How many parts are in the chorus (separate tracks), Is it a 2 part, 3 part or 4 part harmony? Provided we know this information, there are a few tricks you could use. If it's a 4 part harmony (which is the one I like) you can pan 2 of the parts hard left and hard right and the other 2 parts at 10:30 and 2:30. EQ the parts separately if you need any EQ at all (try not to EQ too much). You can also try subtractive EQ on parts that are just fillers in your chorus (they are just basically a few words here and there to add expression in the chorus). Compress your chorus vocal maybe a little harder then your lead vocals (I usually try a ratio like .5 to 1. higher then my lead vocal). The most trickiest part for me was to find a software pitch shifter I like as much as the H3000. I still haven't found one, but
the Audio Damage Discord 2.0 can get the trick done, but anyway add your pitch shifter to a stereo bus, set one side of your pitch shifter at -6 cents and the other at +6 cents. You can also delay the right and left side of pitch shifter a little so it'll have a some movement, like the left side at 9 ms and the right side at 17 ms or something to that affect.
You should have the vocals levels sounding good and spread across the stereo field nicely by now, but they still don't stick out. Now make a Stereo bus and route all your chorus vocals to that bus. Add your pitch shifter to that bus as an aux. The more you increase the level of that send you should now start hearing the vocals stick out of your monitors, just adjust the level to taste but not to much. If your vocals sound good but are still not glued together, add a very natural smooth compressor to the insert of your vocal bus and hit it with about 1 - 2db of gain reduction at an ratio between 3 to 1 - 5 to-1. I usually use a UAD 1176LN, LA-3A or the Softubes Tube Tech
CL-1B for compression on my vocal bus.
You can also make a second vocal bus and send 2 parts to one bus and 2 parts to the second bus then add different effects/compression to each set of chorus vocals, or maybe even delay one vocal bus a little instead of the pitch shifter which is the method I like. There's a few tricks you can use to get that r&b chorus sound that we all know and love, but using the pitch shifter is the most important to get the vocals to stick out...well at least in my experience so far. If this helps you or you still need more assistance email me at
abcegghead@yahoo.com.
