Around We Go

Vocals for the Instrumentalist

A lot of the songs I come up with come from simply trying out chord progressions then slowly adding bass and drums.  I end up with a loop that I hear maybe hundreds of times before I spread it out into some kind of coherent "song".  For some reason I find that I want to add vocals to everything, even though, generally I prefer instrumental music.

This song started with a progression in Am but, as I built it out I felt that the chorus could be "brighter" so, it is in A.

While arranging this song I could not come up with any instrumental melody that felt right.  I went to my trusty licensed samples service to see what I could find.  Amazing I managed to find two vocal samples that sounded similar in timbre and lyrical theme!  Usually the vocals on these services are all very similar: effects heavy and predominantly focused on club-style EDM.  Read below for my thoughts on vocal samples.

Pat's Guitars

Since I am in love with the sampler, I started this track out with some samples from Pat Benatar's "We Belong".  I used the interesting, heavily delayed guitar bits from the beginning of that song throughout.  Later, reading about the laws surrounding sampling, I decided that I should likely get what is known as "sample clearance" from the song's owners.  Well this is much harder than it may sound.

There are only a couple websites that provide information for who owns the rights to a song and, in many cases, more than one party owns the rights.  Once I found the two owners for this song, both LLCs if I recall correctly, I went about looking them up.  This was the major dead-end.  Both of these companies were – likely – set up in the early 80s to control the publishing rights to songs and have now either folded or are so inactive that it is impossible to locate them.  I gave up.

I next went about trying to sonically recreate the sounds.  This was actually a pretty fun exercise but I found it very difficult to achieve the same sound.  To keep things manageable, I opted to prioritize the rhythm of the guitar plucks and emulate the delay as best possible.  It turned out that layering a couple different instruments together really helped make the sound more interesting.  The result is what you hear throughout the song.

Core Learnings

Vocal Timing & Tuning

Dropping the samples in, I immediately found that the vocals for the verses were off in timing, even though the sample was – supposedly – at the same BPM (120).  This led me to find a way to correct these timing issues without destroying the quality of the audio.  Previously, I had used Audacity to do audio manipulation but, like many OSS projects, the user interface and overall user experience is frustrating.  This time I explored what Logic had to offer.

Logic Pro has a feature called "Flex" where you can manipulate both the timing and pitch of audio in a variety of ways.  I ended up being able to adjust the vocals to hit closer to the beats and correct a couple pitch inconsistencies along the way.  The result was much better than before but, as listeners will note, the first verse in the song begins in an awkward way that I simply could not improve.

Vocal Samples: Doubled-Edged

The problems with using vocals from sample services may seem obvious but they are worth noting:

• If you have a direction that you want lyrics to fit to, your options reduce to nearly 0
• If you manage to find lyrics that work, the delivery may be lacking or delivered in a style that is incompatible with your direction
• The recording quality is highly variable; some sample creators are clearly more capable at producing rich samples than others and you must sift through them all
• Likely most importantly, the vocals will not be unique; several thousands of other musicians will have access to the same samples without any proprietary rights

A perfect example is the way one of the lyrics is sung: the vocalist pronounces kaleidoscope sort of phonetically kah-lee-ay-doh-scope.  I can only imagine that these lyrics were written by someone else.

Samples Used

From landr.com:

• WADHVCK Kit2 Acapella Dry AMin 120bpm
• SL Seids Ready To Go Vocal AMaj 120
• TS Cymbal Fake
• a maj female ooo (this name may differ from the original)