Vocal Production
The voice is the only instrument whose source every listener knows from the inside. We hear voices all day and produce them ourselves, so our hearing is extraordinarily sensitive to small deviations in one. That is why the vocal gets priority in every decision.
- comping
- de-essing
- two stages of compression
Where you run into this
- Pop
- Hip hop
- Singer-songwriter
- Podcasting
In short
Everything about vocal production follows from that sensitivity. A guitar slightly out of tune is a texture; a voice slightly out of tune is a mistake. A synth with an odd resonance is a sound; a voice with one is a person with a cold.
Comping a lead from ten takes is where most of the magic in modern vocal production actually happens, and it is unglamorous work.
How it works
Tuning is a tool and it has a tell. Moving pitch shifts formants along with it, and formants are supposed to stay where the singer's body puts them, so heavy correction makes a voice sound synthetic even when the notes are right. That is a physical fact rather than a matter of taste.
Where you run into this
- A lead vocal assembled line by line from ten passes
- A sibilant S that stabs in every chorus
- A tuned vocal that is in tune and no longer sounds like a person
In practice
Compress in two stages. A gentle first stage evens out the performance and a second one sets the level in the track. Two moderate stages sound far more natural than one aggressive one, because each is doing less work.