How to chart vocals without a device to read pitches of note?
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Do you have a Smartphone? I use Singscope to analyze the pitch on my stems but it will need a lot of cleanup & refining before it is RB Ready.
There are several options, mainly depending on your musical ear.
One of them is the obvious, just listen and author by ear. Assuming you have the ReaSynth FX enabled (which I don’t know how you’ve been doing it if not) you can just hear the pitch and chart it accordingly. It’s considerably easier if you know the key each note is in which can be either taken from a website or from the song itself depending on your knowledge of music theory. This is the route I usually take but I’ve had musical experience for most of my life so it comes a lot easier to me. Even so it’s very difficult at times particularly with harmonies. Single-track MP3s are much more difficult to author this way since you can’t hear the singer(s) by themselves. Another problem is a note could sound right but it’s not actually the correct note that is sung, rather it’s a note that is on the same key. Again, a trained ear can tell when that occurs but it takes practice. If you can find an a capella version or an alternate version of the song that has the singer(s) more pronounced for whatever reason, that’ll help too.
Another approach is to use a MIDI file. If you can find a reliable MIDI off the internet and import it into REAPER it could help a lot once you clean it up. Then you’d have to apply the same “author by ear” as mentioned above to make sure everything sounds right. Sometimes the MIDIs are in a different key than the original song so you’ll have to be careful.
A third option is to do something like HDS_Ferno said and use a program to determine what pitch the note is at. If the program cannot discern your MP3 or you don’t have stems, you can try singing it yourself. Seriously. If you’re capable of holding a tune, you’d be surprised how much it can help. I’d once in a while get stuck on a note, hum that note to myself and find it on my keyboard. The disadvantage again mostly depends on your ear.
How I like to chart vocals if I can’t find any good midi reference is by using the ReaTune FX in Reaper. Get this track template, then you can easily load up the necessary tracks to get started. If you don’t have multis, then sometimes the Center Canceler FX in Reaper can isolate vocals somewhat well, depending on the song. It can help with harmonies. You can mess with some of the settings to get more notes. They won’t all be 100% correct, but it helps to see the trend or pattern of pitches it finds which will in turn make charting the vocals more possible for those who can’t identify the pitch as accurately.
Also similar to Bansheeflyer’s advice, you can record the dryvox in Reaper (since you need to do this anyways) and use this as a guide. You can take your recorded audio and put it through the Audio to MIDI track template I mentioned. You should get a lot more pitches this way, not all of them accurate of course. But it should be mostly correct and a good starting point. You can verify the pitches individually afterwards to make sure they’re okay. I find this much more helpful because then I’m not going in without any reference at all. The more pitches you can confidently identify, the easier the rest of the chart will be.
Vocals is something that you really need a good ear for. I usually try to find a good Guitar Pro file from Ultimate Guitar and export the vocal midi. Sometimes its not perfect and needs adjusting, but its a great starting point that does 50% of the work for you. If you can’t find a midi or the midi you have didn’t transcribe the harmonies, then try to pick out the melody and sing it into a tuner. It’s something that you need a lot of practice with, but it gets easier as you do more songs.
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