No idea what I did?

R

rob aylestone

Moderator
I've been working on a track for a singer I work with. I'm old and she's young and the song is an old Whitney Houston track and she'd never heard it before. It's in the starting key of the original, but changes radically during the song - my guide melody she couldn't follow, so having Steinberg's Spectral Layers, I had the idea of taking the original vocal off it and then transplanting it into the new version - same key, no problem but the tempo of mine is a bit slower. As I work in two separate places, somehow I produced the track at one sample rate, and the Special Layers stem in another - so I converted it. but the wrong way, so redid it again and then eventually dropped it into Cubase and the 44.1/48K tooing and froing has done very odd things. I now have the track, but with a voice that sounds like a much older Whitney. Clearly at some point I've done something, but Ive been unable to recreate it. It's not remotely mixed - and a bit faders in a row at this stage, but has anyone ever heard this effect before? I could understand it if it was in a different key - but it is the right one, so I'm at a loss to work out what I've actually done.
 

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  • I HAVE NOTHING v3-whitney voxmod.mp3
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She has a nice voice.

Wow, that is a problem Rob. You make awesome recordings of women, but you don't know how you do it...
 
No - I didn't explain well. That is the guide vocal for my singer to sing to - and that voice is Whitney Houston but it doesn't sound like her, and I cannot work out what changed her voice so much. I
 
My guess is what you are hearing is the effect of slowing down the vocal - the DAW has to 'fill in' those gaps, which it would do by copying the previous bits whenever it has to 'catch up' time-wise.
 
I think Mike is right. Time compression and expansion is something i find tricky and I usually have to play with any tool to get decent results and that's without changing sample rates!
 
It's never hapened like this before - if I import a 48K waveform into a 44.1 track or vice versa you get the pitch change which alters the tone of the voice making it a new person, but here it's done that, but not shifted the pitch. I did the usual stretching and shrinking in cubase the normal way, to bring it forward or make it lunger, longer, but I cannot work out how I did it - mainly because I'd like to replicate this - I'm thinking that you could get the singer to do the BVs, and it would sound like a different person. I'll have to try a diferent track and try to make the thing happen again- so far, it won't do it, so I'm thinking some happy accident? No idea really. The tone to me sounds like a 48K file put into a 44.1 project - in how it 'oldered' the voice making it sound like a 50 yr old instead of a 20 yr old? A bit like turning Whitney into her mum!
 
rob aylestone said:
It's never hapened like this before - if I import a 48K waveform into a 44.1 track or vice versa you get the pitch change which alters the tone of the voice making it a new person, but here it's done that, but not shifted the pitch. I did the usual stretching and shrinking in cubase the normal way, to bring it forward or make it lunger, longer, but I cannot work out how I did it - mainly because I'd like to replicate this - I'm thinking that you could get the singer to do the BVs, and it would sound like a different person. I'll have to try a diferent track and try to make the thing happen again- so far, it won't do it, so I'm thinking some happy accident? No idea really. The tone to me sounds like a 48K file put into a 44.1 project - in how it 'oldered' the voice making it sound like a 50 yr old instead of a 20 yr old? A bit like turning Whitney into her mum!
Click to expand...
Happy accidents can be hard to reproduce: I once did some weird combination of doubling, sample off-setting and modulation delay with automation that somehow created a guitar part that would sound quite literally like it was flying around your head in a big ass circle! Lost the original sessions in a move and was never able to recreate it to the same degree.

I also have some other lost sessions from the same move that had raunchy distorted incredible sounding bass guitar parts that i KNOW i recorded DI and i have never been able to recreate the same , or even a good approximation.

If you figure out how to do it again, I'd be interested to know-Love them crazy tricks
 
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