Vocal Processing on my 'Soundcloud Rap' Track

I recently just recorded the vocals for my ‘Soundcloud rap’ hip hop track, and a lot of processing needed to be done in order to achieve the sound I was after. My main reference for this project was something along the lines of Yung Lean or Bladee, two hip hop artists based on Soundcloud who often have a very unique sounding vocal due to the types of processing put on it. My original reference for this track was “Pearl Fountain’ by Yung Lean (Also features Bladee), however the vocal style went more in a direction of some of their other songs as the vocals on Pearl Fountain are rather dull sounding and I wanted something that sounded a bit brighter. This type of vocal style can be heard in songs such as Yung Lean - Yoshi City or Bladee - That thing you do, they are still in the same style have a bit of an edge or gritty sound which I found as a more appropriate reference.

("Yung Lean - Yoshi City", 2014)

("bladee - That Thing You Do (ft. Uli K)", 2018)

In order to achieve this type of vocal I had to do some research due to the almost synthesizer like sound to them and I have narrowed it down to 3 particular effects that are unusual for me to use that allowed me to achieve the sound; Heavy Autotune, Chorus and Flanger effects and the use of iZotope Vocal Synth.

Autotuned vocals are something I had already identified as a big part of this vocal sound before I started researching, however I have never particularly had a project where I’ve had the entire lead vocal have a hard autotune effect. I have access to the vocal tuning plugin WavesTune which I decided to use to do all of the autotune effect. In the vocal recording session for this track, we used the plugin by Melda Productions called MAutopitch, however this wasn’t going to be used in the final version as it wasn’t working that well at getting the 'hard autotune' effect that I was after and was pretty hard to control. After watching some tutorials on Yung Lean and Bladee vocals, I found most were using a ‘live’ autotune plugin that converts the incoming audio live (this can be seen in some of the tutorials that I'll mention later on), similar to what MAutopitch did, however I still wanted to opt for something like WavesTune as it analyses the audio and converts this on to a piano roll which I can then drag and manipulate each detected note rather than having the live autotune detect the closest note which can sometimes not be the right note I’m looking for. In order to expand my resources a bit I decided to look into some other uses of heavy Autotune and found that the first use of Autotune as a creative effect seemed to be used in the track Believe by Cher (Reynolds, 2018). I decided to look into the Cher vocal effect in Wavestune and that’s when I came across this video that shows how to do this.

("Vocal Tuning Effect with Waves Tune", 2010)

By using wavestune I could also use the glue tool, which essentially glues a couple of variation of pitch into one flat note, then I could glue notes together for a slower transition speed, this was what I was after to get the effect that can be heard in "Yoshi City" and "That Thing You Do", where they’ll sing a note and it will hold with no vibrato or change. Going through the vocals and moving each syllable and note to where I wanted it to be on the scale was a more time consuming side of editing the vocals for this track to have that robotic hold on them.

After watching a couple of the Yung Lean and Bladee vocal tutorials online I did come across some techniques that I hadn’t used before, which was to use flangers and chorus effects on vocals to help achieve the type of vocal effect that they have. I picked this up on these tutorials that I found below, and the technique helps to achieve the quite wide phase-y sound that Yung Lean and Bladee have on the vocals of some of their songs. In many tutorials I found things referring to creating quite a boost in the high end frequencies of the vocal to boost the sibilance and get that high end crispy sound. These types of effects can be possibly be identified in one of Yung Lean’s popular songs “Kyoto” ("I can see the light! (Album Progression and Vocal Editing)", 2017) where the vocals are rather wide and bright sounding.

("Yung Lean - Kyoto", 2013)

Instead of doing this throughout the entire main vocal I decided to apply this effect on some of the backing vocals that are present in the end of the track, and instead of a subtle chorus effect I decided to make the chorus and flanger much more noticeable as these were on backing vocals and not the lead vocals.

In combination with this I played around with plugin called iZotope VocalSynth, which is a tool that can apply many type of vocal effects such as Vocoder and Talkbox effects. I was initially looking to do something that would make the vocal sound much more synthesized and I was trying to get a vocal effect like the one used in One More Time by Daft Punk.

("Daft Punk - One More Time", 2009)

I did some research on how to do this and found a couple of tutorials on how to do it but none of the outcomes were really what I was looking for so I decided to try and see what I could do with iZotope Vocalsynth (for those who are interested in the tutorials that I found on the Daft Punk vocals I'll include it in my bibliography!). After looking at VocalSynths trailer video which demonstrates some of the effects I found that the talkbox effect was the kind of sound I wanted to go for in this track.

("iZotope VocalSynth | Vocal Effects Plug-in", 2016)

I did some research and found a tutorial video of someone showing how they achieved a talkbox effect by using the plugin, I followed this and then added some of my own variations to get a particular sound.

("How to get a Talkbox Effect with using Izotope VocalSynth", 2017)

I created my own VocalSynth settings by using purely the talkbox effect and applied some distortion for a very gritty type effect. I didn’t want this to be applied over the main vocals so I sectioned it in on areas where the vocal holds long extended autotuned notes (the longer ones that I've glued together as one note) and layered it so that it’s not exactly noticeable but reinforces some of the robotic type effect. This is what my settings for the vocal synth looked like,

These are some of the production techniques that I had to look into to achieve the vocal sound on my soundcloud rap project, it was an interesting experience to use some different types of effects on a vocal and I’ve definitely learnt some cool new ways to go about something like this in the future.

Thanks for reading!

References

bladee - That Thing You Do (ft. Uli K). (2018). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo8VpWSfOU0

Daft Punk - One More Time. (2009). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBhQbmPwH8

Flanger Vocal Effects In FL Studio (Free Presets) (Future, The Dream, Yung Lean Type). (2017). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trb2Md16Kno

How to get a Talkbox Effect with using Izotope VocalSynth. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0q-mBQGXM&

I can see the light! (Album Progression and Vocal Editing). (2017). Retrieved from https://nasteskiproductions.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/i-can-see-the-light-album-progression-and-vocal-editing/

iZotope VocalSynth | Vocal Effects Plug-in. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63tNpY8n-1o

Reynolds, S. (2018).

How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music | Pitchfork. Retrieved from https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/

Vocal Tuning Effect with Waves Tune. (2010). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo6WKTpVByU

Yung Lean - Kyoto. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMgkt9jdjTU

Yung Lean - Yoshi City. (2014). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1a3JngmpI