Doubling: Pros and Cons

Jack Russell

Jack Russell

I smell home cookin!
I'm not known as a real good singer. On many demos I've done, I've used the technique of doubling the vocal track to give it more substance. By 'doubling' I mean singing the same part in two different takes on two different tracks and then combining them 50/50 or close to 50/50 on the mixdown, sometimes panned.*

I just wonder: is this just a cheap way to improve mixes with less than perfect singers, or is it a useful technique for mixing Perfect singers in the pros?

[*I suppose there is the notion that one singer singing badly by himself is nasty, but two bad singers together makes them sound like they are ON and CORRECT. Misery loves company??? hahahah. :D]
 
In my experience, this technique is used as an effect, and works best when the singer can nearly replicate the same performance. With too much variation in the vocal line, the effect becomes exaggerated and can defeat the purpose of doing it.

Maybe you should try it, but have one track be the main vocal line and use the other underneath - something like a 70/30 mix.
 
This has been done for decades. Ian Gillan did it in Deep Purple almost non-stop.
It isn't always a 50/50 mix. Sometimes one of them is compressed to death and brought up behind the other, less compressed one. It is neither good or bad, just another tool.
 
Yeah, going for 70/30 does make more sense. Otherwise the ear probably gets confused about who is singing lead and who to listen to.
 
Jack Russell said:
Yeah, going for 70/30 does make more sense. Otherwise the ear probably gets confused about who is singing lead and who to listen to.
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That's the reason you want a singer who can duplicate his/her performance almost perfectly.
 
The biggest problem with going 50/50 and hard panning is that the little differences can result in large amounts of phasing and the timing differences that don't sound phased can become very obnoxious and distracting to the rest of the mix.

I ended up using a pretty different technique to achieve a thicker vocal the other day that I very rarely use, and in the past have almost always used as just an effect. Basically I was starting a full album for a band the other day and when we got to vocals I set up a few mics so we could hear the differences of them so we could decide first which best matched his voice. We also wanted to hear the different tonalities so we could maybe use different mics to get different feels on certain songs or parts. What we ended up with was a Blueberry for the main mic through a Chandler TG2 preamp and then through a distressor with a touch of EQ from the D&R console. This what what I liked the best. What the singer liked the best was the Royer R121 to the Chandler preamp, to the D&R EQ. What we all decided sounded the best was about 60% blend of the Blueberry with some fairly stiff compression (10:1 with peak comps at about -15db and the dist 1 setting) and about 40% the Royer uncompressed. The Royer really helped keep an aggressive midrange with the Blueberry really giving the vocal the necessary air to slice through a mix without having to be too loud (and a nice rich low end due to a touch of proximity). The toughest part was getting the two mics perfectly aligned so that phasing was not an issue. When you are checking phase alignments I find it very useful to try to get them out of phase as much as possible and then reverse the phase of the secondary mic to put them in. It seems to be a lot easier to hear when two mics are way out of phase then when they are barely out of phase. We got the mics set so close that the vocal nearly completely nulled. in fact, we may even try some parts in the mix where we put them out of phase again and let the reverb take over with. When we reverse the phase to were it is out all we have left are the time based FX artifacts with an erie dry wierd vocal. It may find its way into a song or two as an effect:)
 
Xstatic:
Boy, you know your stuff! Just a question, as I'm about 10 levels below yours...
Do you mean that you set up the two different mics and recorded one vocal performance with them, or two separate performances with each mic, then mixed them 60/40?

-JR
 
The Beach Boys doubled almost every vocal. Sometimes it was used as an effect, sometimes just to thicken the track. I say just record it and see what you can do to make it sound right. Using varying eq and compression settings will obviously change the way these two tracks relate to each other. 50/50 is going to be a more obvious effect (sounding somewhat robotic/chorusy) while 70/30 is going to be a bit smoother.
 
I recorded the same vocal take on 2 seperate mics. This is not normally a reccomended idea. Matching the phase while still maintaining good mic placement and tone etc... can be very complicated. But little things like what happened that day are why I like to experiment beyond the norm:)
 
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