MPM028 - Obese & ungainly
MPM029 - Slim & sexy
Impressed? No? Really? Because it’s often very handy to fit more faders on the screen at once, as it reduces a lot of your precious time spent side scrolling. OK, put it back. Whichever way you’re comfortable with is really fine. For the sake of the screenshots I’ll put it back wide again.
Vocal Delay
Solo the LV track, and your LV Mix, Vx Vrb & Vx Dly tracks should all still be audible (you did solo safe them, right?). Let’s work on the Delay sound just a bit. To be completely honest, I’m of the slightly more conservative camp when it comes to delays. I prefer to keep the vocal a bit dryer initially, and let obvious effects like delays enter a little bit later in the song, to add a little more life as it goes on. Essentially, as the song gets bigger, we’ll let the space she’s in grow as well. Sonically, it’s more interesting.
In a vote of confidence for recording your artist with a Pro Tools generated tempo, we’re going to be able to make our delay follow along musically with almost no effort. Since the track is in time with the Pro Tools tempo, we can just set our delays to a half note on both sides. This should be a good starting point for a musical delay.
MPM030 - Setting half note delays for our vocal.
Depending on how you have your preferences set, you may need to turn up the LV Mix tracks Vox Dly send. Whatever level it’s currently at, let’s play the song a bit and find a good amount of delay to begin with. Somewhere around -19 dB feels like a good place to start.
MPM031 - Setting an initial vocal delay send level.
While we’re using a stereo delay effect, this plugin defaulted to have the same delay time for both left and right channels. While that would be fine if the world still lived in mono, let’s make it a bit saucier with a few personal tricks of mine. This is very much like the magician who gives away his own secrets, forcing himself to develop new ones. Well, abracadabra.
Trick number one, take your stereo delay and put one of the sides out of phase with the other with the button in figure 32 below.