What's James Blake doing here?

[dilshan89]

Hey guys,

Im an ableton amateur. I was wondering if anyone could let me know how James Blake is manipulating his vocals in his song 'I mind'. The vocal line Im talking about is first introduced 18 seconds into the song, and he then sort of turns it into a bassline around 35 seconds into the song. Really would appreciate any help. I've posted a youtube link to the song below.

Thanks x

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyb9LNLIJd0

[marcoskohler]

He uses a TC Helion foot controller.

[Komodovaran]

An outboards repitching effect that doesn't alter the tempo. You can also do this in Live with some of the warping types, but it sounds horrible.

[dilshan89]

Thanks for your replies guys. Yh that's what I find so strange...why does the tempo stay the same when the sample is being played at lower/higher pitches?

Anyway I can re-create this effect using Ableton/ plug ins?

[Komodovaran]

Mess around with warping and transpose until it sounds good...ish.

It won't sound good. I find that warping and repitching without changing tempo butchers the sound of the sample.

[oddstep]

if you've got sampler you could have a go at timestretching with that, create a really small loop and set an lfo to drive loop start position, set the lfo to retrigger.
you can also use grain delay as a pitch shifter... take the delay rate right down + 0 feedback. i used this to make racks for a vocalist to sing chords with, sounds evil but cool.
other wise, yep clips is the only available way within live. any software you've got that can unhook duration from pitch could let you explore what he's doing.

[dilshan89]

Hmm so I guess it's a bit of a mystery as to how exactly he's doing this. Thanks for your replies though, I'll mess around and try and replicate it as best as I can. If you have any more ideas please let me know : )

[oddstep]

the smart money is on the tc helion voice live touch or something similar. in abstract terms - audio is being captured, looped and fed into a harmoniser (basically a pitch shifter) - live doesn't have a pitch shifter - the grain delay can be used as one - but there will be be better ones out there... logic has a good one.

[martin68]

isn't it a simple lfo which modulates a looped vocal-sample ? lfo-tempo doesn't change when the sample is pitched.

[oddstep]

yeah, could be... I don't know how the harmoniser works, I guess its got to either be granular synthesis with file scanning being driven by a parameter independent of pitch... or something thing to do with fast fourier transforms - which I completely don't understand.

[djadonis206]

if you've got sampler you could have a go at timestretching with that, create a really small loop and set an lfo to drive loop start position, set the lfo to retrigger.
you can also use grain delay as a pitch shifter... take the delay rate right down + 0 feedback. i used this to make racks for a vocalist to sing chords with, sounds evil but cool.
other wise, yep clips is the only available way within live. any software you've got that can unhook duration from pitch could let you explore what he's doing.

Sampler's dope. In addition to the method you mention above, you can also use the AUX envelope to shift the start or end position of your loop.

I used this technique in a beat I made. If you're interested check it out here: http://soundcloud.com/djadonis206. At around 1.07 minutes and throughout the rest of the track I use the above sampler technique