RE: Prince's "Camille" Vocals
2006/06/12 10:32:47
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Well, judging by how it sounds, and given that Prince was doing this in 87 and earlier, I am pretty sure he just did it by slowing down the backing track, singing over it, and playing it back at normal speed.
You tell by the way the vocals "jabber" slightly that it's not pitch shift in the modern sense (ie: the same as time stretching).
He also did it the other way round to creat deep backing vocals; you can hear this on Housequake and other songs.
The problem with using a pitch shifter as you seem to be trying to, is that the vocals can only be in tune by going an octave up or down. In order to emulate the effect, you need to be singing them at a lower pitch than the actual track is normally at.
One workaroud I can think of is:
1/ Bounce the entire project to a single stereo track.
2/ Pitch shift it down a couple of tones.
3/ Record the vocal along to the pitch shifted track.
4/ Pitch shift the recorded vocal back up to match the original recrding/
5/ delete the temporary bounced mix.
If you are trying to get the effect from an already recorded vocal, you'd need to be able to pitch *everything* up. This is fine if all your tracks are MIDI, but could be problematic if you're using a lot of audio. Really, you need to get the singer back in to do it as described above.