Back in my days as a long-haired metalhead, I played drums and sang backing vocals for a band called Dagger. Love us or hate us, we were competent musicians who took pride in our ability to play and sing. The most widespread comment I received after a show was, "Who's playing the background vocal samples?" Interestingly, there wasn't anyone with a sampler or a tape machine hiding behind the curtain: We were simply singing backup vocals. I vividly remember spending countless nights rehearsing nothing but harmonies until we'd get them right. We wanted to sound like our CD. Nowadays, audiences expect a band to sound like the record. Is it because they are more discriminating than they used to be, or is it simply a sense of entitlement that their favorite band should sound "just like the CD"? Could it be a lack of appreciation for how much work it takes for a live band to sound the same onstage as they do in the studio? Or is it that audiences have become so numb to lip-syncing that they don't know the difference between live and Memorex?
It may be a combination of all of the above, but the net result is the same: Competition is fierce, and that may be the reason many acts have resorted to integrating studio vocal-processing technology into their live shows. Some of that technology includes fixing out-of-tune vocals and vocalists handling their own effects on stage. Let's look at these one at a time.
Pitch-accuracy of vocals is a topic near and dear to my heart. I have zero patience for artists who can't sing in the studio, and less than zero for artists who can't sing live. Of course, the familiar model of tuning vocals is our audio-vision of a sub-par singer soaring to new heights, bolstered by the latest pitch correction technology from TC-Helicon, DigiTech or Antares. You'd be surprised at the number of lead singers who are "auto-tuned" on-the-fly at the FOH console, and we're starting to see pitch correction applied to backing singers as well.
Many people feel this is cheating, and to some extent, I agree with them. When was the last time you saw a drummer who was being time-corrected? (On second thought, don't answer that. I see plenty of drummers playing along with a click onstage). It's almost like the steroid problem in baseball: If everyone is doing it, how can you possibly remaining competitive while abstaining?
Some of these vocal processors include the ability to modify the "character" of the voice, adding parameters that control the size of one's chest cavity (no wisecracks please), add vibrato where there was none, or make your next door neighbor sound like Mickey Mouse. Which one of these knobs makes me sound like Frank Sinatra?
The interesting thing is that using pitch correction on a voice doesn't have to be audible in the Front of House mix to be effective. What, you say? According to Kevin Alexander at TC-Helicon, "When a person learns to sing, one of the things they listen for to determine if they are in tune, is the beating between their own voice and the people they are singing (or playing) with. This lets them know when they are flat or sharp. If their own pitch-corrected voice is sent into the monitors as a reference, they'll hear beating between the corrected voice and their natural voice, and naturally adjust their pitch until the beating goes away–at which point, they are in tune."
So, feed your pitch-corrected signal into your lead vocalist's monitor mix, and quite soon, they will learn to sing on key. Fascinating. There are a plethora of tools available for the job. Hardware boxes manufactured by TC-Helicon (VoiceLive, VoicePro), Antares (ATR-1a, AVP) and Eventide (H8000FW) can fix pitch in real time. If that doesn't float your boat, Manifold Labs' Plugzilla is a hardware box that will run your favorite standard VST plug-ins without a computer, making it a breeze to use software in live situations. Employing any of these tools, you can elect to either fix a singer's pitch in the FOH mix, or send the fixed voice to their monitors and let them figure it out themselves.
The flip (and much more fun) side of the vocal-processing coin is the trend for lead singers to control their own effects on stage. Guitar players have been aggravating sound engineers with this for years and now vocalists are in on it, too. Singers want to hear Front of House effect cues in the monitors, which is difficult in club situations or tours where the band is not traveling with a monitor engineer. From the sound engineer's standpoint, there are important questions to be raised when the mic is routed through a vocal effects device: Where does this thing patch in, at the stage or the FOH console? Is the output mic or line level? Is the output sufficiently quiet? Do I have to worry about ground issues? Will the vocal still be intelligible when the singer initiates the "chipmunk" patch? Most importantly: Does the singer know how to use it, and have the patches been set for the same output level?"
The answers depend upon the device. In the case of the DigiTech Vx400, there are balanced XLR outs on the back panel carrying the processed output at line level, but their Vocal 300 provides mic level out. That brings up the next question: Do I need to add any additional processing? In the case of the Vx400, the answer is "probably not." The latter is capable of EQ, compression, chorus, flange, phase, pitch and reverb. Just when you thought you were off the hook for cueing effects, there's preproduction coming your way. In the way that guitar processing or modeling can change the output level of a guitar rig, variations in vocal presets can change the output level of the lead vocal. This is unacceptable and must be dealt with in advance– especially where the vocal sound includes a distortion component. Maybe that's not a bad thing…maybe it's billable hours spent at rehearsals to work out the vocal patches.
In addition to being the Front of House engineer and tour manager for Blue Öyster Cult, Steve "Woody" La Cerra teaches aspiring audio minds at Mercy College in White Plains, N.Y. He can be reached via email at Woody@fohonline.com.
