Artificially Extending Vocals

[Perceptes]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if anyone knows the technique involved in taking a a vocal part and extending it so that it appears the vocalist is holding a single note forever. Is it done with a very short crossfade or by other means?

I messed around with a vocal part by cutting a section out of the middle where the note is sustained, then lining up a few copies of it and crossfading them, but you either hear the change in parts or you hear it as two voices overlapping each other during the fade. I want to use this to create some atmospheric vocal effects. Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks in advance.

[Track Rat]

Yeah, I've done it many times with vocals and instruments. Pretty much the way you discribe.

[Fletcher]

... and add some reverbs to obscure the edit points...

[solaris0031]

i think i know what you are talking about. ever heard of a band called Portishead? they do a song called Humming, and on the intro of that song, they do that with vocals (their singer: Beth Gibbons) and it almost sounds like a theremin, with all the vibrato and what not. very creepy, very cool.

[TexRoadkill]

A lot of DAWs have a time stretch function without changing the pitch. You could also use that with some combination of the techniques above.

[Perceptes]

Originally Posted by solaris0031

i think i know what you are talking about. ever heard of a band called Portishead? they do a song called Humming, and on the intro of that song, they do that with vocals (their singer: Beth Gibbons) and it almost sounds like a theremin, with all the vibrato and what not. very creepy, very cool.

Actually, that is a synth being played during that part. I'm interested in having a single note sung by a person held that long. The effect I'm looking for is used in Massive Attack's "Butterfly Caught" if anyone is familiar with that. Thanks for the responses, everyone.

[Cloneboy Studio]

TC Helicon VoiceOne and Voice Prism have fairly seamless algo's for doing this very technique quickly and convincingly.

I cut and paste to fix stuff in people's recordings all the time, but HATE doing it for vocals... it's a pain in the butt to match inflection, pitch, attitude and feel convincingly.

[Huck Hobo]

If you seriously wanna do this kinda stuff regularly, check into Celemony's Melodyne - I think they will or soon will have a 1-track version (last I saw only 8 & 16 track versions).

http://www.celemony.com/melodyne/demos.html

It's pretty cool software, and if you just need a quickie or two, you can do your work with the demo version & jack the audio while your track is playing with the appropriate software, eh?