Suggestions for recreating Thriller MJ vocals, He's using something..

[LazerBeakShiek]

Hey man, I m in about 15minutes..When does he talk about the harmony emulator tracks?

 

[Farview]

I didn't watch the whole thing.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

At 53 seconds in on beat it, at 'leave while you can' , the pitch change is synthetic. There are other places too. I suspect could be synthetic or edited a particular way.

It could be tape spliced together.

 

[TalismanRich]

Its not synthetic, maybe a bit of falsetto when he says "leave".
Give the guy credit. He could sing. There great singers long before Melodyne, Autotune or synth pitch tracking.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

I am at least 50 % sure it is synthetic or edited.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

Is it Pretty Young Thing or Human Nature that has an obvious vocoder part, with the same emulator/vocoder credit? Are there vocal isoltions of those tracks somewhere?

50% sure its Human Nature.

It is not robotic but organic.

Whoa, Rich I'm not saying anything negative, he was a talent. The albums engineering is a masterpiece from the 80's.

 

[Felipe Carvalho]

Sounds like a splice/comping yeah. It's pretty tight but hearing the vocals only you can spot it, you can also hear it going back to the previous line on the next phrase.

 

[pj11]

I listened to it 4 times and first must say I loved it. But I don't think there's anything to suggest that anything artificial is going on with the harmonies. The panning of the same set of harmonies at what I heard was around 10 and 2 along with him in center was perfect. Really fattened it up. Then sink the center vocal a bit and put the adlib stuff on top of it. And the kid was that good to overdub it all himself. The way he slams some of the words shut is evident on all of them. Very tight.
Thanks for sharing. I love listening to that stuff.

 

[LazerBeakShiek]

I love listening to that stuff.

There are a lot of old albums like this. I would like the people to come out and say how they did it. The tracks are complex and technical enough.

Sometimes I need to go reverb into a delay to get the dissolve right. Or a similar trick. It gets interesting. Everybody loves a good mystery.

 

[Papanate]

I am at least 50 % sure it is synthetic or edited.

No it wasn't. Bruce Swedien didn't fool with the Vocals as much as you think. Things would happen - i.e. happy accidents - but for the most part he's got an SM7a on the front vocals and a U67/U47 on the back grounds - a Harrison console - and they had 2 or 3 snyc'd 24 tracks. The magic was when Swedien mixed - it was a process and he was brilliant at it.

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[Supercreep]

I've listened to the isolated tracks, and the harmonies are definitely separate performances. Vocorders don't just do robot voices, they are also used for modulation effects and there are a bunch of those on those songs. There is also something following the bass line on Billie Jean that could be a vocorder.

I don't hear anything in the vocal harmonies that MJ couldn't easily hit and we can tell from the unison parts that he can certainly sing really tightly with himself. There is no need for synthetic harmony tracks.

This. His control is really amazing. He's very aggressive with every syllable in the main vocal. Check out the power and accuracy in "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it's fair." There's some doubling on the chorus intro (Beat it! Beat it!), some harmony background, and an improv track or two that picks up at the end. Sounds like a plate reverb with a little more on the background vocals than the main vocal. If you can sing like that, a medium or large diaphragm dynamic microphone and a fast compressor should get you most of the way there.