The Fred again.. voice trick, step by step

Start with one line, sung. Ours is an a cappella we generated with ElevenLabs Music from our own words: four phrases, about 20 seconds, sung freely with no click. Use your own voice, a friend’s, or an a cappella you have the rights to.

Set the project to 130 BPM before you touch the vocal. Then cut the take at the breaths into its phrases and drag each one so it starts on a bar: bars 1, 3, 5 and 7 of an 8-bar loop. Only the starts move. Don’t stretch her to the grid and don’t tune her: the small wobbles are what make her sound like a person.

The first and last phrases come in a breath early. Leave that: the word lands on the beat, the breath before it doesn’t. The gaps between phrases are where every other part gets to speak.

Play her line and find her notes on a keyboard: while she sings, tap keys until one matches the note she is holding. Try it on the keys below. (A tuner plugin on the vocal track does the same job, if you would rather read it.)

She sings only a handful of notes: G♯, B, C♯ and D♯, with a passing A♯. And she keeps coming back to C♯: she starts there, leans on it and returns to it after every turn. The note a melody keeps coming home to is the key’s home note, and with her other notes it spells a minor key. The track is in C♯ minor: C♯, D♯, E, F♯, G♯, A, B.

Then write down the note she holds longest in each bar. Those four notes are what every other part is built on: B in bar 1, C♯ in bar 2, C♯ in bar 3, G♯ in bar 4, and the same again in bars 5 to 8.

For each bar, pick a chord from the key that contains the note she holds, and put that note on top, an octave above her. Then the piano doesn’t just sit under her; its highest voice sings her note with her, and every long note she holds is inside the harmony instead of rubbing against it.

A plain C♯ minor chord (C♯, E, G♯) has no B in it, so bar 1 would clash. Adding the seventh and the ninth fixes that: a C♯m9 has C♯, E, G♯, B and D♯. Ninth chords give each bar enough notes to hold hers, and they sound soft and open, which is most of the colour of Fred’s piano. The four chords, one per bar:

Her note is its seventh in C♯m9, its third in Amaj9, its sixth in E6/9 and its ninth in F♯m9. We measured how much of what she sings in each bar lands on a note of its chord: 92%, 70%, 72%, 84%. The rest are passing notes on the way to the next held one, which is exactly where a passing note belongs.

In Roman numerals that is i–VI–III–iv in C♯ minor, or vi–IV–I–ii counted from E major: a cousin of vi–IV–I–V with a softer last chord. You don’t need to know that to use it; you need her four notes and a keyboard.

Three sounds and no snare: a kick, a closed hi-hat and a rim. A snare on beats 2 and 4 is loud and wide, and it would land on her words; a rim is short and high, so it marks the beat without covering her. The drums go around the voice, not over it.

• Kick (a TR-909, tuned down a little): on the one, just before beat 2, on beat 3 and just before beat 4, which is steps 1, 4, 9 and 12. Every second bar adds one on step 15, a push into the next bar.
• Hi-hat (TR-909): every eighth note, loud between the beats and quiet on them, the ones between the beats a touch late (10% swing).
• Rim (TR-808): on the “and” of 2 and of 4, steps 7 and 15. Pitch it up three semitones and cut its envelope to about 18 ms so it ticks rather than knocks.

A bed is a pad that plays the same four chords, long and quiet, so the gaps between her phrases never go empty. Ours is three slightly detuned saw waves per note, a chorus and a 2.8 s reverb: warm, wide and much too big on its own.

So cut it. A high-pass at 300 Hz takes out its lows, so it doesn’t muddy the kick and the bass; a low-pass at 2.6 kHz takes out its highs, so it doesn’t cover the air in her voice. What is left is a warm middle that fills the room and gets out of everyone’s way. Keep it low: you should miss it when it stops more than you notice it while it plays.

“The word I’m most obsessed with is hypnosis,” he says in the clip. Here it is as a part: take the note she lands on, G♯, where her second and fourth phrases come to rest, and repeat it quietly every two beats, the whole way through. Under it, a D♯ swells up through each bar and drops at the bar line.

It works because G♯ is in all four chords: the fifth of C♯m9, the major seventh of Amaj9, the third of E6/9 and the ninth of F♯m9. One note that never has to change, against chords that do. That steadiness is the hypnotic part. Ours is an ocarina, soft and nearly a pure tone, with a 1.8 s reverb.

Last, the bass, and not one long note. Holding a single low note under four changing chords flattens them; a bass that moves makes each change land. Ours starts every bar on the chord’s root and walks toward the next one:

C♯m9 C♯ → E → BAmaj9 A → C♯ → E → G♯E6/9 E → B → G♯F♯m9 F♯ → A → E → D♯

Under it sits a sine an octave lower, 8 dB quieter, for weight. Over it, a distorted copy with everything below 140 Hz cut, so phone speakers that can’t play the low notes still hear the line. Most of its notes start between the kicks or ring on after them, so the two never trip over each other.