The Mix Academy: bit.ly/mixacademy Learn to mix hip-hop: mixinghiphop.com Learn compression: learncompression.com Improve your ears: quiztones.com Mix tips: theproaudiofiles.com How to use Nectar 2 from iZotope to automate and manipulate vocal harmonies. — Transcript: Hey what's up guys, David Glenn of davidglennrecording.com and theproaudiofiles.com. Coming at you with a video on automating harmonies. I'm a big believer that you're gonna be in the studio, you're a part of the writing, you're the recording engineer, co-producing, producing, what have you: record your harmonies in the studio. Write them out, prepare for them, track them well, maybe use a different mic for your harmonies. In this situation I didn't have the luxury of recording the harmony. We just wanted a couple quick harmonies, so we went to the digital route. We generated them with iZotope Nectar 2 in the mix process. You may be familiar with Melodyne, by all means if you got a couple, you know, lines that you want to pull in Melodyne, switch them around, randomize the timing. But I was really impressed when I tried this out with Nectar, and I didn't feel like I needed to use Melodyne. I actually feel like I got even better results using Nectar. [music] We didn't track the harmony live. Let me walk you through iZotope Nectar 2. I've only got the harmony module engaged, and I've got the master bypass set to to be automated. You can see I've got my plugins, my chain here for her vocal, and then Nectar at the end. And that's gonna be what I'm using the master bypass for. First let me show you — in Pro Tools you can hold all three modifier keys: control, option and command, and you can click any parameter pretty much and enable or disable the automation. The next thing you can do, say I'm in waveform view and I've got this plugin open, I can hold Control + Command and click on any parameter and it'll snap to that automation lane. So now I've got my master bypass, ready for me to get to work. Moving on, let's show you Nectar 2. I've got the harmony engine enabled. I've gone with a 3rd. I wanted just a 3rd up and wanted to hear it nice and tight under the lead vocal. I didn't want it to be distracting, coming in big and wide like doubled and tripled. Give it a shot, use it for doubling vocals, multiple harmonies, effects. Now I'm using this to where I'll print the harmony, I'll solo it — I'm in Pro Tools 11 — so I'll actually highlight the section, I'll bounce the solo harmony and import it back in. Logic guys have had that for a little while. And then treat it differently than the lead vocal. So mix it in and get kind of crazy with it. This is really quick, this mix isn't quite done yet, I may still do that. When you're creating a harmony digitally, in this case I'm taking the lead vocal, and that harmony is being created by the lead vocal itself. When you're in the studio and you record that, when you have an artist or singer that's gonna double or record the harmony, they're gonna sing it slightly different pitch — it's not gonna be perfect, the timing is not gonna be perfect. And while we have vocal align and other things to make it more perfect or perfect, I like harmonies to be a little loose and to be a little bit more natural sounding. The cool thing about Nectar is you've got the pitch correction option right here. The lead vocal was Melodyned. What it will do is it will even tighten that harmony so that it gives it a different character, a different sound than the lead vocal that it's being generated by. I've got this one set at like 50 or so, but you can generate a little bit of a different timing so that's gonna slide it forward or backward in time. Then the pitch, I added a decent amount of pitch shift. [music + harmony + pitch shift] The option I was talking about earlier, what you can do is solo those voices. [solo vocal harmony] So I can come in here and solo the bridge, zoom in and you can in Pro Tools send this out to a bus, we'll call it 55. Then you can right click, bounce bus 55, it will bounce that selection and then what it'll give you is this menu over here. This menu will give you the option to import after bounce. Don't need mp3. Mono is cool. WAV, make sure your settings are similar. What I'm doing is I'm naming this, whenever I process files in Pro Tools, I would say, this is Blanca Harm Bnc 1. Bnc for bounce. And I would do Offline, and I would hit bounce. This menu will pop up, new track. Triple click, hit cut, tab to transient, and let's say paste it here. There you go, there's my harmony back in the song. Now in this case I left the processing on. I probably wouldn't do that if I was bouncing this out and creating it but let's solo it. [solo vocal harmony after bounce] So, a couple quick tips on how to use iZotope Nectar 2, and then more so conceptually how to add harmonies to your mix whenever you're at the mixing process.

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