Editing Metal Vocals in Pro Tools: The Pro Workflow

You’ve tracked a killer vocal performance. The screams are raw, the emotion is there, but when you drop it into the mix, something’s… off. It’s fighting the guitars, the timing feels a little loose, and the doubles are flamming instead of hitting like a unified punch.

Sound familiar?

Sloppy vocals can sink an otherwise crushing metal track. But locking them into the grid and making them sound massive doesn’t require magic—it requires a solid, repeatable workflow. We're going to break down a pro-level process for editing heavy vocals in Pro Tools, from initial cleanup to creating a rock-solid wall of sound.

Let's dive in.

The Prep Work: Cleaning Up Your Vocal Tracks

Before you start time-stretching and aligning, you need to get rid of the noise. Bleed, breaths in the wrong places, and random mouth clicks can clutter up your mix and trigger compressors when you don't want them to.

Getting Rid of the Gunk with Strip Silence

Manually cutting out the silence between vocal phrases is a drag. This is where Pro Tools’ Strip Silence function becomes your best friend. It’s a fast, efficient way to gate your tracks without a plugin.

Here’s the game plan:

1. Select a vocal track you want to clean up. Let's start with a backing vocal or a double.
2. Open Strip Silence by hitting Command+U (on Mac) or Ctrl+U (on PC).
3. Dial in your settings. You’ll see a few key parameters:
   • Threshold: This determines how loud a signal has to be to not be stripped. Adjust this until you see the purple highlight covering only the silence you want to remove, leaving the actual words untouched.
   • Clip Start/End Pad: This is crucial. Add a little time (e.g., 0.1 seconds) to the start and end pads. This prevents the tool from chopping off the beginning of a consonant or the natural tail of a breath. You don’t want to lose the human element.
   • Min. Strip Duration: Adjust this to avoid cutting out tiny, quick phrases.
4. Hit "Strip" and watch the silence disappear.

Strip Silence isn't always perfect. You might need to manually delete a few remaining stray noises, but it'll get you 90% of the way there in a fraction of the time.

Pro Tip: This cleanup isn't just for tidiness. Pro Tools has a feature called Dynamic Plugin Processing. When there’s no active clip on a track, Pro Tools deactivates the plugins on that track, saving you precious CPU power.

Tightening the Timing: The Power of Elastic Audio

Now for the real magic. Elastic Audio is Pro Tools’ built-in time-stretching engine, and it’s the key to getting every syllable perfectly in the pocket.

Setting Up Elastic Audio for Vocals

To get started, you'll want to enable Elastic Audio on all your vocal tracks.

• Hold Shift+Option (Mac) or Shift+Alt (PC) and click on the Elastic Audio selector on one of your vocal tracks.
• Choose the Polyphonic algorithm. While you might think "Monophonic" is for vocals, the Polyphonic algorithm often yields more transparent, artifact-free results, especially on aggressive screamed vocals with a lot of complex harmonic content.

Next, you want to take control. Pro Tools will automatically analyze the track and add its own transient markers, but we want to place our own.

• Switch the track view to Analysis.
• Select the entire clip and delete all the existing analysis markers. We're starting from a blank slate.
• Now, switch the track view to Warp. This is where we’ll do our editing.

Warping the Lead Vocal: Your Timing Guide

Your lead vocal is the anchor. The goal here is to get it perfectly aligned with the grid. Once the lead is tight, you’ll use it as the guide for all your other layers.

Start by making the track nice and big so you can see the waveform clearly. It can also help to throw a plugin on the track to make it more aggressive and easier to hear, like Soundtoys' Decapitator, just to help it cut through while you're editing.

The key to warping vocals is learning to see the difference between consonants and vowels in a waveform.

• Consonants (like 't', 'k', 's', 'sh') are usually sharp, spiky, high-frequency transients.
• Vowels (like 'a', 'e', 'o') are the sustained, "open" parts of the word where the waveform is fatter and more consistent.

You want to align the start of the vowel to the grid. This is what our ears perceive as the "hit" of the word.

1. Listen to a phrase with the click track on.
2. Identify a word that feels off-time.
3. Zoom in on the waveform. Find the spiky consonant, then find the fatter vowel right after it.
4. Using the Grabber tool, drop a Warp Marker right at the beginning of the vowel.
5. Drag that marker until it snaps to the correct beat or subdivision on the grid. Pro Tools will stretch or compress the audio around it.

