V-Vocal sounds Phasey

Is it me or does V Vocal make the vocal sound as if it's going through a very subtle phaser, even before any correction has taken place?
 
I have Melodyne also and this is totally transparent, yet V Vocal, although quite a nice bit of kit, colours the sound.
 
Anybody else found this? Listen to the upper Khz of the vocal, they sound suppressed yet fluid just like a phaser effect, bypass V Vocal and you're back to normal.
 
Bizarre!

And make sure you're only working with clean, short clips

Absolutely not.I use V-Vocal on mono bass and sax tracks too for time and noise corrections and it's a powerful weapon!!Best.

It also depends on subtlety. 
I've not been able to move vocals more than a full tone or so without some artifacts.
Still very useful for tweaks.

I do hear great things about Melodyne so it must be good.
Just "redo the vox" is easier said than done many days or weeks after the take
 unless you are one of those pros that meticulously logs every setup and the singer is fine with it.

In X2 in the take lanes V-Vocal doesn't mute the underlying clip, so there is definitely a phasey sound unless you manually mute the original clip.  I use V-Vocal for quick small adjustments, and if you learn what kind of adjustments to avoid it's pretty transparent.  For anything serious I have Melodyne.

John

stig109


Is it me or does V Vocal make the vocal sound as if it's going through a very subtle phaser, even before any correction has taken place?
 
I have Melodyne also and this is totally transparent, yet V Vocal, although quite a nice bit of kit, colours the sound.
 
Anybody else found this? Listen to the upper Khz of the vocal, they sound suppressed yet fluid just like a phaser effect, bypass V Vocal and you're back to normal.
 
Bizarre!

I've also heard this phasey effect before at times, though I was working in V-Vocal a lot last night (Sonar X-2, using take lanes) and didn't notice it happening at all. When creating a V-Vocal clip, the previous clips were all automatically muted, as they should be.
 
Makes me wonder if it is caused by something else, like input echo turned on, or cutting and pasting vocal clips ?
In fact, when I added the new Breverb prochannel reverb to my Vocal track, then I heard the phasey effect.
 
I'm only using V-Vocal for slight touch-up of intonation problems, not extensive pitch corrections, and shorter clips only.
 
 
 

Remember the days when there was NO pitch correction for vocalists....and did things sound inferior? The only time I like to hear absolute perfection in pitch and timing is in electronic music, because it's a distinctive quality of the genre. For all other kinds of music I think pitch and timing imperfections -within reasonable bounds - are an essential part of the enjoyment. 

Correcting vocals with compression, I understand. You need them to sit well in the mix. But correcting pitch and timing....sheesh! Whatever happened to "practice"?

stig109


Is it me or does V Vocal make the vocal sound as if it's going through a very subtle phaser, even before any correction has taken place?
 
I have Melodyne also and this is totally transparent, yet V Vocal, although quite a nice bit of kit, colours the sound.
 
Anybody else found this? Listen to the upper Khz of the vocal, they sound suppressed yet fluid just like a phaser effect, bypass V Vocal and you're back to normal.
 
Bizarre!

I have complained about this for years. No, there is no unmuted clip underneath, and no pitch correction at all is being applied. The recording is clean. Everything is right (I have follow Bitflippers sticky in regards to getting the most out of v-vocal).


V-vocal gives you lots of artefacts. Simple as that. It's just no good for transparency. It sounds pitch corrected even if it ain't. I wouldn't mind if it only did it to clips that you were correcting, but it does it to EVERYTHING even without correction being applied. I don't know what's going on if you can't hear it... It's clear as day! The only option is to work out which words you're going to correct and make them individual clips which makes it lots of frustrating and wasteful work.


V-vocal needs replacing. Majorly.

I also think times have changed. 
Yes lots of golden oldies were off and sloppy but that was acceptable in the day. 
Now, not so much. The bar has risen.

Have you applied v-vocal to the vocal clip? I seem to recall hearing the phasey effect too but I think apppy to clip worked as it renders with a higher quality off-line algorithm... might be wrong though as I haven't had any coffee this morning :)

Where V-Vocal falls down (and Melodyne shines) is in the pitch detection. V-V divides the clip into 50ms segments and determines the fundamental pitch for each one. If it miscalculates some of them you'll hear artifacts as bogus frequencies from adjacent segments beat together. The result is a particularly offensive metallic phasiness. Even if you simply bounce the clip without making any edits, the artifacts will still be there, because the damage was done as soon as you created the V-Vocal clip.

To get the best results from V-Vocal - and good results really are possible - you have to help it  out. That means giving it clean, loud tracks with minimal background noise and headphone bleed. It also means segregating out portions of the track (split and trim) that need correction the most, while not including the good-enough portions in the V-Vocal clip that don't really need editing. In short, the higher the quality of your tracks the better job V-V will do.

As Craig points out above, you don't want to include non-pitched sections for correction because V-V will never figure out what their fundamental pitch is and artifacts will surely ensue. And it may not be enough to just not edit them: ideally they should be excluded from the V-Vocal clip altogether.

The worst mistake you can make is automatically creating V-Vocal clips for every vocal clip and determining which notes need correction by looking at the V-V display. Don't do that. Ever. Always listen to the clips first and decide whether they sound out-of-tune or not. Do not assume that straightening out the pitch will make them sound better!

So yeah, compared to other pitch-correction tools, V-Vocal can be a pain. But there are many users for whom better alternatives are not an option. For those folks, it's good to know that V-V can in fact do the job most of the time, with a little extra effort.

bitflipper


 The worst mistake you can make is automatically creating V-Vocal clips for every vocal clip and determining which notes need correction by looking at the V-V display. Don't do that. Ever. Always listen to the clips first and decide whether they sound out-of-tune or not. Do not assume that straightening out the pitch will make them sound better!

Re-quoted due to high wisdom content.