Your approach to comping?

[D-toks]

Hi FP family,

So a client provides you with a project file containing a song instrumental and 50 full vox takes sang over that instrumental. This client then asks you to "work your magic" to make the best sound bits of the vox come together and to get back to him/her ASAP/in a reasonable time.

My question to all of you is what is your personal strategy/advice for being able to streamline the comping process and comp vox efficiently? How many measures/bars or seconds at a time do you find to be most effective for you when you comp? How do you minimize fatigue as you listen to all the takes for each segment you are comping? I'm wondering about these sorts of things. Please keep in mind that I'm asking this question with respect to having to deal with large take folders (i.e. more than 10 takes).

I am really trying to figure this out because I find I spend so much time trying to comp vox tracks and typically I will come back to an old project a couple weeks or a month later to review a track and notice sound bits that sound much better than bits I put into the final product – to the point where I have to ask myself, "How did I not notice this sound clip before?". Obviously, I cannot continue to have this happen so I am in need of some guidance here. Thanks.

 

[DarkRed]

You should not allow too many records/plays on each vox during the recording process, keep removing the least good ones during the recording process and stay within some practical limits. Then once ITB you can use the playlist feature and just listen through a song section at a time, then quickly decide which one is the best, then move that up. Then keep doing this. If you find yourself in a situation that you need to copy bits and peaces like crazy, then the issue is the vocals that are not trained enough, so that on each take you have false notes and other issues in the recording. So you resolve this by increasing the performance of the vocals, limit the amount of takes, then just quickly move up (PT feature) the sections from the takes that you like, typically you have some particular take that tends to work better than the other ones most of the time, that speeds it up too. It should not be more complicated than that. A section could be say 4, 8 or 16 bars depending on what quality diffs you happen to have within each section between the tracks. Although vocals are very important, one should not get stuck working on them. I think it is smarter to do the take selection a bit roughly and then do auto tuning, automation etc. to make them fit the production. If you have crazy amounts of bits, then that's going to be painful to work with, it's a sign that the conditions varied a lot during the recording, that the singer struggled a bit during the recording. Some of those sessions should be avoided, it's sometimes smarter to just record on a different day. Then it might work much better and you end up with much fewer takes.

Another thing, do not let the recording engineer dictate what your work is going to end up being. Require from the recording engineer that the recording is delivered in a certain way. Some recording engineers think that all you need to do is to record a bunch of takes and then pick the best sounding ones. You can do so, but it's not how great recording is achieved. Great recording is achieved by not focusing on the processes that follow the recording process. The final recording should be so sweet that the engineer would be proud of it eventhough it would be sent straight to printing, bypassing the mixing and mastering process. Recordings where you have tons of takes that the mixing engineer has to comp, those ones are rarely sweet, because they relied on the mixing and mastering to do the heavy duty, but it's the production and recording that are the heavy duty. Once there is a common understanding about that, the performance tends to increase to the level where it needs to be. Hence, more than anything it is about the performance. Once that is great, you don't have to spend much time with the takes. In Nashville a whole band might do two songs on a day, there are not a lot of takes, just awesome performances. That's the key. So it's pure skills resulting in the required waveforms.

 

[lemeilleurmacklin]

dope, it sound pretty good

 

[KonKossKang]

comping is real simi to patterning.

 

[D-toks]

You should not allow too many records/plays on each vox during the recording process, keep removing the least good ones during the recording process and stay within some practical limits. Then once ITB you can use the playlist feature and just listen through a song section at a time, then quickly decide which one is the best, then move that up. Then keep doing this. If you find yourself in a situation that you need to copy bits and peaces like crazy, then the issue is the vocals that are not trained enough, so that on each take you have false notes and other issues in the recording. So you resolve this by increasing the performance of the vocals, limit the amount of takes, then just quickly move up (PT feature) the sections from the takes that you like, typically you have some particular take that tends to work better than the other ones most of the time, that speeds it up too. It should not be more complicated than that. A section could be say 4, 8 or 16 bars depending on what quality diffs you happen to have within each section between the tracks. Although vocals are very important, one should not get stuck working on them. I think it is smarter to do the take selection a bit roughly and then do auto tuning, automation etc. to make them fit the production. If you have crazy amounts of bits, then that's going to be painful to work with, it's a sign that the conditions varied a lot during the recording, that the singer struggled a bit during the recording. Some of those sessions should be avoided, it's sometimes smarter to just record on a different day. Then it might work much better and you end up with much fewer takes.

