The Logistics of Vocal Collaboration: How do y'all do it?

[Paulie]

New Taxi member here.

As a multi-instrumentalist that can't sing, I get frustrated when I see listings for male vocalists. I want to write for some of these, but don't have a vocalist handy. For those of you out there that collaborate in this situation, how do you actually do it? Do you get together in person, or Skype to talk through the tune? Do you send a high-quality MP3 of the track to the vocalist that then sends back a solo track of the performance to be layered on the instrumental master?

I'd love to hear how people are doing this successfully. We have the technology, I need the process.

[andygabrys]

well depends on:

what you have (i.e. $$$ or lack thereof)

and how much control over the tune you want (i.e. do you want the vocalist to do a WFH so its unencumbered and you can pitch it at your will or sign it to a publisher as your whim)

and whether you are skilled enough as a vocalist that you can get down a rough take of how the melody goes or if you need to the vocalist to help you write the melody and possibly lyrics and effectively becomes a co-writer.


If you don't need help writing, and can get a rough take down, or even a piano line playing the melody and a set of lyrics, then there are plenty of vocalists around here who would do a Work-for-hire (WFH). As well there are vocalists on sites like www.studiopros.com who will do a vocal for a certain $$ and under certain conditions (like number of touchups, changes etc).

On the other hand, if you need to collaborate to write the tune and get the performance down with the end goal of splitting the song, then you would do well to have an avenue to pitch the song - as being 50% owner of a song that never gets used isn't that monumental of a financial position to be in. Some people will do that to pitch to a TAXI listing. Its easy to put together a vocal track with a rough piano guide playing footballs (whole notes) just to get the song together if the vocalist comes up with an idea, or vice versa its easy to put together an instrumental track that somebody can vibe with and come up with ideas, or you can both vibe along with your instrumental on Skype or FaceTime - although neither of those services allows true real-time simultaneous performance.

Then technically its easy (similar to your other thread about collaborations) - you just send a bounce of your tune as an instrumental and a separate stem of the lead vocal rough so the vocalist can line it up in their workstation and record tracks and then export them from their DAW and send them back to you via Gobbler or Dropbox or Box or Google Drive or wetransfer.com or hightail.com - all of these services have a small amount of storage available in a free account.

You have to specify the format you want (i.e. sample rate and bit depth) and usually you will send the guide tracks in the same format to your collaborator or WFH singer.

traditionally music for picture has been mastered at 48k 16bit - and sessions for same are often at 48k 24 bit, but I bet there are as many different variations on that as there are people on this forum - and a lot of people here work at 44.1k. In practice the ~8% difference doesn't make that big of a deal when converting back and forth.

HTH

[melodymessiah]

i've done this a few times. since i'm living in a small town with limited access to suitable vocals, i've hired demosingers online.

i send them two tracks, one with my reference vocal, and one backing track only for the singer to put their vocal on. both mp3 files, this will do just fine for this purpose.

you could, of course, send them an instrumental version instead of the vocal (where the vocal melody is played with an instrument/sound). however, since it can be very hard to emulate the phrasings and the subtle shifts in vocals with instruments, i highly recommend to at least TRY to put your guide vocal on it (depending on your singing ability of course). this will give the singer more to work from, especially if you have very spesific requests for the vocal. some demosingers actually INSISTS on a guide vocal rather than instrumental.

however, there's a couple of major drawback with these online vocal services. you won't be able to be in the studio to guide the singer. i've found that somewhat frustrating, since they, in many cases, don't seem to (or don't bother to take their time) to notice the subtle changes in vocal pitch and phrasings, especially on variations on "corresponding" melody lines, for the sake of variations. skyping may be an option here of course, i haven't tried it. most demosinger, however, seem to offer one or two revisions included in the price.
anyway, nothing beats being in the stuidio with the singer of course!! another drawback with demosingers, is that they're mostly in it for the money, and will sing everything offered to them, even songs they don't genuinly connect to. so they may not be able to give a convincing performance. if you can find a regular collab, who really connects to your songs, i would go for that instead.

another pitfall is if you've allready recorded a track, just to discover that it's out of rech for the singer! oh-oh. if you work in midi only, like i do. that's no issue of course, since you can easily transpose the tracks to fit the singer. (actually there's software who can do this with audio as well, without compromizing the sound quality to much)