A question about vocal manipulation in recording

Before auto-tune, were there ways that sound engineers "enhanced" a vocalist's pitch for a recording.

they'd take a tuning fork, and stab the singer in the kidneys when they sang a bum note

tape editing speeding up/down
vocoder

peepee

....and how common were these techniques for larger acts in the 70s and 80s?

- Recording and compiling several takes
- Singing along to a guide vocal
- Slightly slowing down or increasing the track speed to help the singer sing comfortably
- Using a Harmonizer to pitch shift

examples?

examples for what exactly?

Also:

peepee

― nostormo

peepee we're not going to write your homework assignment for you mate.

mate

u havin a giggle m8?

Milli Vanilli method

I remember reading an exposé of sorts in the late 70s/early 80s in Rolling Stone about studio vocal manipulation of people like Linda Ronstadt. I would assume that if an artist or group took 6 months to 2 years to record an album, that there'd be some kind of vocal manipulation happening, no matter how crude.

not pitch, but... overdubs. lots of overdubs.

or there's the gainsbourg technique toward women singers : not caring if they're out of tune !

Yeah, I don't know of any artificial pitch enhancement being used to correct vocals in the 70s, but there were certainly ways to "disguise" a bad vocal with reverb, doubling, creative mixing, using composite performances of several takes, etc. Still, IMO most pop singers in the 60s-80s were expected to have more skill than singers today.

Agreed Dominique....but I've no doubt that if all of the modern recording tools were available to those singers of the 60s-80s, they'd most likely use them.

ADT, auto double tracking, was probably the earliest automated vocal effect.

xp sure - they're convenient - I'm very glad we have a rich body of recorded work from a time before that convenience was available

One really obvious example (imho) of pitch shifting is on the word 'sudden' in True Faith, actually just the first syllable, it sounds really weird to me.

I guess the singing guitar is the opposite way around, but I can't pass up an opportunity to post Stringy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPd9cxqKCVg

wow!

ADT, auto double tracking, was probably the earliest automated vocal effect.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, February 5, 2014 11:59 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And before that became available (as some here have alluded), manual double tracking - overdubbing your voice singing the exact same part, which is all over early to mid-'60s recordings. Sometimes the singer would get it wrong and sing a different word somewhere and it wouldn't be corrected, so the final result would have two words or sylables sung at the same time from what was ostensibly one voice.

The liner notes on some albums of the era (including some early Beatles albums) acknowledge the use of double-tracking, which had previously been considered fakery in the era when studio recordings were assumed to be snapshots of what a band sounded like live, and "using the studio as an instrument" wasn't yet broadly accepted.

and in the 80s in particular the wide proliferation of chorus pedals and cheap digital reverb was often brought in to bathe a dodgy vocal in "space/ambience" (though the result can be a bit like when you spray fake perfume in a bathroom- it's additive rather than subtractive- like "oh! now it smells like poop AND roses!")

but, yeah, singing along with yourself and doing lots of takes can pull a weak singer closer and closer to something acceptable

some good info here

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/pitch-correction-basics/

lots of eventide harmonizer use

Beginning in the mid-1970s, an increasingly popular way to add lots of ear candy to a recording was with a product created by the Eventide H910, the first of a line of Eventide, Inc.'s rack-mounted effects under their Harmonizer brand name (which has since become a registered trademark of Eventide). Led Zeppelin loved this product so much that live, they ran Robert Plant's vocals through a Harmonizer (the slightly later H949 model, apparently) on certain songs, to allow him to sing harmonies with himself.

http://blogcritics.org/product-review-the-harmonizer-messing-with/

Strawberry Fields Forever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Fields_Forever

Lennon said, "You can fix it, George", giving Martin and Emerick the difficult task of joining the two takes together.[42][43] With only a pair of editing scissors, two tape machines, and a vari-speed control, Emerick compensated for the differences in key and speed by increasing the speed of the first version and decreasing the speed of the second.[16] He then spliced the versions together,[41] starting the orchestral score in the middle of the second chorus.[42] (Since the first version did not include a chorus after the first verse, he also spliced in the first seven words of the chorus from elsewhere in the first version.) The pitch-shifting in joining the versions gave Lennon's lead vocal a slightly other-worldly "swimming" quality.[44

Varying the speed was a pretty common practice. I know one trick to give things an "edge" was to have the group slightly detune a few cents flat, so they could then speed up the take at mix so it would sound tight at tempo but at normal tuning.

Yeah, the super slowed pitch on the second half of "SFF" is a pretty noticable change, and bring the song to a whole new level.