Audio Sampling in a DAW

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From the course by Berklee College of Music

The Art of Vocal Production

156 ratings

Berklee College of Music

The Art of Vocal Production

156 ratings

This course addresses recorded vocal performances and the technologies used to highlight and support them in modern record production and mixes. Most of us know that vocals serve as the focal point of modern recordings but many do not know the tools used or when the tools are used best in modern record production. The course begins with simple vocal placement in a mix, where you will also learn the fundamentals of compression and equalization. You’ll further study delays and reverbs before moving to advanced concepts in audio editing, synthetic processing, automatic & graphic pitch correction, time compression, time expansion, flex and elastic audio. Through analysis and/or hands on projects that the students will post for peer review, the student will gain an understanding of the many choices available to modern record producers as they record and mix with a modern tool set. You’ll see, in action, the Vocoder, Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Elastic Audio, Flex Time, VocAlign, tempo based editing and a host of other file modification protocols that are readily available on most Digital Audio Workstations. This course gives students a thorough look at the expanded choices that have risen in the art of vocal production as a result of these modern tools. The goal of the course is to help interested novices understand the recordings they are listening to, performers find an expanded language for their recorded voices and for vocal producers to be able to create musically artistic visualizations using singers as their paintbrushes.

From the lesson

Vocal Time Compression and Expansion: Tools of the Trade

In this lesson the nature of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) will be demystified and simplified. You will understand time as an absolute concept, time as a relative concept and further grasp the utility of the sample rate and bit depth parameters in your audio software. You will be shown tools that can change a song from a ballad to a dance record and vice versa. Many modern vocal production tools exist in software that might already be on your computer; but if you do not have such tools, you will document the use of these concepts via in-depth analysis of current and emerging music.

Basic Audio Editing0:38

Basic Audio Editing in a DAW3:58

Time Based Audio Editing1:55

Time Based Editing in a DAW8:52

Tempo Based Audio Editing0:53

Tempo Based Editing in a DAW5:02

Basic Audio Sampling1:11

Audio Sampling in a DAW8:36

Elastic Audio1:04

Elastic Audio in a DAW13:38

Flex in a DAW11:01

Revoice in a DAW10:52

Meet the Instructors

Prince Charles Alexander
Professor
Music Production and Engineering

Let's look at a sampling device.

Samplers share the same DNA as your DAW.

What that means is that if my DAW is running at 44,100

samples per second, my sampling device, which is a plugin,

will be able to sample audio at 44,100 samples per second.

Samples originated as hardware devices, and have turned into plugins in our DAWs.

I'll open up a track, and put a sampler across that track.

My sampler is called Structure Free.

Structure Free opens up with a sound in it already.

It's a sine tone.

I'll go in and remove that patch.

I will take my current vocal piece,

and I will export that vocal piece out to the desktop.

I already did that.

Let me look for

it on the desktop, there it is, I'm going to pull that into my sampler.

My sampler has now loaded that voice into a module in structure free.

Structure free doesn't give you a great depiction

of what's going on with your audiowave form the way Pro Tools does.

Some samplers do.

You can actually see the wave form inside the sampler, just like this.

I don't believe I can do that structure free.

Now, this sample's not playing and

just to not distract us I'll get that out of the way.

I have a keyboard plugged up to my sampler, and

if I hit C3, I should hear that voice.

[MUSIC]

If I go up a half step to c sharp three, I should hear that voice up a half step.

[MUSIC]

If I go to d.

[MUSIC]

D sharp.

[MUSIC]

E. [MUSIC]

F. [MUSIC]

F sharp. [MUSIC]

G. [MUSIC]

G sharp. [MUSIC]

A. [MUSIC]

A sharp.

[MUSIC]

B. [MUSIC]

And C.

[MUSIC]

That's a whole octave.

[MUSIC]

I have a range from C-2 to G8.

I have a pretty short keyboard here, so my lowest note.

[MUSIC]

In this particular, too often optic keyboard is like that, but

then if I drop down by an optic I can go even lower.

[MUSIC]

Or I can go up even higher.

If I go up two octaves.

[MUSIC]

[LAUGH] Now, if you notice something,

the time is changing.

If I go to my default C3.

[MUSIC]

That will be in tempo with the composition, so

I could literally record, and let me get my transport.

And open my transport up, setup a recording.

[MUSIC]

Go in and quantize those bits that I just recorded.

Select them and quantize them.

And if I listen to them, they should be beating in time.

[MUSIC]

Now if I change the pitch of those samples and go up by a half step,

one semitone, listen to the timing of that phrase now.

[MUSIC]

I'll go up even further, I'll go up by a minor third, by three-halves.

Listen to the phrase again, listen to the timing of that phrase against the clip.

[MUSIC]

The start time, is in time.

I have a start time at bar two, a start time at bar three, and

a start time at bar four.

What's not in time is the entire phrase,

a sampler can only lock the start time of a phrase.

So, the beginning of these phrases is definitely in time,

but then as the phrase performs, the time has modified.

The shorter the phrase, the higher the pitch.

The longer the phrase, the lower the pitch.

Let's listen to this one more time.

[MUSIC]

A lot of time between phrases.

I'll lower the pitch now, and you'll see that there's a lot of length.

And they'll start to spill over into each other, because the length of the phrase

is elongated the pitch of the phrase will get lower, and

we've got something a bit bizarre happening with our sampler now.

[MUSIC]

I should be able to make it spill right on top of each other.

[MUSIC]

I actually have a stop time.

Let's go in there and elongate that time a little bit,

all my phrases, so they'll kind of spill into each other.

Let's elongate this one, also.

[MUSIC]

And it got a little bit too long on that first one,

because it interrupted the start time of the second one.

If I go in and look at another window for

editing the media event list, and look at the duration,

and change this first duration to one beat,

actually just slightly [SOUND] beat.

And change this one to one beat, and change this one to a one beat.

Well, it's actually one bar, sorry, so one bar.

That should allow them to play, let's.

[MUSIC]

It's got no bearing to anything musical that I might do in a composition.

I'm just showing this to an octave will be down an entire octave,

and the timings should be relative.

Let's see what the time sounds like.

[MUSIC]

Did you see how that felt like it was in time?

I've actually come down to a second relative time based.

The octaves will be the same note, and

it will be half time, exactly half time, so.

If my tempo's at 92, that want to get to know,

is performing at, what would that be, 46 beats per minute.

And if I went up an octave, it would be performing at 184, and

it would sound like it's kind of in my time base, also.

[MUSIC]

Really cool concept, there are samplers that can do time

compression expansion where as the length changes,

the pitch does not change.

I'll show you how to do that in the DAW itself in another section.

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