How to achieve this vocal harmony sound?

[PhilipZeplin]

So, its finally time I got around to figuring this out.
This is something I've been turning my head at for literally years, and I've tried to replicate myself, but to no avail.

I'm trying to find out how to do the vocal harmony effect found in the following to videos (as examples):
youtube DOT com/watch?v=_UwWYtLWEZg
vimeo DOT com/23806412
(sorry, can't post direct links since I don't have the postcount yet)

You can hear it in the chorus.
Is it the same guy double tracked? Another guy singing to? Singing the same notes or different notes?

I've tried messing around in Melodyne quite a lot, to try to create these types of harmonies, but it always ends up sounding quite different!

Anyone able to finally solve this big mystery for me?

 

[Steenamaroo]

He's just singing the main line and a harmony above it.
It's a pretty standard harmony based a third above the melody.

You can recreate that kind of thing with a duplicate of your vocal track and an autotune plug, but it won't be as simple as shifting the whole thing up a third.
That'll get you close, but certain intervals and passing notes won't comply.

 

[PhilipZeplin]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Few questions:
You sure about that? I've tried something like that many times (I feel, at least), but always felt the final result was very different. My own attempts have felt >very< thick, where it's very clear that there is a second line going on above (or below). In the cases shown here, I feel you don't really "notice" it very much, it's like the melody doesn't change, except for the "effect"?

So if a note in the melody was, lets say, C (in a C chord), the harmony would be singing an E?
How would you go about that for something like a chorus? I mean, if you follow the melody, wouldn't you run into far too many notes that didn't fit with the current chord you're in?

 

[PhilipZeplin]

A little update:
I had also posted this question on the KVR forums (always good to get several opinions!), where I got an answer that was quite different from here:

"what you mean is the tight sounding vocal which is a result of a) double tracking, b) heavy compression, c) instrumental arrangement which supports the vocal (e.g. octave instrumental doubling)."

So now I'm just doubly confused!

 

[RAMI]

So if a note in the melody was, lets say, C (in a C chord), the harmony would be singing an E?
How would you go about that for something like a chorus? I mean, if you follow the melody, wouldn't you run into far too many notes that didn't fit with the current chord you're in?

It's really simple music theory. Like Steen mentioned above, you can't just take the melody and transpose it a third up because some notes don't correspnd. But when you learn how to arrange vocals to fit chord changes, it becomes second nature.

For example, let's say you're going from a C major chord to a G major chord. A standard, though certainly not the only, way to do it would be to have one vocal singing C on the C chord and then moving down to a B for the G chord, another can sing an E and go down to D. While the other vocal can go from a G and stay on the G for the G chord. There are several way to arrange this, but you don't need all the notes to fly all over the place.

 

[Steenamaroo]

It depends on the key and chord.

Two examples in C major.

Chord = I/C, singer sings C...Harmony sings E.
Chord = IV/F, singer sings a C...harmony sings F.


Edit : Didn't see Rami's response there. He's bang on.

 

[mjbphotos]

A little update:
I had also posted this question on the KVR forums (always good to get several opinions!), where I got an answer that was quite different from here:

"what you mean is the tight sounding vocal which is a result of a) double tracking, b) heavy compression, c) instrumental arrangement which supports the vocal (e.g. octave instrumental doubling)."

So now I'm just doubly confused!

The verse does have doubletracking, heavy eq and compression, but the chorus uses a harmony line (not on every line, though).

 

[VomitHatSteve]

I'd suspect it's a combination of what you've gotten in this thread and the KVR thread.

Here's what it sounds like to my (incredibly inexpert) ears.
Vocals are tracked very clean to start with. This includes singing very cleanly. Any natural distortion or stress on the singers voice will affect that hard piercing tone he gets.
There is a whole mess o' compression on the main vocal.
Then doubling and harmony are added selectively to emphasize. (e.g. They're applied to all of the held notes.)
However, they may not be applied to the entire note. The harmony is probably just fading in during the transitions at the beginning and end of the important notes. That way you don't explicitly notice that the harmony is singing a word; you just hear the effect it has on the body of the note.

Also, try to write better lyrics than this guy! This is pretty banal.

Wait... the second song is J-rock. Awesome! Heh. Those guys look like The Pimps if they were Japanese and glam/emo kids instead of surly, drunken Americans!