Inside the Box with Joe Albano: Vocal Repair

For a recording to stand up to repeated listening, a stricter standard of ‘perfection’ needs to applied, with a lower tolerance for wrong notes, extraneous noises, and other flaws that would pass mostly unnoticed in a live performance or broadcast/podcast. Nowhere is this more important and noticeable than in the vocals. Issues need to be addressed, and a wide range of tools exists for fixing up voice tracks—some of which exist as inside-the-box solutions exclusively.

By and large, vocal track fixes can be split into two categories— performance tweaks and technical corrections. Performance adjustments include pitch and timing issues in a musical performance and pacing and speaking tics such as ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’ in a dialog recording. These are addressed by common practice waveform editing techniques and specialized tools—comping, editing, EQ, compression, tuning and time stretching.

For this article, I’ll focus on the more technical vocal issues and their solutions. These can include excessive breaths (between words or phrases), harsh sibilants (‘s’ sounds), and plosives (thumps or pops that sometimes occur on the letters p, t, k, b, d, and g).