Recording, comping, editing

As far as the recording phase itself is concerned, the watchword is patience! Few singers can conjure up the right feeling with a hey presto. To interpret a song well is an artistically demanding task, requiring above all assiduity and perseverance! The initial price, though, is worth paying because the subsequent editing will go that much faster if the original material was not produced under time pressure. The motto “we'll fix it in the mix” was never a sound one – with vocals, least of all.

Once you have some good vocal takes in the can, the work of compositing generally begins. Compositing (or comping) is the process of assembling from the various takes the best rendering of each phrase – or even each word.

Technically this is not especially complicated, as your DAW offers you a powerful set of functions to facilitate the task. In terms of content, however, comping is a challenging business, because it means throwing away any number of takes, with the risk that a mere fraction of the emotional bandwidth covered by the singer in the course of the session is at your disposal later in Melodyne. So the comping process requires sound judgment and a willingness to take hard decisions.

A certain take might have intonation errors but, despite these, plenty of feeling of a kind appropriate to the lyrics. Another might be virtually error-free yet less convincing on an emotional level. In such cases, you should always decide in favor of feeling and expression and against error-free performance. Because a lack of feeling is considerably more difficult (in most cases even impossible) to compensate for afterwards than lack of technique.

To what extent poorly executed passages can be redeemed later – when the comping process is complete – is something you can never quite tell in advance. Sometimes a correction might be inaudible and unimpeachable from an acoustic standpoint, yet somehow result in the feeling being lost. This is not a discovery you want to make after the comping process has been concluded, so integrate Melodyne into your workflow at a very early stage and conduct a quick test to see whether a particular take is, or is not, capable of surviving editing.

If your DAW supports the ARA-protocol, such “tests” are enduring, since – thanks to ARA – all edits are remembered per take. So everything you do will still be there, even after you changed the comping road map back and forth between different takes.

If, on the other hand, your DAW does not support the ARA-protocol, all edits are temporary and you have to proceed like this: Transfer the current state of the comping to Melodyne and perform trial corrections. In this way, you can be sure that you have chosen the right take.
Remember, though, that as soon as you change some other area of the comping road map, you will have to repeat the transfer and all your trial corrections will be lost; they remain volatile, in other words, until the comping phase is concluded. Use Melodyne at this stage, therefore, to form a quick judgment as to whether a given take is, or is not, a realistic candidate for future editing. You cannot begin the effective, permanent, fine-tuning of the compilation track until you’ve completed work on it and transferred the finished article to Melodyne.