Vocal Production for Songwriters

This course reinforces skills in capturing, producing, and mixing high quality vocals, as well as familiarity with the modern tools and technology used in modern contemporary music production workflows. Regardless of genre, vocals are the focal point of all contemporary music recordings, but the tools and techniques are agile, elusive, and often a mystery to most self-producing songwriters. Building on the skills learned in the 100 and 200-level technology courses, the goal of this course is to give the self-producing songwriter all the required vocal production skills to compete in the current marketplace. The course opens with a focus on “talking the talk,” exploring the roles of artist, producer, and engineer, to arm students with the necessary vocabulary to effectively communicate when serving in each role. Critical listening, effective preproduction techniques, vocal session prep, and recording session management skills are taught through a series of hands-on projects in which students learn the use cases and applications of the many tools and techniques used by today's most prolific music producers and engineers. Students will learn recording techniques, advanced concepts in audio editing, production techniques, synthetic processing, real time and graphic pitch correction, time compression/expansion, flex, and elastic audio. Auto-Tune, Melodyne, VocAlign, VocalSynth 2, Little AlterBoy, as well as a plethora of other creative tools will be used to bring the recorded vocals in their songs to life.