If you knew how many hours I have spent in the studio trying to record the perfect vocal double, you would think I was crazy. Well, you might think I am crazy anyway, but my sanity level improved by a quantum leap after discovering VocAlign.

Before VocAlign, there were two ways of obtaining the elusive vocal double. The first method was to record the lead vocal, and then have the artist sing along with the original track. You would keep a log sheet of which lines were good doubles and which lines weren’t good enough for doubles. You then continue to record on the double track, punching in and out to keep the good lines while trying to get better performances on the not so good lines. As you accumulate additional lines that are good, you keep them while continuing to record over the bad ones.

The second method was to record many tracks of vocal, say six or more, and then listen back to them and transfer the best lines to a compilation or "comp" track. After you assembled the comp track for the single performance, you would re-listen to the tracks you did not use and see if any of them made good doubles of the master single track. Any lines that sounded good as doubles were transferred to a second, or double comp track. Someday, if you were lucky, you would end up with a whole song (or chorus, or bridge, or whatever you wanted doubled) that had a master single track and a master double track.

You are not done yet! Usually the artist wants to play "beat the comp" where he will go out and sing some more vocal passes to see if he can get any lines that are better than the ones currently residing on the master comp tracks. After a few (hundred) passes you listen to what you recorded and pick the best lines. You then substitute the new lines for the ones on the single or double comp tracks to see if there is any improvement in quality or tightness of the double. Sometimes this process continues right into the mixing of the album when the artist is sure that if given the chance, could produce an even better vocal performance.

Enter VocAlign

In the above scenarios, you would often record an excellent vocal piece, but it wasn’t close enough to make a good double. Many times great performances were flushed down the digital toilet just because they weren’t tight enough to be used with the vocal that you were trying to match.

Now, I look for the best performance of a line, and don’t even care if it lines up as a double. I build two tracks full of great stuff, and pick which track I want to call the master. I then listen to the master and the double track together and mark the lines that aren’t tight enough to be good doubles. I then dump the vocal tracks into ProTools and fire up VocAlign.

The VocAlign process is very straightforward. First you launch VocAlign. Next, you drag over the region that you want to use as the guide. Usually this is the line in the master vocal track. On the keyboard hold Ctrl+Shift+7. This enters the region you have selected into VocAlign. Now you select the area that you want to line up with the master. On The keyboard hold Ctrl+Shift+8. This loads he DUB region (the vocal track that will be processed) into VocAlign.

There are two views in the VocAlign window. The top view shows the master, and the lower view shows the DUB audio. You will see the waveforms of both tracks in their respective views. When you click on the Align button, you will see an outline of the DUB audio superimposed on the Master audio region. This shows the relative position of the audio in both views. If the line-up is not quite correct, (i.e. one region had more audio selected than the other did) you can drag the lower view to roughly line up the two regions.

Press the Edit button to process the audio. This is non-destructive. A new audio file is created to contain the processed audio, so you don’t have to worry. Press the Spot button, and the newly created audio file will be placed in Pro Tools in the track of your choice.

At any time during the process you can listen to the master track, the dub track, or both together to see how things are going. VocAlign works so well that I don’t even listen to the intermediate steps any more. I just process all of the regions, and listen to the results in Pro Tools. There are plenty of parameters to change for special situations, but I have found that the default setting has worked for me every time.

VocAlign worked so well on lead vocals that I decided to try it on the vocal harmonies in the choruses. The results were just as amazing. Using the lead vocal as a guide, I easily lined up all of the harmony vocals. It didn’t matter whether they were higher or lower than the lead vocal. It also didn’t matter whether it was a different singer, male or female. Everything lined up perfectly.

Sound Quality

VocAlign does a great job of covering up any artifacts created by the processing it has to do. If you listen to the processed double track in solo, it doesn’t sound any different than the original track you recorded.

How does VocAlign work? Well this is what it says in the manual:

"VocALign first analyses the two signals' spectral energy content through a pair of Filterbanks. The output from this Spectral Analysis process is then passed to a pattern recognition process that generates a Time Alignment Path. This Path describes how to best modify the time scale of the replacement audio to align its modulations to those of the Guide."

Sounds about right to me. VocAlign works in a non-linear fashion. That is, it picks spots to lengthen or shorten the audio track that will be masked so that you won’t hear it work.

TimeMod

TimeMod is another operation that can be performed with the VocAlign program. TimeMod works in a linear fashion. It microedits the entire audio region equally to stretch or compress the time frame. TimeMod is used much the same way as VocAlign. You select the audio region you want to modify, select the new length and process the audio. If you process a stereo pair of tracks, they will remain phase coherent after the process.

TimeMod works well for problems like copying a guitar rhythm track from the first chorus to the second chorus, only to find the temp a little different. You can stretch or compress the guitar part to fit the tempo change.

Conclusion

If you have Pro Tools and use it for recording or editing, (I guess that includes everyone) then you must own VocAlign. It does everything it says, better than I expected. You can download a demo from their web site at http://www.synchroarts.co.uk, or check it out at your local music retailer. You will be glad you did.



Roger Nichols is currently VocAligning his brains out on the new Steely Dan album due to be released in the summer of ’99.