Prince Charles Alexander, Mitch Benoff – Vocal Production

This course will first give you background about the importance of the vocal since the earliest days of recording, the technologies that enhanced vocal recording, and why listeners focus first on the voice as the most communicative instrument. You will then delve into the often overlooked yet absolutely essential phases of “preproduction,” which can help ensure the easiest, quickest, and ultimately most successful recordings once your vocal session begins. The course then explores the recording session, including guiding your vocalist to the most fluid and convincing performance through the use of often-invisible yet very complex methods, such as singing for the comp, vocal doubling, stacking and thickening, harmonies, and backing vocals. The course then focuses on post-production elements: advanced comping, subtle tuning, and timbre enhancement to create the most compelling final vocal tracks. The course culminates with more advanced vocal mixing, where creative use of technology can enhance the vocal and its focus to even further heights.

By the end of this course, you will have perfected a producer’s perception of what makes a vocal reach through to a listener, bring them into that recording, and hold them there. You will have enhanced your “producer’s ear” to successfully guide a vocalist to their best and truest performance. You will also have gained the engineer’s knowledge and basic skills to ensure the quickest, most fluid, and creative recording of those vocals, and the skills to enhance them and mix them to the full satisfaction of the producer, the artist, and the audience. These combined skills will allow you to apply your abilities to many roles, from producer to engineer to vocal producer/engineer to artist to avid fan of recorded music.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Prepare for a vocal recording session, both as an engineer, focusing on the technical aspects, and as a producer, focusing on the personal, creative and artistic aspects of the vocalist
• Run a recording session with technical fluidity and an interpersonal mastery to bring forth the best and truest performances
• Compile a final vocal track that has both a consistency and maximum impact of emotional and dynamic growth, staying true to the artist and the song
• Enhance that vocal with additional tracking, harmony, etc., as well as technical processes, in order to increase the impact of that compiled vocal performance
• Mix a vocal track so that is has the proper size, placement, and focus within a total mix

Syllabus

Lesson 1 The Vocal in Recorded Music

Lesson 2 Knowing Your Singer; Knowing Your Song

Lesson 3 Pre-Production: Initial Steps for the Producer, Engineer, and Artist

Lesson 4 Vocal Session Preparation – It’s All About the Singer

Lesson 5 The Scratch Vocal

Lesson 6 Producing the Vocal – Creating a “Keeper” Take

Lesson 7 Advanced Vocal Performance: Enhanced Conviction & Singing to the Comp

Lesson 8 Advanced Vocal Editing: Final Comp, Tuning, Timbre Changing, Stretching

Lesson 9 Making the Vocal Bigger: Doubling & Stacking; Harmonies; Background Vocals

Lesson 10 Vocal Mixing

Lesson 11 Creating a Vocal-Focused Final Mix

Prerequisites and Course-Specific Requirements

Completion of Audio Fundamentals for Recording, or equivalent knowledge and/or experience. Basic experience recording and working in your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is required. To meet the DAW proficiency requirements, you may benefit from taking any of the following courses: Pro Tools 101, Pro Tools 110, Producing Music with Logic, Producing Music with Reason, Producing Music with Cubase, Ableton Live Fundamentals

Required Textbook(s)

• None required

Software Requirements

• You should own, or have access to, a recording system with the capacity to record an individual vocalist multiple times to at least 4 distinct tracks, and allow easy editing and transfer of waveform sections between tracks for comping
• DAW with equalizers, compressors, limiters, reverbs, delays, and tuning capability (Pro Tools, Logic Pro X, Ableton Live, Cubase, etc.)

Hardware Requirements

• An audio interface with 1/4″ or XLR inputs
• One condenser or dynamic microphone
• A basic keyboard that can reproduce a 3-octave range – the range of the human voice. An F2-C6, A2-A5, or C3-C6 keyboard is fine. It can be virtual, or with fewer octaves, as long as it is tunable to achieve that 3-octave range
• 2 pairs of headphones for tracking (3 is better), these cannot be ear-buds, and should provide adequate sound quality and sound isolation. A headphone amplifier or system that can accommodate at least 2 headphones for at least singer and producer/engineer, if they are in the same room) will be required. A third headphone capability is advised for situations with a separate producer and engineer
• A monitoring setup, with speakers, that can accommodate at least 2 listeners at the same time is required

Instructors

Prince Charles Alexander

Author & Instructor

Prince Charles Alexander is a sought-after music producer and audio engineer whose clients include Mary J. Blige, Destiny’s Child, Faith Evans, P. Diddy, the Notorious B.I.G., Usher, Boyz II Men, Brandy, Babyface, Sting, Aretha Franklin, Brian McKnight, Donnie McClurkin, and others.

Alexander has garnered more than 40 Platinum and Gold certifications from the RIAA and has multiple Grammy Awards and nominations. He teaches Advanced Production and Mixing at Berklee, and created the Commercial Record Production minor in that department, for which he received the Don Wilkins Excellence in Curriculum Development Award from Berklee’s Professional Writing and Music Technology Division in 2013. Alexander also teaches production and engineering for Berklee Online, is co-creator of the Vocal Production course for Berklee Online, and for ten concurrent years, was also an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

He has taught audio technology at the Institute of Audio Research in NYC, and is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities around the world. From the early to mid 80s, he produced, wrote, and recorded on Virgin Records with his group, Prince Charles and the City Beat Band. Alexander was an early innovator of wind synthesis and a part of the “punk-funk” generation that incorporated many of the devices that would propel rap music to the forefront of the American music scene. Prince Charles Alexander is one of the proud founders of the annual Berklee in Atlanta Spring Break Trip.

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Mitch Benoff

Author & Instructor

Mitch Benoff is a professor in the Music Production & Engineering department at Berklee College of Music. His focus on vocal production began in the days of analogue, developing for himself many of the comping techniques that have now become the norm in the digital world. Vocal Production is based on a similar course Benoff created on campus.

For decades, Benoff has split his time among various fields in the art. As producer, songwriter, and musician, he has written short film scores, musicals, music for off-Broadway, and lots of songs. He is the former owner of Downtown Recorders, home to much of Boston’s New Wave and Reggae scene in the 80’s. His 3-D sound company had clients like Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson.

Benoff has also consulted on special effects concert lighting for national tours, and at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he created large-scale art installations like his 400 ft. long Athens Olympic Meteor for the 2004 Olympics.

What’s Next?

When taken for credit, Vocal Production can be applied towards these associated programs:

Associated Certificate Programs

• General Music Studies Professional Certificate
• General Music Studies Advanced Professional Certificate
• Music Production and Technology Advanced Professional Certificate
• Advanced Music Production Professional Certificate

Associated Degree Majors

• Bachelor’s Degree in Music Production
• Bachelor’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Music Studies (Create Your Own Major)
• Bachelor’s Degree in Songwriting and Producing Music