Flagrant abuse of stock Reaper plug ins to do stuff they probably shouldn't be used for...

[Armistice]

So I found a couple of "interesting" YouTube/Reaper videos when searching around the other night. Both of these use different Reaper plug ins - ReaTune and ReaPitch - for things you probably shouldn't actually use them for, for good reason.

This first one is particularly bad... don't know who this guy is, but 70,000 people have watched the video and got bad advice. At 2.09, where you hear his base track, at the very end, you can hear that it's massively tuned already... and then he uses copies of that vocal and ReaTune to map out harmonies AND IT SOUNDS ABSOLUTELY AWFUL... at 7.30 you get the full horror of the effect. How would that be actually useful in a recording?

I don't know - perhaps just sing the harmonies yourself, or get your singer to. If they can't, then perhaps they should learn how. Plus, his song has the name "Crispin" in it and that's a reason to hate the guy, right there...



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This next one, is good old Kenny G using ReaPitch to do a similar thing - if you listen to his base track at 0.40 - then it's at least doubled, maybe tripled, already - strikes me that's not the way to generate USEFUL harmonies artificially - perhaps a single track would be better, anyway, what he's done is create additional "harmonies" at a constant 4 steps and 7 steps up using ReaPitch, and the end result is the god-awful noise presented at 3.20 - again, that is a completely artificial sounding mess and also has the additional problem in that THIS IS NOT HOW HARMONY WORKS as I understand it.

He thinks he's created a major triad harmony, but he hasn't, because if, say, you start with a C and your song is in C major, and you strike a major third up, that's E and then a fifth up that's G - all good so far. But if the next note in your melody is D, then his auto harmony is now producing F# and A and that F# isn't in the key of C major, so it's dissonant if you're trying to sing a song that's in C major. So perhaps a useful effect, but a useful harmony it ain't. Very few people have noted this issue in the comments - most think it's a fantastic thing. Another 70,000 people have seen this video.

It's almost like he knows everything about Reaper but not much about music theory. Or have I missed something and my general understanding of music is incorrect?

[rayc]

The 1st person makes it clear it'll sound robotic. The "tuned" vocals are UP in the mix for the cloth eared to hear...no subtlety but with a reason. ReaTune is coarse and moving more than a tone will sound very obvious. Setting the attack to a larger number will lessen the robotic sound but will let some of the original sound in - not a great option for creating harmonies. Using reverb to soften things and mixing low allow it to be snuck under the bar sometimes. The prime use of ReaTune, for me, is to map out the notes sung and to establish the note to retrack to. That is how James taught me.
ReaPitch & Kenny..he does know his theory but there's not much of it in this early video. It' like ReaTune is rough...it takes quite some time and decent ears to get the sound to be reasonable for voice and, again, anything beyond a tone gets awful awful fast. Mixing & blending can help. As to proper intervals across keys it doesn't do that as your ears demonstrated. It'd take a lot of effort and separate vocal tracks to get even near a decent sound.

Just as a Kemper assist those who don't have the money, space, time or isolation for the real deal so too " vocal tuners" for those without the pipes or connections.
Neither of the programs works well with vocals apart from Tune's ability to tidy a note that's slightly awry.

The price of software that does those things well, when used appropriately, explains why short cuts n messy attempts at working around about to approximate a result are canvassed in the stock/free software.

[Armistice]

People can use the things for whatever they want, and I'm all for pushing the envelope and finding new uses for things - I'm just amazed that ReaTune guy thinks there's some actual use for the thing he's created - "which you can use to create vocal harmonies" - really, you can't. Nothing you can use anyway.

And Kenny G is growing on me - he does some useful stuff and there are other things in the video that are good to know about ReaPitch - although I experimented with the 10/20 L/R thing on a tune and just found that it makes it sound mechanical - but to head down the road of saying 4 steps up and 7 steps up gives you a harmony - well yes, but only on that note - as soon as you go elsewhere - which is sort of what vocal melodies do, it's probably not going to work at all - so again, he's produced something which isn't much actual use - especially as it's based on a doubled/tripled voice in the first instance - an effect, if you like it, but it's not a usable harmony generating machine, unless you put about 6 of them on the track and faded them in/out via envelopes. To suggest otherwise indicates a lack of understanding of how musical keys work, IMO.

Whatever they do still leaves them with the problem that they're simply manipulating a straight copy of something and laying against the original, and that will always sound bad - just like copying and pasting a guitar track and offsetting it by 10ms or whatever, it just doesn't sound very good. Play it again and double track properly. Same same. You want harmonies? Sing them... if you can sing the lead, you can sing the harmony.

What might be interesting is if either of them used alternative takes and then applied their processes - I mean, they're recording stuff, right? There are alternative takes - would solve at least the major issue of it being a direct copy.





BTW, Kempers are misunderstood - the fundamental difference between miking an amp - the "real deal" - and ending up with a digital recording in your DAW, and using a Kemper, is the location and style of the AD conversion. The profiles are created using real amps, and real mics and real cabinets by real people who can play real guitars, and usually, really know how to create good profiles which work really well as long as you understand their limitations.

[rayc]

When I use Melodyne to create harmonies it's not from a duplicate. I usually do three or four takes for a main vocal and then comp together something that's as close as I can get. In doing that I remove the used sections from the original tracks so have fodder to create harmonies from. Quite often I don't need to use a program for the whole thing as there are chunks where I've naturally & accidentally sung something in harmony to the original idea...those bits need tidying etc. but little processing. Those things make me happy.

Kempers, yeah like a mountain of good digital amp in a box pedals - but it's still a digital recreation and sophistry isn't going to make it cool...recording great tones with it and no one knowing it's a Kemper could make it cool.

[JD01]

Glad you found that method useful ray. I basically used it to teach myself to sing.

[vomitHatSteve]

I guess... technically if you tune the vocal up to a major third and a fifth, you are making major triads. Goia's not wrong about that. It's just a very suspect choice to make 90% of the time (as you pointed out already, major triads aren't going to match your key every time)

Oh! Better solution to automate his methodology: Set both instances of reapitch to be about a quarter tone flat (3.5 and 6.5 respectively). Then put an instance of reatune and assign the key there. Reatune can snap the 3rd between major and minor to match the key, and that 7 tritone too.

[Armistice]

I guess... technically if you tune the vocal up to a major third and a fifth, you are making major triads. Goia's not wrong about that. It's just a very suspect choice to make 90% of the time (as you pointed out already, major triads aren't going to match your key every time)

Oh! Better solution to automate his methodology: Set both instances of reapitch to be about a quarter tone flat (3.5 and 6.5 respectively). Then put an instance of reatune and assign the key there. Reatune can snap the 3rd between major and minor to match the key, and that 7 tritone too.

See - now that's thinking about the problem and finding a solution!

And if he'd split out his tripled original vocal to 3 single takes, and used a different take on separate tracks and thus different instances of ReaPitch, he might have something that's vaguely usable.

[Greg_L]

He should do a video on editing vocals and make his own vocal tracks flow together into one cohesive complete sentence instead of little bursts of words.

[Armistice]

He should do a video on editing vocals and make his own vocal tracks flow together into one cohesive complete sentence instead of little bursts of words.

I'm getting used to it. I think @rayc mentioned he does it like that as he's so excitable that no-one would understand him if he spoke naturally, so he deliberately stops mid-sentence so he can be understood. Some of the places he stops though... like there's literally one more word in the sentence, and he stops.