Layered Vocals

This post is dedicated to the autotune posse

We spent the weekend on the Gold Coast. There is a lot of Krishna Conscious outreach going on down there, and it was a real pleasure to spend time with people who are enthusiastic and dedicated to sharing the philosophy and lifestyle of Krishna Consciousness with others.

We did kirtan on Saturday night in Surfers Paradise at the Bhakti Centre, and on Sunday in Coolangatta at the Country Women's Association Hall. The Bhajan Babas - Venu Gopal on harmonium and lead vocal, Yamal Arjuna on drums, and Janmastami on bass - played their unique combination of traditional melodies with a solid rock / blues groove rocking the bottom. Super mellow groove.

On the way home we stopped off in Tweed Heads to put some gas in the car. The servo had speakers at the pumps and I heard a song that was total autotune plus something else like a vocoder. Using my iPhone I googled what seemed to be the hook: "Watchya say", and found this:

When we got home I did some more google research (wikipedia), and found out that the song samples this one: Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek (embedding disabled). Below I've embedded a version of the song with the lyrics. However, if you follow the previous link and watch the video with only Imogen's mouth visible you can learn a lot about the expressive vocal techniques she employs, in addition to the melody and harmonies, to give the track strong emotional appeal.

According to the wikipedia article for this song, Imogen uses a Digitech Vocalist Workstation to get the vocal harmonies. You can see her doing it here:

The Digitech Vocalist Workstation works by taking two inputs: a vocal via a mic, and harmonic information from a keyboard via MIDI. The machine then generates harmonies for the vocal line based on the chords being played on the keyboard.

The live version doesn't sound as good as the recorded version because she is singing with a machine that effectively amplifies pitch deviations in her voice, and her singing is pitchy (=a little off-key in places). In the recorded version she has either (a) used autotune to correct the pitch of her voice; or (b) retracked her vocal over and over again until she got it pitch perfect.