If you're new to Multi-Platinum Pro Tools, you may be asking yourself "what in the world is track pocketing or vocal pocketing?" Pocketing is a term for sliding instrument or vocal phrases around in time so that things line up better and feel a little more in the "pocket." Some vocalists, for example, have a tendency to sing consistently ahead of the beat when they are in the studio. Live onstage, not a problem, but for some reason when the red light is on and they are under headphones, everything just feels a little anxious. The flip side of that is a lot of singers lay stuff back behind the beat. Some of this feels good, but too much of it starts to feel lazy and even sloppy. Same thing happens with musicians. This can be especially prevalent when you are trying to record a band or solo musician who's not necessarily a professional studio musician. Again, you can be an awesome live musician and have difficulty in the studio.
Multi-Platinum Track Pocketing and Multi-Platinum Vocal Editing both go into great detail about what specific techniques I use to accomplish this in a musical way. The greatest trick to editing is to make the end product sound better, but NOT EDITED! You don't want a vocalist to sound tuned...you just want them to sound like they had a great day. You don't want the drummer to be perfectly in time for the entire length of the song or the performance can begin to sound very mechanical and stale. There is also the potential for audio artifacts when you're doing detailed editing like this. If you're doing straight ahead chop and move editing, you have to be extremely careful with edit points and cross fade types to avoid bumps, pops and ticks. If you're time stretching, it's easy to introduce very noticeable artifacts like phasiness, metallic sounds, etc.
We show you how to do this type of editing musically and do it seamlessly. Pocketing of some sort is done on most records today, regardless of genre. Some use it for an effect, some do it just to tighten up a great band and yes, some do it to create useable performances out of mediocre or sub par starting performances. Check out our book and first 2 DVDS on editing for the in depth explanations on how to accomplish all of this.
Thanks for visiting Multi-Platinum Pro Tools.
Brady