Pro Tip: If you're struggling to hear the timing, use half-speed playback (Shift+Spacebar). It sounds ridiculous, but it makes it incredibly easy to hear if a syllable is rushed or dragging.

Don’t just trust your eyes. Continuously listen back. Sometimes what looks right on the grid doesn't feel right with the groove of the song. It's common to accidentally align a word to the wrong beat. If it sounds wrong, it is wrong. Go back and fix it.

Building the Wall of Sound: Editing Doubles and Layers

With your lead vocal locked in, it's time to tighten up the doubles and harmonies. A tight stack of vocals is what gives modern metal that massive, powerful sound.

Using the Lead Vocal as a Visual Guide

Instead of aligning your doubles to the grid, align them to the lead vocal. This is far more effective for creating a cohesive performance.

1. Keep the lead vocal track visible right above the double you’re editing.
2. Go through the double, phrase by phrase, using Warp view.
3. Your goal is to make the waveform of the double visually match the waveform of the lead. Pay close attention to two things:
   • The start of the words: Line up the consonants and vowels just like you did with the lead.
   • The end of the words: This is just as important! Use Warp Markers to stretch or shorten the end of each phrase on the double so it cuts off at the exact same time as the lead. This is what creates that super-tight, almost "sampled" effect.

Sometimes, a simple warp isn't enough. If a consonant on a double is way longer and sloppier than the lead, you might need to switch back to waveform view, manually slice out a chunk of the consonant, and create a quick crossfade.

Checking Your Work: The Panning Trick

How do you know if your doubles are truly tight? Use the pan pots.

• Solo your lead and one double.
• Pan the lead hard left and the double hard right.
• Listen carefully. Any timing discrepancies will now be painfully obvious. You'll hear words "flam" or sound like a weird slap-back delay. Go back into Warp view and fix those spots.
• Once it sounds tight when panned, check it again with both tracks panned to the center. This ensures they phase coherently and sound powerful in mono.

Repeat this process for all of your vocal layers, always using the lead vocal as your timing reference.

Finalizing Your Edits: Committing and Consolidating

You've done the hard work. Your vocals are clean, tight, and massive. But there’s one last crucial step before you start mixing.

Why You MUST Commit Elastic Audio

Elastic Audio is a real-time process. If you just leave it active, it's constantly using CPU. Worse, if you try to consolidate the files without committing the edits, you risk baking in weird artifacts and glitches that you can't get rid of.

Here’s the safe way to finalize your edits:

1. Save a new version of your session (e.g., "MySong – Vocals Committed"). You always want a backup of the un-committed session.
2. Select your edited vocal tracks.
3. Hold Shift+Option (Mac) or Shift+Alt (PC) and click on the Elastic Audio plugin selector.
4. Choose "Disable" and when the dialog box pops up, hit "Commit".

Pro Tools will render new audio files with all your warp edits permanently printed.

The Final Cleanup: Fades and Consolidation

Now that your edits are committed, do a final pass.

• Use Batch Fades (Command+F or Ctrl+F) to add tiny 5ms fades to the start and end of every clip to prevent any pops or clicks.
• Select all your vocal clips from the beginning of the song to the end and Consolidate them (Shift+Option+3 or Shift+Alt+3). This turns all the little edited clips into one clean, continuous audio file per track, making your session much cleaner and easier to manage.

Taking Your Vocals to the Next Level

This workflow will give you a professional, tight, and powerful vocal foundation. From here, the real fun begins: shaping that performance into a finished product. Once your vocals are perfectly timed, the next steps involve using strategic tools to make them sit perfectly in a dense metal mix. This means carving out space with powerful EQ strategies and controlling the dynamics with surgical compression techniques.

Mastering these editing techniques is a game-changer. But imagine watching the exact producer who tracked and mixed your favorite metal albums do this in real-time, explaining every single move. At Nail The Mix, you get exactly that. Every month, we hand you the raw multitracks from a massive metal song and you get to watch the original producer mix it from scratch, showing you how they edit, EQ, compress, and automate vocals to get that signature, radio-ready sound.

See how the pros build world-class vocal mixes from the ground up with Nail The Mix.

Want even more? Over 1,500 more tutorials covering every aspect of metal production, from tracking and editing to mixing and mastering, are available right now as part of URM Enhanced. Check it out here.