Oh man, speaking my language there for sure. It's a bit of a curse. On the one hand you can't be arsed working with recording your own vocalists (they're assholes and I'm an asshole, it just doesn't work out) but on the other, samples rarely fit and you sit there wondering how long you'll be massaging it, and should you just give up already?

Don't give up too easily, here come the homegrown remedies I use:

- Listen to the sample and try to ignore the vocal message for the moment, focus purely on what its structure is rhythmically and then on what its structure is melodically. Sometimes this leads to "aha!", and you change one beat a little, or melodyne one note and bam, now it fits perfect. If this doesn't work or you're too lazy for this (like me), go to the next one.

- Pitch incongruity can be successfully masked by putting chorus-type effects on the sample. It obscures the human pitch tracking and you get away with a lot more than if it was dry. Another of my favorite tactics against the pitch thing is resampling the sample, playing it pitches other than what it's "supposed" to be played at, until I find one that sounds like it almost kinda fits. From there you finetune it using the cents feature in your sampler. Just a tip, I used to scoff at this technique too, thinking it will ruin everything and be too lofi to be useable. Not so, often it lets you fit a sample in that just didn't wanna fit no matter what you did to it before.

- Try pitching the sample with a realtime tool like Ircam TS, while the relevant part of your track's playing in the background. With this one, you have the option of preserving the timing exactly if you want it to stay as it is, and finetune the actual sample... think of it as shifting the sample's root pitch AND at the same time sliding it back and forth away from A-440hz tuning, it's subtle but you can find some amazingly good-sounding fits by doing this and listening to the interaction of track vs sample.

- Tonality/scale/key as a subset of pitch incongruity that you can fix by paying attention to what intervals are in the sample, then melodyning it to fit better with your own scale/key/currently playing chord. To make it less daunting for yourself if you're not fresh from the Conservatory exams, think of all the white notes on the keyboard, that peculiar layout they have. All the out of key (black) notes are mostly 1 semitone away from an in-key note, sometimes 2 semitones in a couple of places. What this tells you is that no matter what actual key it's in, you don't especially care, since you'll be mostly massaging the detected notes up and down 1 semitone in Melodyne and listening for improved fit...

- EQing and dynamic EQ/or multiband compressing certain freq ranges can sometimes let you cut out a chunk of the sample that clashes, like a whole area of pitches, you just kill it dead with target scooping or judicious boosting and then fill in the gaps you made in with other instruments in the track instead. Now it sits better.

- Rhythmic incongruity also responds to this resampling tactic sometimes (when resampling changes the sample's tempo and you accidentally find a happy fit, maybe cutting away some of the sample and just worrying about hitting that (1) of the bar, never mind that what happens after is kinda out of time - it sounds funky and cool in a lot of ways as long as you nail the (1) ), plus you can use timestretch markers and play with that, getting the rhythm to sit well with what you have already. Another oldschool rhythmic technique is to break the sample down into phrases or syllables (something meaningful, not just a useless beatslice), and then retrig it in parts using a programmed quantized rhythm of your own. This approach makes it rhythmically sit perfectly, though it's time consuming. Sugarbytes Egoist is a good tool for the job, but any sampler will do.

- Third type of incongruity that happens is the "recording" type. I.e. it was done with a certain mic, certain pre, certain compressor etc, and you're using mic types and tools that are very different so the thing clashes, even though it's rhytmically and pitchwise fitting OK for your track. In this case you can put the sample into Izotope RX, and use the handy EQ matching feature in there. You only need 15-30% of that usually and it starts sitting a lot better, pretty subtle. You can either match the sample to what you have or vice versa. Other options include Voxengo CurveEQ, Zynaptic Unfilter (probably the better choice if you have the time to get into it).

- Fourth type of clashing is semantic, the meaning or vibe or mood of the damn thing is clashing with what you have, if you ask me this is only really fixable with extreme processing so that the sample doesn't sound anything like what you started with...

It's a sample, IMHO you should give yourself license to be brutal with it. It's not going to come by tomorrow and bitch your ear off about what you did to her "perfect take" and you took the spotlight away from her in the mix so that's obviously a crime against humanity.

 

Last edited: Nov 1, 2016