“Polished” Voice in songs?

[Dave Haynie]

There are a thousand things you can do… mention a specific part of a specific song, and maybe some of the folks around here can tell you what’s being done.

There are some common treatments. Sometimes a chorus really is a chorus… a few background singers join in, creating a richer sound. Sometimes you just double the original singer — record the chorus twice, using both together. Or use a Chorus plug-in to create a similar effect from just one voice. Sometimes you muck around with reverb.

Really, if you know what you want to hear, mess around with things. That’s a good way to develop a sense of this stuff.

-Dave

[Mike Kujbida]

I’d like to offer another suggestion and that is to have this done by a professional studio.
The guy I work with has his own home studio and does engineering and producing for a wide range of local and not so local people.
He can get done in a few hours (or less) what would take me a year and still not sound as good.
He has the gear and, more importantly, the skills and knowledge to “make it right”.

[Ken Mitchell]

Do you have a song example?

[Tyson Onaga]

That “polished” sound is probably done with stuff like this:
https://www.tcelectronic.com/powercore.asp

or stuff like it … which is why it is probably a great idea to follow Mike’s advice.

[Timothy Carr]

Thanks guys! I will try and look for a song that has this really well.

[Timothy Carr]

Ok i asked my friends son (a music nut) and he said that this song has it in the chorus and when he talks normally its not polished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elGnvPQW0WM

I dont know if you want a better quality video (better quality video on YouTube means better audio) but i couldn’t find one. For all thoese people where youtube has been blocked, the song is called LoudNClear by Trudog. Or something like that.

How is this done?

[Kevin Mccarthy]

The predominate effect on that track is form of phasing. The vegas equivilent would be the flanging effect. There is also some delay and some distortion applied to the audio. Play with these effects and you should be able to get what you want. The “erie/spacey ” effect is the flanger.

[Ken Mitchell]

When he is singing he is using pitch correction on his vocals… this causes the notes to “jump” directly to the correct note instead of slide or be slightly off… check out ANTARES software (autotune).This is what everyone is using..especially if they can’t sing that well.

https://www.antarestech.com/products/auto-tune-evo.shtml

[Mike Kujbida]

Even my teenage daughters can recognize an Autotuned song and they’ve come to hate it.

[Dave Haynie]

Yeah, they’re using Autotune as an effect there. Autotune is a phase vocoder, a function first built in 1966… back when you had to actually build them in hardware.

The original point of Autotune was to add small correction to vocals, so that singers (particularly mediocre singers) could be adjusted in pitch. Of course, this was supposed to be kept secret…

The plug-in as an effect was first popularized in Cher’s 1998 song “Believe”. It had some popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s, know back then as “The Cher Effect”. It died down for awhile, but was resurrected by rapper turned R&B singer T-Pain, which pretty much uses it everywhere.

And of course, let’s not forget the Gregory Brothers’ “Auto-Tune the News”: https://autotunethenews.com.

In short, this effect is all over the place, very distinctive and annoyingly overused. The plug-in is not THAT expensive, there’s a time-limited download, you can find some phase vocoder VST freebies if you look around, though probably not as easy to use as Auto-Tune.

-Dave