Wherever they’re sourced from, working with vocal samples is rarely as simple as dropping a loop into your track and being done with it. Let’s look at the basics of how we can adjust and edit sampled vocal phrases to create a fresh hook to work in a dance track. We’re working in Ableton Live as it makes it particularly easy to adjust timing of individual formants in a loop, but these techniques can be used in other DAWs and audio editors.
01 >In this tutorial, we’ll take two short vocal phrases and turn them into a basic call and response hook for a dance track. We’re starting with a basic 4-bar drum loop that’s providing a rhythm for us to fit the samples around. Though our phrases are from the same vocalist, the timing, pitch and timbre doesn’t match, so some work is needed to make the fit.
02 > To start, we drag phrase A (“It’s gonna take all night”) onto an audio track. Initially we try placing the sample at the very start of the bar, but the timing sounds all wrong. Instead we move it to the midpoint of the first bar, beat 1.3. This is better, but it’s now obvious that the start of the word “gonna” should sit on the downbeat, so we shift the whole loop slightly forward.
03 > Next we drag phrase B – “You’ve gotta get in the groove” – onto the third bar of the same audio track. Again, we find that the second word “gotta” makes sense on the downbeat, so we line that up with beat 3.3. The timing of the rest of the phrase still needs work though. For this, we turn to Live’s Clip View and warp the audio clip, using the Complex Pro algorithm for the best quality results.
INCLUDES V
