Help with singing crowd

M

maroncool

New member
hey ive been in a concert that the crowd singing along but its sound terrible in the edits.
so i took 3 people to sing and record them each one to add to the track of the singing crowd
what effect should i put on them so it will sound like the crowd singing togeter and still will sound good
i thought to put wet reverb or something, any ideas?
 
You mean replace the crowd with three people? The first thing is that wet reverb on the crowd will make them sound like they're singing in a cathedral. From my own pub noise experience, you need at least twenty different takes - then you can start duplicating, time slipping and stretching. Three people won't work if any of them have a distinctive good or bad voice. bland ones are best, but it takes time and a lot of effort.
 
There is a trick I've heard of and occasionally used where you can vary the tape speed slightly during tracking and that will make them sound slightly different when played back at the correct speed. If you overdub enough of that it can sound like a crowd of different people rather than the same person double-tracked.
 
One of our early recording was a live recording in a popular drinks venue, in a cellar. It had a great audience, but the band were a bit er, below par that night. We re-recorded them in the studio and then spent ages doing exactly this. The varispeed thing works brilliantly changing voice, old school. Things to look out for are anything repetitive - a whistle, or a yell, or even glasses clinking. You can dump out the tracks to another machine, then play those back in maybe two minutes later, and as long as the whistles and clunks are missing from those, so it's just hubbub - it fills it up nicely. We sold thousands of these to the fans, many who were at the event and they never knew. We even inserted some of the between songs original hubbub into the crowd mix. We always referred to it as 'pub noise' and we used it an awful lot. Now I still do it more sedately with classical stuff - as in singer in church, and no audience (as we did in covid a lot) and inserted churchly, sedate background- sniffs, quiet coughs, occasional foot falls, and a tiny bit of occasional traffic noise. Live vs almost live can be very similar.
 
As for things to look out for - if you listen to the original Rock And Roll Animal LP by Lou Reed, you can hear a distinctive chuckle repeated a few times.
This always struck me as strange, until I learned they used a John Denver audience track for some of the crown noises.
 
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