manually editing vocals in elastic audio warp mode?

[dan weapon]

Anyone do this?

i've always felt the 'secret' to good backing vocals and massive vocal layering is getting the syllables to line up perfectly and for the different takes to finish at exactly the same time etc. (on top of good takes of course!)
This requires heaps of manual editing which can be a pain in the ass especially if you have different singers who don't phrase the lines EXACTLY the same as one another. I know some people probably use vocalign or similar.

I've used elastic audio on various things for a while, however I recently discovered warp mode. Talk about feeling late to the fucking party. Anyway - I still like to use it as manually as possible, but seems a much quicker way of aligning vocals rather than chopping up shit and using TCE trip tools etc.

 

[Ermz]

I did it once. For the main vocal track of this record: http://www.intromental.org/music/divineascension.mp3

You have to render it using X-form otherwise you'll get all sorts of weird glitches. Even so, I found x-form altered the tonality of the vocal slightly, and very visibly altered the waveform (even on unedited sections). In the scope of the mix, with a vocal double going on top anyway, it didn't really seem to matter. I doubt anyone could pick it with all the autotuning that goes on these days (not implying the clip above was tuned - as it wasn't) anyway. For my next project I reverted back to manual chopping just for peace of mind though.

For tons of backing vox I just track the singer real tight, because I find the natural nuances widen them in the mix. If stuff is out, or there are just too many damned layers I'll VocAlign it.