How to Edit Choral Vocals Recorded Separately

This is a transcript from my video on How to Edit Choral Vocals Recorded Separately so go check out that video if you prefer to watch the content.

Intro to vocal recording

I wanted to make a quick post talking about how to edit choral vocals recorded separately. Specifically I’m going to be talking about some stuff that my students recorded and most of the equipment was just a laptop microphone and minimal amounts of equipment.

Normally a choir you record with a couple microphones and you hear these people singing all together. So you have a stereo image already. In this case you have maybe a whole bunch of stereo tracks, but all of them are panned center, rather than actually having a wider stereo image.

First thing I do is line everything up, cut out the excess noise, all that stuff. Clean it up a little bit. If you hear any places in the recording because it’s been recorded with less than stellar conditions, maybe there’s somebody in the background, you hear some footsteps, or somebody closes a door pretty loudly and you have to edit that out.

Pro Tools Routing

In Pro Tools I’ll route everything to a single bus or a single Aux Input track. And then I’ll create a group so I can adjust all the faders all at once. If you have 15 different tracks of people singing, you only really need 5 for it to sound like a pretty decent choir. Everything else is kind of just more voices to beef it up a little bit. If you have 5 good singers, 5 really strong singers, and then 5 that are decent and then 5 that aren’t great. It’ll still sound pretty good. And it’ll sound like a pretty big group if you edit it properly.

Mixing

I’ll use that to mix it. I’ll make sure that the loudest ones are the ones that are outstanding, the best takes. And then the ones that aren’t too good are a little quieter. So you can still hear them a tiny bit. They’ll add a little bit to the noise and make it a little bigger, but it won’t really take away from the sound the fact that they maybe didn’t put in as much effort as other people in their recordings.

I recently just edited one for Hail Holy Queen, the Sister Act version. It’s a great song. I highly recommend you go check it out. It is so fun. The solos were to one bus. The top line were to one bus. The bottom line were to a different bus and then the claps were to a different bus. So on those busses that’s where I’ll add EQ, compression, and reverb.

Panning

Okay here’s where we get to then make it really sound choral. So I’ll pan everything left, right, center. Another thing I like to think about is trying to keep each different section more than 5 people, or around 3 to 5 people. So if you have let’s say 15 singers, like I did with Hail Holy Queen; each line had 15 different people. So I did hard right, slightly right, middle, slightly left, hard left and each of those things gets 3 singers. So right there it sounds pretty choral and it sounds like a pretty big choir. So you’re kind of dividing it into a like stereo field that you’re trying to imagine. Where would you place them if you had them in a room?

Reverb

I use two reverb sends. One is a convolution reverb to make it sound like it’s in a specific space and the other is an algorithmic reverb to make it sound a little bigger. I’ll use reverbs on aux tracks so that I can send everything to that same reverb. I’ll send the first reverb, the convolution reverb, to the algorithmic reverb. And what that does is, the algorithmic reverb gets everything and it is the biggest.

Compression

I’ll add EQ and compression. I’m not really using anything fancy. I mostly use the compression to control and tame the sounds and bring them together a little bit. I don’t really go much over a ratio of 4:1 or 5:1. I try to keep it even less than that.

Equalization

And then for EQ what I’ve been doing is cutting off the high frequencies with a filter and cutting off the low frequencies. And then I’ll add a de-esser because, oh boy, Macbook and webcam microphones pick up a whole lot of sibilance like none other.

Alright that’s it for this post. I hope you learned something about music. I hope you found it useful. Remember to subscribe to my newsletter and thank you for reading. I’ll see you next time. Peace.

ISJ