Put on a Taylor Swift or Mariah Carey or Michael Jackson song
and listen to the vocals. You may think the track was recorded by the
artist singing the song through a few times and the producer choosing
the best take to use on the record. But that’s almost never the case.
The reality is far less romantic. Listen to almost any contemporary pop or rock record and there’s a
very
good chance the vocals were “comped.” This is when the producer or
sound engineer combs through several takes of the vocal track and
cherry-picks the best phrases, words, or even syllables of each
recording, then stitches them together into one flawless “composite”
master track.
Though it’s unknown to most listeners, comping’s been standard
practice in the recording industry for decades. Everyone does it—“even
the best best best best singers,” says producer and mix engineer
Ken Lewis, who’s comped vocals for Mary J Blige, Usher, David Byrne, Lenny Kravitz, Ludacris, Soul Asylum, Diana Ross, and Queen Latifah.
“Comping is not the thing that makes something sound robotic. Actually I would say it does the opposite."
“Comping
doesn’t have to do with the quality of the vocalist,” Lewis says. “Back
in the Michael Jackson days—and Michael Jackson was an incredible
singer—they used to comp 48 tracks together, from what I’ve read and
what I’ve heard.”
But surely cobbling together a song this way
must sound disjointed, robotic, devoid of personality, right? That’s
certainly what I thought when I first learned about the practice. And
while it’s true that vocal comping is used heavily in pop music where
the intention is usually to sound smooth and polished rather than honest
and gritty, most producers will tell you that this piecemeal approach
is the best way to get a superb recording from any vocalist.
“This
is the epitome of all that is unglamorous in music, but very necessary
for the best possible presentation of the most important element in the
mix,” wrote music producer Frank Gryner
in Recording Magazine.
He’s recorded the likes of Rob Zombie and Tommy Lee. “I’ve yet to work
on a major-label record that didn’t involve vocal comping to arrive at
the finished product.”
The process works like this: A singer
records the song through a handful of times in the studio, either from
start to finish or isolating particularly tricky spots. Starting with
between 4-10 takes is typical—too many passes can drain the artist’s
energy and confidence and also bog down the editing process later. (That
said, it’s sometimes
much more. Christina Aguilera’s song “
Here to Stay”
was compiled from 100 different takes. “She sat on the stool and sang
the song for six hours until it was done—didn't leave the booth once and
didn't make a single phone call,” engineer Ben Allen said in
an interview with Tape Op magazine.)
The engineer generally follows along during the studio recording
with a lyric sheet and jots down notes to use as a guide for later,
marking whether a phrase was very good, good, bad, sharp or flat, and so
on.
An example of a comp sheet for lead
vocal. The columns on the right indicate promising sections of the eight
takes and final decisions are noted over the lyrics. Image: Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior.
When the session’s over, they listen closely to each section of
each take, playing the line back on loop with the volume jacked up twice
as high as it will be in the final mix. They’re listening to make sure
the singer’s on pitch, of course, but that’s not necessarily the primary
measure of what makes the final cut.
Timing, tone, attitude,
emotion, personality, and how each phrase or word fits in context with
the other instruments and the rest of the vocal track can trump pitch
perfection. Those little quirky gems add character and emotion to the
track—they’re what the listener remembers.
The recording engineer
picks out the best take for each bit of the song and edits all the
pieces together, usually in a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Pro
Tools.
“Often, I’ll have a three-syllable word in the middle of a
line, and I’ll use the first syllable from take 3, the second syllable
from take 7, and the third syllable from take 10," Lewis writes
in a blog post. “Not kidding.”
Christina Aguilera’s song “Here to Stay” was compiled from 100 different takes.
Comping is one of the most common DAW tasks and the software has made it stupid simple, especially compared to
cutting tape reels back in the analog days,
when editors would mark the cut spot on the open tape reel with a
pencil, slice it with a razor blade and attach the two ends together
with sticky tape.
Most programs today let you input multiple files within an audio
track, so you can simply drag and drop the portion you want from each
take into the master track.
Comping tutorial in Pro Tools. GIF via YouTube
The editor makes sure the transitions are seamless, the track
flows properly, that no glitches or bad edits made it into the final
cut, and importantly, that no emotion or personality is lost in the
process. A sign of a success is that the listener has no idea a song’s
vocals were compiled from several different takes. The work should be
invisible.
“It’s rare that you hear a really bad vocal comp,” says says recording engineer
Mike Senior, a
columnist for Sound on Sound and author of
Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio. But that’s often because the edits are obscured by the other instruments in the track.
About 20 seconds into Aguilera’s “
Genie in the Bottle”
is a really clunky edit, but you can’t hear it in the song because it’s
tucked behind a big heavy drum beat, says Senior. “If you think how
many drum beats typically occur in a mainstream song, you can think how
many places you can edit without it being heard.”
Listen closely to Adele’s hit “
Someone Like You”
and you can hear that in the first couple verses the opening breath is
missing—there’s just no breath on that phrase, he points out. You can
also hear some background noise on the mic throughout the song but then
in certain places it cuts out, a sign of an edit.
As
you can imagine, the whole process is incredibly tedious and time
consuming; it can take hours, even days. “That’s why these records are
expensive,” said engineer Mark Bright in an interview with Bobby
Owsinski, author of
The Music Producer’s Handbook.Blight
has produced Carrie Underwood, Reba McEntyre, and Rascal Flatts, and
typically spends 8-12 hours comping a track from upwards of 20 takes.
Max Martin and “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the hitmakers behind mega pop
stars like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry and Britney Spears, are known for
relying heavily on comping during their recording process. John
Seabrook, author of
The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, writes
in the New Yorker:
“Comping is so mind-numbing boring that even Gottwald, with his powers
of concentration, can’t tolerate it.” However, "Max loves comping,"
songwriter Bonnie McKee told Seabrook. "He’ll do it for hours.’”
But while pop songs are often accused of being sterile,
artificial, or overproduced, each producer I talked to said this is not
the result of comping. “Comping is not the thing that makes something
sound robotic. Actually I would say comping does the opposite,” says
Senior.
Comping gets a bad rap because it’s lumped in with other
editing tools like pitch correction and auto-tune, but “it is almost
unreservedly a good thing,” Senior says. It gives singers the freedom to
push the boundaries and perform at the edge of their capability,
trusting it’s OK to mess up because there’s the safety net of having
multiple other takes. And if there is a rogue bum note in an otherwise
killer recording, you can swap it out with an on pitch note from another
take instead of relying on pitch correction, which alters the overall
sonic quality.
Pushing the limit and taking chances is what leads to those gems
that can make a whole track, says Lewis. “That’s one of the beauties of
comping—you get to search for the most magical piece of every take.”
“People have a very idealistic view of a producer or recording
engineer’s job. If people really knew how records were made, they’d be
much more jaded,” says Lewis. “But if you go into record making with the
idea that you need to sing the song down from start to finish, come
what may, you will rarely find the true magic.”
Middle East Eye @MiddleEastEye 24 Nov 2015 
