I “finished” working on a version of my song “Listen” a month or so ago, but I was listening to it again today and I realized that, when I’d changed the final reprise of the chorus from a minor to a major key, I’d left a flattened 6th note in the bass line unchanged. Probably no-one except me would notice, but I thought it stuck out like, well, a flattened 6th in a major scale.

I opened the project in Cakewalk‘s SONAR 5 (My Digital Audio Workstation software of choice), made a copy of the bass track, and applied the V-Vocal plugin to the relevant section. V-Vocal is part of the SONAR 5 Professional bundle and is normally thought of as a Vocal pitch and formant corrector (to “fix” a terrible performance. Use with caution, apply conservatively, and not that *I* need to use it on *my* vocals… yeah, right), but it works very well on any monophonic audio. It did a great job of sharpening up that 6th note in two places. Thanks, Cakewalk! I did not want to try and “punch-in record” that bass line. For a start, I’m not sure what outboard processing I used on the Chapman Stick when I recorded it in the first place, many years ago.