Effects on prerecorded vocals

Flei

Flei

New member
I see lots of posts about "How do I get a crowd/chorus effect on vocals?":yawn:
The answer usually is to record lots of tracks, add some panning, maybe nudge the tracks my some milliseconds, and layer it all. That's what I do when I've got an artist in the studio, but...

What if you are working with an acappella vocal track for a remix? I don't have the option to record additional layers. Is there a good plugin or method to get the desired effect? Some songs I listen to that are definitely layered multiple times (you can hear the subtle variances), but others are clearly using effects (there are panning/tone differences, but all the voices have the same specific nuances). Has anybody come across a good "crowd" effect? Any help will be very appreciated as I am trying to finish a submission for a remix contest, and the deadline is approaching...

I'm trying to get a sound similar to the one that is used in the hook of this song 0:47
(not the most amazing song, but that is an example of the sound I'm looking for...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhxPBrxxaqc
 
I've heard of people duplicating the track and putting a light chorus effect on the duplicate but haven't tried it myself and can't imagine it's going to sound great in an acapella song where the vocals are the entire mix.

Your example just sounds like a whole bunch of different people singing the chorus and it gets its "effect" from the different tones of the different voices.
 
Thank you for the feedback Armistice. Just for clarification, the final product won't be acapella. When you do a remix in hiphop, most of the time you just get the vocal track from song "x", along with the BPM and key that it's in. You then can put your own music behind it, and mix how you want. I agree that a final mix of just acapella (especially hip hop) would be lame. I'm trying to do the opposite, and add some music to the vocals.
 
I've done it many times because a few artists that I mix for always want that chorus effect without recording multiple takes. It's frustrating but I deal with it. Here's an example:

First, take your vocal and duplicate it 4 times.

Track 1 - Original Vocal. Keep it centered.
Track 2 - Pan Left. Pitch up 20-30 cents (you need to play with this). Nudge to the right a little bit until the comb filtering is way down.
Track 3 - Pan Right. Pitch it down 20-30 cents. Nudge a little more to the right a little bit until the comb filtering is down again.
Track 4 - Pan Left. Pitch down 15 cents. Bring up the formant of the song to around 20 cents. Nudge it left or right til it sounds right.
Track 5 - Pan Right. Pitch up 15 cents. Bring down formant of the song to around -20 cents. Nudge it left or right til it sounds right.

That's just one example. You can really play around with the settings. There still may be some comb filtering but not as bad and it'll sound fine in the mix. This is probably easier on hip hop tracks when they're not singing...you can increase or decrease the pitch way more without it sounding off key. I'll PM you an example since I'm not allowed to post links yet.
 
Isn't that essentially what a chorus effect is ? Turning the one vocal into multiple copies of itself with slight offset in pitch and timing to emulate multiple singers? Maybe I'm mistaken. Anyways you could manually do this, but it'd be quite tedious if you offset the pitch of the replica's then towards the end they won't line up very well, and it'd all have the same annunciation so it won't be exactly like having multiple takes overlayed on top of each other...I guess you could also try taking the duplicates and playing w/ panning and eq, pitch, timing, and tweak the dynamic range a bit, but I really don't think it'll be possible to emulate the desired effect 100%
 
2infamouz said:
Isn't that essentially what a chorus effect is ? Turning the one vocal into multiple copies of itself with slight offset in pitch and timing to emulate multiple singers? Maybe I'm mistaken. Anyways you could manually do this, but it'd be quite tedious if you offset the pitch of the replica's then towards the end they won't line up very well, and it'd all have the same annunciation so it won't be exactly like having multiple takes overlayed on top of each other...I guess you could also try taking the duplicates and playing w/ panning and eq, pitch, timing, and tweak the dynamic range a bit, but I really don't think it'll be possible to emulate the desired effect 100%
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure chorus is BASICALLY what he was saying, but I think it modulates how many cents the panned vocals are detuned.
 
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