Kim’s Journey

Beginning the Project

I am a video editing enthusiast, and many of my friends are musicians, so I wanted to expand my skills to include a better understanding of audio editing. Recently some of those musician friends created an album using REAPER and highly recommended it, so I dove in head-first to see what I could accomplish!

I am by no means a musician myself, but I wanted practice recording audio as well as editing it, so I chose to create a short a cappella clip of “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” by Herman’s Hermits (Murray & Weston, 1965). It was the first thing I could think of that was short and fun.

To begin, I inserted two new tracks and colour-coded them to recognize them as the forward and back vocal tracks.

Next, I set the tempo to 180 beats per minute (BPM) to change the measures of the tracks, as well as activate a click track (metronome) to help me stay in time while I sang. For the record, I tried to look up the usual BPM of the song, but I got results ranging from 50 to 200, and 180 sounded the most natural match to me based on a live recording from The Ed Sullivan Show (2010).

BPM and time measure are found in the bottom right of the program.

"Vocals left" and "Vocals right" were eventually renamed "Vocals forward" and "Vocals back."

Recording

The next step was recording raw audio! First, I sang the chorus, then I repeated the process and sang it a second time, making sure both tracks lined up. I did this purely from recommendation of my musician friends; apparently this technique can help round out the audio and give it a fuller sound when one has a normal volume and the other is quieter.

Originally, I launched right into singing, but found it hard to actually get the right timing despite the metronome. Because of this, I eventually added a track to record the bass beat first (colour-coded purple), started with a measure of this, and used that to help me time the song better. In the recording below, a measure is silent before vocals begin; you can hear how I start myself off in the beat recording that follows.

I then added some backup vocals that I put on two separate tracks (colour-coded pink), with the intent of making one track come out one speaker while the other track came out the other. I made a few takes of this one to get the timing that I wanted. Here are both of them isolated and trimmed (so you don't listen to several seconds of silence first).

After recording these pieces, I still felt like something was missing, so I added a track of myself humming along (colour-coded yellow). My inspiration was: “Be a simple rhythm guitar, happy and buzzy.”

I must emphasize again that I am not by any stretch of the imagination a musician, but I have a sense of adventure and verve.

Vocals

Backup vocals

Beat

Humming

A snapshot of my REAPER project with raw audio.

Audio Editing

Forward and Backing Vocals

Now that I had my raw audio in place, it was time to apply some REAPER magic! After viewing the video tutorials on most common effects (Gioia, 2014), I started applying the most common effects, which you can find in the "What is REAPER?" section of this site.

First and foremost was reverb on the forward and backing vocals. I toyed around with the settings a little to get just a bit of a big room feel, then applied the same parameters to both tracks.

Following this was EQ, or equalization. I used this to amplify the lower frequencies of my voice and lower the higher ones. I sounded stronger and more pronounced.

As a final touch, I decided to add a tuner to my forward vocals, which helped adjust my voice in choice spots where I was just out of key. I think a more trained musician might be able to tell the difference between the notes I sang and the corrections I put in, but essentially, small parts were adjusted to be in the key of A Major.

Reverb parameters on forward and backing vocals

My reverb parameters

My EQ parameters on forward vocals: lower frequencies are lowered while mid frequencies are raised

My EQ parameters for forward vocals

Manual tuning is applied to a section of the track. A red line indicates where the tune is. Light grey bars indicate a note in the key, whereas dark grey indicates a note not in key. Blue lines are drawn to manually override the note desired

A snapshot of the tuner applied to forward vocals

Beat, Humming, and Backup Vocals

In addition to reverb and EQ, I decided to play around with pitch, delay, compression, and an envelope for the remaining tracks.

I lowered my pitch on the beat track and increased it on the humming track to distinguish them further (and add some fun flair). The delay effect created a fun call-back feature on the humming track. Using just the settings for the track, I was able to force audio just out of the left or right speaker for the backup vocals, which you'll be able to hear below. In the humming track, I ended up being much louder at the end of my recording than I was throughout, where I occasionally got quieter. Compression evened out the volume to balance better with the other recordings. Finally, I used an envelope feature on the bass track to apply lower parameters within the pitch filter near the end, making one deep measure.

Beat