Another thing, do not let the recording engineer dictate what your work is going to end up being. Require from the recording engineer that the recording is delivered in a certain way. Some recording engineers think that all you need to do is to record a bunch of takes and then pick the best sounding ones. You can do so, but it's not how great recording is achieved. Great recording is achieved by not focusing on the processes that follow the recording process. The final recording should be so sweet that the engineer would be proud of it eventhough it would be sent straight to printing, bypassing the mixing and mastering process. Recordings where you have tons of takes that the mixing engineer has to comp, those ones are rarely sweet, because they relied on the mixing and mastering to do the heavy duty, but it's the production and recording that are the heavy duty. Once there is a common understanding about that, the performance tends to increase to the level where it needs to be. Hence, more than anything it is about the performance. Once that is great, you don't have to spend much time with the takes. In Nashville a whole band might do two songs on a day, there are not a lot of takes, just awesome performances. That's the key. So it's pure skills resulting in the required waveforms.

Thanks for the useful response Dark. So how many records/plays do you usually permit before moving onto another or telling the singer it's not working out? I think I'll try doing 8 bar section comps. I really just want to expedite the comping process. A lot of times it's not necessarily bad sections I'm struggling to comp; sometimes it's simply I have quite a few good takes and in the moment I select one and later revisit and realize a different one was in fact way better and would have been used instead if I could do it over again. Again, it probably goes back to the fact that I let good takes stack up. I don't have protools so I do not exactly know what you mean by the "move up" feature. I use Logic.

At the moment I'm serving as both the producer and engineer so your second paragraph is very hard to apply. I am extremely picky and particular about everything. Maybe I just need to get someone else on board with me to get me out of my own head. So typically how many takes do you usually find is sufficient to get a good track mixed if the performance is up to your standard?

dope, it sound pretty good

?

comping is real simi to patterning.

Hi, could you please elaborate?

 

[KonKossKang]

Layers/patterns/clips/takes/sections.

But the question is about what to do when using vox in a beat.
Not really a rule, but methods exist to achieve the desired effect of something depending on what it is trying to be achieved.

 

[chris carter]

It's a bit odd that someone would provide you, as the mixer (I'm assuming) a ton of uncommped vocals. Generally speaking, the producer keeps track during recording using one of two methods. One is the comp-as-you-go method in which you make the comps during the tracking session so you always know what you have and it's done, leaving only a few comps at most for later. The other method is to use a comp sheet whereby you write down all the lyrics and use one of a variety of notations to indicate the results of each take so you know which words/phrases are good and which aren't; then you can comp after the fact, but you have a road map. Just doing a bunch of takes willy nilly without paying any attention is setting yourself up for a lot of work. comping in general is a LOT of work (which is why a lot of people like to comp-as-you-go, because it's the fastest method). But leaving the comping for someone who wasn't even the producer or the tracking engineer is asking for a MASSIVE amount of work.

Your best bet is to do your own comp sheet. Print out the lyrics with plenty of space between lines and go through each take and mark on the sheet which words/phrases are good, which are great, which are bad, which could be good with tuning, which could be good with timing adjustments, etc. It'll take a long time, but that's how it goes. Then go through and do all those comps.

But whatever you do, charge a LOT! Depending on the song this could easily be a half-day or full-day of work if you are trying to do a high quality job. If the client complains, tell them to do it right the first time LOL!