had made the ultimate discovery…how to sing 3 and 4 part harmony WITH MYSELF. Muhuhwhahahaha!
I set my tape recorder up and recorded myself playing acoustic guitar and singing “This Boy,” by the Beatles. Then I put a BLANK tape into my brother’s boom box, put it next to my purloined ancient tape recorder, pressed the “record/play” buttons, then played the tape I just recorded (me playing and singing “This Boy”). When the choruses came, I sang one harmony along with the boom box, then listened to the result. A bit of hiss, but otherwise it was me playing guitar and singing harmony with myself!  Then I played THAT tape and sang a second harmony with it as I recorded with the my tape recorder. The result was MAGIC!!! I actually had to stop several times and start over because I was laughing so hard as I sang a 3rd harmony WITH MYSELF. I was hooked.
Of course I carried the tape with me everywhere I went and forced all my friends to listen. Most of them actually did.  The “hiss” noise was really awful too. You used to get quite a lot of hiss just recording ONE TIME on those cassettes. Just imagine that multiplied by 3!  But I didn’t care. I had made my first “multi-track recording,” plus caused some sort of psychological damage, I think.  Hearing 3 of myself at the same time coming out of a machine was just….different. Actually, that explains a lot, now that I think of it. Oh well. Water under the bridge now. What’s done is done;).
So, do you want to sing harmony with yourself? With no hiss? Thanks to the computer age, you can! And you probably won’t need to buy any equipment. Learn how with our tutorials here.
More embarrassing (and hopefully amusing) stories to come! Until then…
Cheers!
Ken

Acoustic Pop Song With 3-Part Harmony Recorded on 36-Dollar Studio

February 11, 2016 by Ken Leave a Comment

Is it possible to record a professional sounding song with acoustic guitar and 3-part harmony on a home studio costing only $36? It is if you know how!
I recorded the chorus section of my song “Everything That Matters” (from the album “Everything That Matters“) using free recording software – Audacity, and a single USB mic that currently sells at B&H Photo-Video-Audio for only $36 (the Samson Q1U).
I double-tracked the acoustic guitar part (actually recording it twice onto separate tracks) and panned them left and right for a nice stereo sound. Then I sang the melody and two harmony parts, double-tracking each of those as well. That made for a total of 8 tracks.
I used noise reduction on all tracks to remove the low-level hiss associated with most USB mics. And the only other editing required was to use some EQ to remove p-pops in the vocals.
Then I just adjusted the relative volume os each track (mixing) and panned the harmony vocals left and right, leaving the melody vocals un-panned (so the lead singer can sound like he’s right in front of you), and saved the project. Then I exported the mix as a stereo wav file.

How does it sound?

I think it sounds pretty awesome. But you go ahead and decide for yourself whether you would have believed (before I told you:)) that this came from a $36 home studio? Below is an excerpt from our new course, Harmony Recording Awesomeness.
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/0psju9y5w6?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=544
You can learn to do this and a LOT more cool vocal harmony recording techniques in our new course Harmony Recording Awesomeness. CLICK HERE to learn more about the course.