How to mix a doubled vocal recording

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about a common practice when recording vocals: if we want to put emphasis for example on a chrorus or on a verse part but we don't want to make it stand out too much using some vocal harmony, we can simply record twice the same vocal part (from the same singer) and play the 2 tracks together.

When is this used? It's a technique used to thicken the vocal part, raising it in volume and giving it a "Chorus-like" effect  but more realistic, less cold than a chorus, and it's very popular especially in genres like rap or death metal.

This technique is used also for another purpose: to hide the imprecisions, in facts usually for example when singing a melody, if one of the 2 vocal tracks is slightly out of tune it's likely that the other one is better, and in the mix of the 2, the perception is that the good one prevails.

Talking about tuning, we can use this technique instead of autotuning our vocal track, but if we really need to autotune it, it's better to do it only on the worst of the 2 tracks, because if we would do it on both the result would sound a bit too "robotic" and noticeable.

When mixing these 2 vocals I suggest to route them in a single vocal buss and treat them as they were one single voice, so they should share eq and compression, but the level of the individual tracks may vary according to your taste (just consider that if one of the 2 is too low compared to the other one, though, the comp woud probably not affect it).

At the end of the chain then we can put a Limiter with as ceiling the maximum level reachable from the main vocal track, so that the final result will be a thicker vocal line but the volume will remain consistent, considering that otherwise the volume might double in some parts since the gain would build up in some frequency area.

I hope this was helpful!

Become fan of this blog on Facebook! Share it and contact us to collaborate!!