Ever notice how every Christmas album pretty much has the same songs? Of course! Christmas only has so many carols and songs which leaves it to an artist to figure out how to produce a song differently...and here's what we did to the classic "Little Drummer Boy".
With over 100 vocal samples created and tuned, beat sliced and effected, placed together in an arrangement along with a lead vocal and some creative drum programming, we now have "Take 6 and Vinnie C. feat. Nancy Roché"
The actual vocal samples were performed by Randy Crenshaw, Wayne Levy and Tom Frazee.
The Process: I scored out the basics of the pieces I wanted. I sent the score to Randy and Wayne and had them sing each part several times with different styles of R&B. I did the same for my parts.
Once I got ALL the files back (everything was sent via dropbox as wav files 96K / 32 bit / mono) I started assembling the files for each piece. As I assembled them, I looked to see which performances fit together the best. I was editing in Sonar X1 and using their V-Vocal plug in for tuning, entrance and exit line up, even adjusted to formant to make all the parts sound like a group.
Once I got the raw assembled samples, I use WAVES Diamond Bundle for frequency compression and some Sony plug ins for a very slight chorus and reverb. I added beat markers then loaded all the pieces into BeatScape for quantizing and trigger. Any fine tuning of beat and pitch I did in the track timeline of Sonar X1, added the lead vocal and programmed the drums using Session Drummer 3.
Note: Some of the parts are sung in a different octave as notated!
