Time Stretching Vocals

[Fatlimey]

Adding a "sick bunch of reverb" and "just looping it - you get the right bit and it won't sound looped" are good starting points. But once you get annoyed with the difficulties of getting good loops while retaining the human voice tonality or start to hate losing all that definition just to extend a voice sample, you'll finally get see why "granular sampling" is the key.

Granular sampling will take your voice loop, cuts it into lots of tiny pieces and pastes them beack together together, a bit like making a collage. Instead of your vocal loop fitting together like bricks in a wall (end to end to end), using a granular system you can take pieces and overlap them, smear the edges between parts, make each section of sound more human by adding in tiny amounts of pitch and timing randomness (which is essentially what adding "sick reverb" does, but without all that smearing in the time domain) until you just can't tell where the join is.

Get hold of a good sampler - not Simpler - and try doing it granular.

[DJ_Animus]

you also could do a transpose stretch? basically you mix on 3 decks and have deck C stretch the vocal and when youre ready to stretch it quickly cut in deck C and cut out deck A, when youre done cut back A and no ones the the wiser (cue juggling kind of) No need for other programs, traktor can do it.

[rvltion909]

you also could do a transpose stretch? basically you mix on 3 decks and have deck C stretch the vocal and when youre ready to stretch it quickly cut in deck C and cut out deck A, when youre done cut back A and no ones the the wiser (cue juggling kind of) No need for other programs, traktor can do it.

True but Im not really impressed with Traktor's key lock feature (sounds very artificial to me). Hell even Ableton's warp feature for this is not pleasing my ear.

I've heard it done with granular technique before but it was very "tricked out" with other effects so it wasnt necessarily what I was looking for (i.e. Nautilus plugin for MAC). So far the Melodyne VIDEO is the best I've heard...but Im not trying to drop $300 on that right now.

Not only have I wondered about this for a while but the whole Depeche Mode Beatport remix contest Im doing got me thinking about it again. I've heard several quality uses of this feature that sound great and natural.

Limey, you think Ableton 6's granular delay could do this?

[Monika.mhz]

Yeah...I'm going to vote for Melodyne. Probably the best granular processor out there.

I've taken vox in 4/4, turned them into 3/4, at a third the speed, in a different key. It's bloody amazing.

It's become an indispensable part of my remix/mix/production toolkit.

[rvltion909]

ok, then Im definitely doing something wrong with my demo.

If I ever have money to burn I will definitely be picking Melodyne up.


not anytime soon since I still need to pick up a VCI........some day