Generally speaking, we all try our best. Of course, sometimes the results are better than other times, but let's give singers the benefit of the doubt and agree that they try their best to deliver the best vocals they can in the studio.

Sometimes, however, we have less than perfect vocals to work with at the mixing stage. There are many tricks and techniques to try and salvage what we can for productive use. Recently I encountered a vocal track that had me perplexed. It wasn't clear if the part was intended to be a double of the lead or a harmony part. In either case, it didn't work very well.

Rather than scrap the vocal, which would have been a perfectly reasonable course of action, I called up Vocalign from Synchro Arts to see what repairs were possible.

I first tried Vocalign Project. It solved the timing and phrasing issues perfectly. But it didn't correct the pitch problems. On the other hand, Vocalign Ultra easily solved both the timing and pitch problems.

With a workable double now, I rendered the new doubled track and decided to explore a bit further. I transposed it down an octave. Now there is no vocal software on the planet that will get a perfectly natural sounding transposition of twelve semitones. So I tried some formant shifting to make it even more unnatural and hopefully more enjoyable. I rendered two different versions. Both transposed down an octave but with different formant shifting offsets. I also made sure to alter the Max Difference values for both the timing and the pitch, so there were some natural variations.

In addition to the lead vocal track, I had the freshly corrected double, and now these two-octave and formant shifted copies. With some judicious use of EQ, panning, and some Valhalla SuperMassive processing, I was able to turn this phrase into an exciting and unusual little vocal arrangement.

Follow along in this video, and see how Vocalign Ultra came to the rescue. It turned a lemon into lemonade. It turned a less than useable vocal into both useable and creatively engaging.